eating cucumbers without permission...

I’ve been borderline-obsessed with “Fanfiction” (or “fan fiction”) for a while now, so I’m planning to write a series of entries on it in the hope that, by articulating my fascination, I can expunge it from my system and get on with something productive. It seemed best to start with an introduction.

In case you’ve not encountered the term, it’s used to describe a certain class of derivative work. A fan takes the characters, setting or ideas from an original work and incorporates them into something new. It might be a disturbing sex romp starring the characters from “Friends”, a script for an episode of “Star Trek”, or an innocuous Harry Potter sequel written to pass the time until J.K. Rowling’s next release.

For a time it referred to amateur fiction as distinct from professional, published work, but this usage is now obsolete.

Literature has a long and distinguished history of intellectual theft building on the work of others; these fan writers are just very open about it. We don’t care that She’s All That is Pygmalion (Shaw) is Pygmalion (Ovid). We don’t attack Anne Rice for borrowing from Bram Stoker, nor he from his antecedents. Parodies like Doon and Barry Trotter follow the stories they satirize very closely, and if not for specific exceptions in copyright law would almost certainly run afoul of it.

A better analogue to fan fiction is the unauthorized sequel, such as Matthew Hodgart’s A New Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Being the Fifth Part of the Travels Into Several Remote Parts of the World By Lemuel Gulliver, published in 1969. (It should be obvious from which work it borrows.) Similarities can also found with shared worlds such as Thieves’ World and Wild Cards, and licensed properties with varying degrees of canonicity, such as the Star Wars “Expanded Universe” and the Star Trek novels. The authors of the various official Star Wars novels are playing in George Lucas’s sandbox the same way that fanfiction writers are. The fanfiction is often much the same as the official works, with the chief exception that fan writers don’t expect to get paid. They also tend not to bother waiting until the original author is dead, or even, in the case of serials, finished.

A large quantity doesn’t mean much — “90% of everything is crud” — but it does make it harder to ignore. I knew fanfiction existed, but I’d just assumed we were talking about short stories and the like. Learning that there was one Harry Potter fan novel was a mild shock; learning there was an entire website devoted to them was a million times worse.

It’s hard to say just how much there is out there, even now that the bulk of it is published online, but it’s a lot. Cataloguing the fiction output of all the defunct, small-circulation Star Trek zines would be a monstrous task, if possible at all, and stories on the web are scattered over hundreds of sites. Many have disappeared or been deleted over the years. Still, looking at FanFiction.net, the largest fanfic repository on the ‘net, for the first time is surprising enough.

It currently houses over 180,000 works of Harry Potter fanfiction, up from approximately 45,000 in 2002. Harry Potter is, however, the largest current fanfiction-producing fandom by a significant margin. Many of these works are short stories, but by no means all: over 5100 of them exceed 40,000 words, making them novel-length according to SWFA Nebula Award rules. At the top end we find works like In the Crosshairs by Dragon Voldemort, at over 650,000 words — by way of comparison, the combined word count of the first four official Harry Potter books is less than 480,000.

The fans, collectively, have a remarkable breadth of imagination. Their fiction, collectively, analyzes, interrogates, twists and extends the original works in every conceivable direction. (There’s another essay in that: Fan Fiction As Criticism.)

There are normal continuations, such as all fifth-year books written before Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was published; and there are in-universe alternate versions, re-telling the story as if Harry had been raised by Sirius, or Voldemort. Or unicorns. Or ninja. (I’m not joking, by the way; I’ve encountered everything I mention in this paragraph.) There are bizarre alternate universes, such as that where Hogwarts is a ballet school. There are fics where Harry becomes rich, or poor, or a Death Eater; in some he gets together with Ginny, Hermione or auror Nymphadora; in others it’s all three together. And in others it’s Draco, Snape, or Voldemort. There are fics set twenty years in the future, or five hundred years in the past. Many don’t focus on Harry at all — some writers use original characters, others have their favourites from Rowling’s cast. Snape is immensely popular. Some authors write action; others write detailed character studies. There’s romance, angst, drama, comedy… and a fair amount of pornography, if imagining Ron and Hermione going at it is your idea of a good time. The strangest to me are those stories which are almost completely original, but which the authors, for whatever reason, have chosen to cover with a thin veneer of copyright infringement and release as fanfiction. And, at the opposite end of the spectrum, there are shamelessly derivative stories containing vast tracts of plagiarized text.

Some are written poorly, others are written better than Rowling’s source material. Some are even written well! The quality varies, but the best of it is certainly better than a lot of the crap you’ll find at your local bookshop.

Why do people write it? Why do they read it? Is it qualitatively different than traditionally published works? What are the effects of such an incestuous literary culture? So many questions! Is it any wonder I’m interested?

See also:

• “Fan fiction“, in the Wikipedia
• “For the love of…“, in the Sydney Morning Herald
• “Luke Skywalker Is Gay?“, in Slate