The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction
By Stephen Burt
August 23, 2017
>> www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-promise...

Fan fiction offers new writers a clearer path to potentially interested readers than has ever previously existed.Illustration by Jamie Coe
First there was “Star Trek,” the original series, whose viewers—many of them women in stem fields—organized conventions and created self-published journals (a.k.a. fanzines) with fiction about its characters, a small but notorious slice of which included sexy doings between Kirk and Spock. Or: first there were fans of science-fiction novels and magazines who held conventions and traded self-published journals as early as the nineteen-thirties. Or: first there was Sherlock Holmes, whose devotees, hooked by serial publication, pushed for more stories, formed clubs, and wrote their own. Or: first came Virgil’s Aeneid. Or: first, the Janeites. Or: first there was you, and your friends, age ten, making up adventures in which Chewbacca met Addy Walker, and writing them down.

However it started, however you define it, and whether or not you read it, at this point you’ve probably heard of fan fiction (abbreviated as “fanfic” by its enthusiasts). The advent of the Internet, where anyone can distribute text for free, and the arrival of such all-ages pop-culture juggernauts as Harry Potter, have together meant that the amount and the availability of fan fiction—narrowly defined by Francesca Coppa, in her new book, “The Fanfiction Reader,” as “creative material featuring characters [from] works whose copyright is held by others”—has grown spectacularly in the course of this century. So has its reputation, both because all things geeky, science-fictional, and fantastic now carry less stigma (or more cachet) and because authors with fanfic backgrounds have hit the big time. E. L. James famously converted her online “Twilight” novel, “Master of the Universe,” into the 2011 blockbuster “Fifty Shades of Grey” by removing names, vampires, and anything else that might infringe a “Twilight” copyright, a move known in fanfic circles as “filing off the serial numbers.” (She also removed the earlier text from the Web.) Fanfic itself is now a recurrent subject for professionally published novelists: Rainbow Rowell’s fun “Carry On,” published in 2015, was, in her words, “inspired by fictional fanfiction of a fictional series” described in Rowell’s earlier novel “Fangirl.”
A couple of years ago, Anne Jamison, a professor at the University of Utah, published a spectacularly useful study called “Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World,” written together with contributors from many fandoms and published by a small press. Jamison’s volume topped a stack of earlier books and essays by “aca-fans” that explained fan practices through one or another academic lens. Some focussed on homoerotic pairings (“slash,” from the virgule in “Kirk/Spock”), others on how amateurs built their own institutions, others on particular fandoms (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” say, or One Direction). The people who wrote these books and articles were anthropologists, psychoanalytic feminists, British-style cultural-studies types, legal scholars, and, more recently, literary critics, like Jamison (she is also a Kafka expert). All these scholars investigated the social, emotional, and aesthetic goals that fanfic, and sometimes only fanfic, can meet.
That stack of books did not, however, contain much actual fan fiction: a printed collection of the stuff, from a university press, with no serial numbers removed, would likely have been impossible as recently as five years ago, because the corporations that own Buffy, or General Leia, would have threatened to sue. They might have lost, if they did, on fair-use grounds, but the threats were the point; many copyright holders sought to control the way their properties circulated and to keep any money those properties made. (Some of those corporations now regard fanfic as free advertising instead, or else they’ve just given up: the Web is too big.) Absent those threats, the enormous amateur communities that now surround much fan fiction—with their solidarity, their infighting, their sometimes baroque memes and tropes (yuletide, femslash, drabble, gen, “imagine”), and their norms of online publication—would never have come into being, since they evolved to evade copyright claims and to deflect the legal and reputational dangers in writing and publishing sexually explicit work.
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