There's been a hot debate going on in Lee Goldberg's blog about fan fiction (small wonder, since Goldberg is a known hater of fan fiction). Check it out if you can: there's over 50 comments. No use trying to say anything pro or against, but everyone should admit that fan fiction will be with us for a long, long time, since it's about narcism and narcissistic culture where everyone wants to get their share of the glory, be it about web-published amateur Harry Potter porn or a real money-making best seller.
Another truth is that there's always been fan fiction. I bought some kiddie-made magazines from the early seventies from a flea market. There were two stories with Donald Duck as the hero! (I may scan some of these in the near future, but with all the job stuff happening suddenly, don't know when (or where).)
There was a conversation on the interwebs not too long ago about whether the latest Pulitzer fiction prize winner, Geraldine Brooks’s March would qualify as fanfic.
ReplyDeleteIt’s a tale set in the world of Little Women, with the girls’ father as the main character.
I have no great interest in fan fiction as such, but I found the arguments in that conversation interesting.
Yeah, you can of course point out that LITTLE WOMEN is no longer in copyright, so it's free for each and everyone. Same goes for WIDE SARGASSO SEA and all of the Sherlock Holmes retellings and all the new Cthulhu stuff (which Lovecraft gave freely to his friends to use, to be sure).
ReplyDeleteBut as I said, there's no way to be satisfactorily pro or against fanfiction. I fear, though, that most of it just bad writing.