Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  Amber Benson is a writer, actor, director, and maker of things. She lives in LA and doesn’t own a television. Her new urban fantasy series, The Witches of Echo Park, will be out in 2014, but if you like her brand of insanity, you can go pick up her five-book Calliope Reaper-Jones series at your local bookstore. She also codirected the film Drones, which you can add to your Netflix queue . . . right . . . now!

  Peter Berg (Homfrog) is a seventeen-year-old geeky dude with big ambitions. Receiving a 2180 on his SATs and an INTP on the Myers–Briggs, he is a rising senior at the Lab School of Washington in the District of Columbia. He’s worked at a community newspaper and led an after-school computer club. His favorite books are Godel Escher Bach, The Phantom Tollbooth, and The Cyberiad. He has written about ten fanfictions in the My Little Pony fandom and has many more ideas as-of-yet unimplemented. Besides MLPFIM, the fandoms to which he belongs include Homestar Runner; Adventure Time; Gravity Falls; Eureka, Warehouse 13, Alphas, and Haven; the SCP Foundation; and Supernatural. Peter’s favorite color is orange and his favorite adjective is “hella.” He’s not the guy who directed Battleship. He likes to make other people happy.

  Lauren Billings (LolaShoes) splits her time between her research career and her writing passion, where she writes both YA and erotica with Christina Hobbs under the pen name Christina Lauren (christinalaurenbooks.com). You can find their Beautiful Bastard series online or on shelves now. Lauren lives in California with her husband and their two children. Her handle on Twitter is @lolashoes.

  Kristina Busse found online media fandom when desperately searching the internet after Buffy sent Angel to hell—and she has been lost since. Her fandoms today include Generation Kill, Hannibal, My Chemical Romance, Teen Wolf, and X-Men First Class. But ask her tomorrow, and that list may have changed. Kristina has been publishing academic essays on fanfiction since 2002, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. She is founding coeditor of the online peer-reviewed academic journal Transformative Works and Culture and coeditor of Fanfiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (2012), and the forthcoming Fanfiction Studies Reader. Her current book project is Fanfiction and Literary Theory.

  Rachel Caine is the bestselling writer of the Weather Warden, Outcast Season, Revivalist, and Red Letter Days series in urban fantasy, and the Morganville Vampires series in young adult. She’s the winner of multiple awards, most recently a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times. She still loves film, television, and all forms of storytelling. Oh, and she wrote a Stargate: SG-1 media tie-in novel, too. You can find her online at rachelcaine.com or follow her on Twitter at @rachelcaine.

  P.S. If you’d like to read her Prey fanfic, it’s been freshly archived at juliefortune.tumblr.com/prey.

  Francesca Coppa is professor of English at Muhlenberg College, where she teaches courses in dramatic literature, performance studies, and mass media storytelling. She is a founding member of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit organization established by fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and culture. She is currently the Wolf Professor of Television Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter at @fcoppa.

  Randi Flanagan is a writer and publishing sales professional; she has completed several Twilight fics and is currently writing an original work of fiction. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, with her husband, son, and two face-eating miniature pinchers.

  Jolie Fontenot has her PhD in communication studies from the University of Texas at Austin. The majority of her research examines the social glue that holds people together in the form of organizational identification. She started studying the Twilight fandom in 2006, and along the way, met many fascinating people and learned their stories. Dr. Fontenot teaches for the University of South Carolina Regional Campus system. She can be reached at jfonteno@mailbox.sc.edu.

  Wendy C. Fries (Atlin Merrick) makes her living writing nonfiction by day, and makes herself happy writing fiction by night, including original one-hour TV scripts and short stories. The heads-down goal from here? Making fiction both the source of fun and finance. And staying mad as a box of frogs.

  Christina Hobbs (tby789) makes her home in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is coauthor of the New York Times bestselling Beautiful Bastard series, as well as the upcoming young adult novel Sublime.

  Ron Hogan is the founder of Beatrice.com and TheHandsell.com. His book projects have ranged from a pop history of 1970s Hollywood to anthologies of stories drawn from the archives of pulp romance magazines. He hosts literary events throughout New York City, including Lady Jane’s Salon, the first monthly reading series dedicated to romance fiction. He lives in Queens with his wife, Laura, and their cats. Follow him on Twitter at @RonHogan.

  Bethan Jones is a PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University. Her thesis, tentatively titled “The G Woman and The Fowl One: Fandom’s Rewriting of Gender in The X-Files” focuses on the ways in which fanfiction writers resist and revise meanings around gender in cult television series. Bethan has written extensively on fandom, new media, and gender, and her work has been published in the journals Transformative Works and Culture, Participations, and Sexualities. Bethan is on the board of the Fan Studies Network, blogs at bethanvjones.wordpress.com, and can be found on Twitter as @memories_child.

  Jacqueline Lichtenberg is a professional reviewer, an editor, the creator of the Sime~Gen® Universe, the primary author of Star Trek Lives!, the founder of the Star Trek Welcommittee, the creator of the term “Intimate Adventure,” and the winner of the Galaxy Award for Spirituality in Science Fiction and the first Romantic Times Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Her books are available in ebook, print, audiobook, and dramatization on satellite radio. Her most recent book is The Farris Channel, Sime~Gen #12 (Wildside Press, 2012). Sime~Gen is in development as the story-driven, cross-platform science fiction RPG Ambrov X (ambrovx.com), taking Sime~Gen into the space age.

  Samira Nadkarni is completing her doctorate at the University of Aberdeen. She grew up in Mumbai, India, and has been either a participant or a lurker in various fandoms since 2002. Her publications range from the analysis of contemporary poetry to pop culture. In her spare time she writes terrible poetry and tweets about her cat.

  Rukmini Pande is completing her doctorate at the University of Western Australia, Perth, focusing on the construction of the erotic body in slash fanfiction. She has also completed an MPhil in fan culture from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, on fandom as a means of online identity creation for women. She spends far too much of her time arguing with people on the internet.

  Chris Rankin was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and lived there until he moved with his parents to the UK at age 6. In August 2000, he auditioned for the Harry Potter films, and is now recognized internationally for playing the role of Percy Weasley in six of the eight movies. In addition to this, he has appeared in The Rotter’s Club (BBC2), Victoria Cross Heroes (C5), and a selection of “celebrity shows” including Celebrity Total Wipeout. He has also toured the UK playing Edgar Linton in Wuthering Heights, Eilert Loevborg in Hedda Gabler, and Young Syrian in Oscar Wilde’s Salome (the latter two he also produced).

  Since the age of sixteen, Chris has produced, directed, acted, and led masterclasses. In recent years, he graduated from the University of Lincoln (UK) with a BA in Media Production. He is currently working in Television Production for a major new drama for BBC ONE.

  Feel free to follow him on twitter @chrisrankin or visit his website www.chrisrankin.co.uk.

  Tiffany Reisz is the international bestselling author of the Original Sinners series from Mira Books. Her debut novel, The Siren, won the RT Book Lover’s Magazine Editor’s Choice Award for Best Erotic Romance 2012. She continues to hope someday Jason Isaacs will read The Siren and steal her from her boyfriend.

  Andy Sawyer is librarian of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection
at the University of Liverpool Library (www.sfhub.ac.uk) and a critic/reviewer of science fiction and fantasy wearing academic and fannish hats, often at the same time. His “Foundation Favourites” column appears in the British Science Fiction Association’s Vector. He recently coedited (with David Ketterer) Plan for Chaos, a previously unpublished novel by John Wyndham (Liverpool University Press, 2009; Penguin, 2010) and (with Peter Wright) Teaching Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2011).

  From 2002 to 2012 he was director of the MA in science fiction studies for the School of English, University of Liverpool. He was the 2008 recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Clareson Award for services to science fiction, and Guest Curator of the British Library’s “Out of This World: Science Fiction but Not as You Know It” Exhibition in 2011.

  Andrew Shaffer is the author of Fifty Shames of Earl Grey: A Parody (a Goodreads Choice 2012 Semifinalist) as well as several works of non-fiction. His website is www.literaryrogue.com. His FanFiction.Net username is andrewshaffer.

  Heidi Tandy (Heidi8) has been part of the Harry Potter internet fandom since the day of Goblet of Fire’s release, and has since been involved in fanfiction (founding and posting on FictionAlley.org), news websites (The Leaky Cauldron, HPANA), discussions and meta (HPForGrownups), and HPEF fancons from Nimbus in 2003 through Ascendio in 2012. Since at least 2000, Heidi Tandy has advocated for fans, built fansites, organized fan-supported charitable fund-raisers like Help_Haiti on LiveJournal, and advocated that fans’ creative endeavors are frequently transformative and therefore protectable under US copyright and trademark law. She’s spoken at fan-run and law-focused events on topics including copyright and trademark, as well as written fanfiction, created over fifty fanvids, and crafted mediocre fanart because she really can’t draw, for Harry Potter, The Magicians, Doctor Who/Torchwood, Heroes, Supernatural, Sherlock, Glee, Marvel Cinematic Universe, XMFC, Teen Wolf, and Schoolhouse Rock. Heidi was sorted into Ravenclaw on Pottermore, tweets as TravelingHeidi, and blogs with other fandom-focused lawyers at fyeahcopyright.tumblr.com. “Creativity is magic!”

  Darren Wershler, aka Darren Wershler-Henry, is the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature (Tier 2). At Concordia, he works with the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) group on video games, comic books, contemporary poetry, and other preposterous things. Darren is the author or coauthor of twelve books, most recently Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (University of Toronto Press) and Update (Snare), with Bill Kennedy.

  Jules Wilkinson (missyjack) is a fangirl, writer, and comic from Australia who watches a lot of TV. She runs the award-winning Supernatural Wiki—a site covering both the show and the fandom of Supernatural, which started in 2006 and attracts nearly 1 million visits a month. She coedited the first ever essay collection about Supernatural, Some of Us Really Do Watch for the Plot.

  Jules’ fanfic and original writing explores the postmodern self, gender identity, and desire. To be honest a lot of it seems to be about sex.

  As an occasional comic, Jules has confused, and occasionally amused, audiences at festivals around Australia.

  She is currently editing an anthology of stories by and about fangirls called SQUEE! You can find out more about her at juleswilkinson.com.

  Jen Zern (NautiBitz) is a native New Yorker and former Los Angeleno who recently washed ashore on the enchanted island of Martha’s Vineyard. There, she writes books, walks dogs, serves food, and laughs really loud. At night, she searches for mermaids. You can follow her on Twitter at @jenizee or read her fic at nautibitz.com.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANNE JAMISON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton and is the author of Poetics en passant (Palgrave, 2009), a forthcoming book on Franz Kafka and Czech culture, a number of essays and articles, and a lot of tweets (as @prof_anne). Her work on fanfiction has been quoted in publications from The New York Review of Books to The Wall Street Journal to Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch. She lives happily in Salt Lake City in a house full of children, basset hounds, and an avant-garde poet. And yes, of course she’s written fic.

  ENDNOTES

  1.Jeffery, Morgan. “‘Sherlock’: Edinburgh TV Festival Masterclass—Live Blog.” Digital Spy, 24 Aug. 2012. http://www.digitalspy.com/british-tv/s129/sherlock/news/a401513/sherlock-edinburgh-tv-festival-masterclass-live-blog.html.

  2.Lauzen, Martha. “Boxed In: Employment of Behind-the-Scenes Women in the 2011-12 Prime-time Television Season.” Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/research.html.

  3.Lauzen. “The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind the Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 250 Films of 2012.” http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/files/2012 _Celluloid_Ceiling_Exec_Summ.pdf.

  4.Vida. “The Count 2012.” http://www.vidaweb.org/the-count-2012.

  5.de Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote Part II, John Ornmby, trans. http://www2. hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/cervante/quixote2.pdf.

  6.Berk, “Dodgy Don Quixote Sequel,” Comic Book Resources, 24 Aug. 2007, http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread. php?187694-Dodgy-Don-Quixote-sequel.

  7.Richardson, Samuel and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ed., The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

  8.Judge, Elizabeth F. “Kidnapped and Counterfeit Characters: Eighteenth-Century Fan Fiction, Copyright Law, and the Custody of Fictional Characters.” In Reginald McGinnis, ed., Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment (Routledge, 2012).

  9.William Makepeace Thackeray (as M. A. Titmarsh). Rebecca and Rowena: A Romance upon Romance. London: Chapman and Hall, 1850.

  10.“The Truth about Sherlock Holmes,” in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, vol. 2, 683.

  11.As quoted by Green. The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Richard Lancelyn Green, ed. London: Penguin Books, 1985.

  12.Richard Green’s The Further Adventures and Martin Key’s The Game is Afoot: Parodies, Pastiches, and Ponderings of Sherlock Holmes (St Martins, 1994) were invaluable in preparing this section.

  13.Originally delivered as an address to the Baker Street Irregulars in January 1941, Stout’s piece was subsequently published in the March 1, 1941, issue of The Saturday Review of Literature. http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1941mar01-00015.

  14.Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique” (originally published in 1917). In Russian Formalist Criticism, edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reiss. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.

  15.greywash. “Confessions: Meta Coda to ‘The Sensation of Falling Just as You Hit Sleep.’” 13 Feb. 2012. http://greywash.dreamwidth.org/16168.html.

  16.“Katie Forsythe.” Fanlore. http://fanlore.org/wiki/Katie_Forsythe. Accessed 23 August 2013.

  17.damned_colonial. “Doylist or Watsonian?” 22 Apr. 2010. damned-colonial.dreamwidth.org/470356.html.

  18.Berry, John, ed., A Time Regained (Fables of Irish Fandom Volume 1), Halesowen, England: Shoestring Press, 1998; Berry, John, ed., The If Files (Fables of Irish Fandom Volume 2), Halesowen, England: Shoestring Press, 1999; Berry, John, ed., Tales of Oblique House (Fables of Irish Fandom Volume 3), Halesowen, England: Shoestring Press, 1999; Berry, John, ed., Each Charter’d Course (Fables of Irish Fandom Volume 4), Halesowen, England: Shoestring Press, 1999; Berry, John, ed., Fandom Denied (Fables of Irish Fandom Volume 5), Halesowen, England: Shoestring Press, 1999.

  19.Berry, A Time Regained, 1.

  20.Around the same time as Cheslin reprinted the “Fables,” he reprinted another collection of fan-based fiction, described later in this essay: spoof detective stories that also featured fans as characters, featuring “Goon Bleary.”

  21.Berry, Tales of Oblique House.

  22.Ibid; ellipses are Berry’s.

  23.Willis, Walter and Bob Shaw. The Enchanted Duplicator. Belfast, Northern Ireland: printed by Walter Willis, 1954. http://fanac.org/fanzines/Enchanted_ Duplicator/Enchanted-00
.html.

  24.Hansen, Rob. Then (1988–93; 4 vols). London: Rob Hansen, 1988–1993. http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-Archives/Then/Index.html.

  25.Berry, Tales of Oblique House.

  26.Berry, The If Files.

  27.Berry, John, ed., The Bleary Eyes: The Early Years, Halesowen, England: Shoestring Press, 1993; Berry, John, ed., The Middle Ages (The Bleary Eyes Volume 2), Halesowen, England: Shoestring Press, 1993; Berry, John, ed., Nor the Years Condemn (The Bleary Eyes Volume 3), Halesowen, England: Shoestring Press, 1994; Berry, John, ed., Kitsch in Sync Legends (The Bleary Eyes Volume 4), Halesowen, England: Shoestring Press, 1995; Berry, John, ed., The Bleary Eyes Volume 5. Halesowen, England: Shoestring Press, 1996.

  28.The Bleary Eyes.

  29.Retribution 15, 1960/Bleary Eyes: Volume 2.

  30.Bleary Eyes: Volume 2.

  31.Ibid.

  32.Ibid.

  33.Fandom Denied (Fables of Irish Fandom Volume 5).

  34.Shatner, William, Sondra Marshak, and Myrna Culbreath. Shatner: Where No Man . . . The Authorized Biography of William Shatner. New York: Ace Books, 1979.

  35.Roddenberry, Gene. Star Trek: The Motion Picture. New York: Pocket, 1979.

  36.Did the Luke Skywalker figure in his X-Wing uniform fit inside the prop plane from Fisher Price’s Wilderness Patrol? I’m sure my brother and I must have at least tried. I do remember that Gonk the Power Droid became a valued member of the Adventure People TV Action Team.

  37.My wife and I have a running mock debate as to whether I’m a Trekker, an ex-Trekker, or, as I sometimes put it, a guy who knows Harry Mudd’s middle name is Fenton because it’s a matter of basic twentieth-century American cultural literacy.

  38.The short version of the Wold Newton family hypothesis is that a meteorite that really did fall in the outskirts of that Yorkshire village in 1795 exposed sixteen “fictional” characters in a passing carriage to radiation that gave them and their descendants superpowers; Tarzan, for example, is the great-great-grandson of Elizabeth and Darcy from Pride and Prejudice on his father’s side and the Scarlet Pimpernel on his mother’s. Though Farmer generally confined himself to tracing the intertwined lineages of that core group, later scholars—most notably Win Scott Eckert—would expand the “Wold Newton Universe” to bring their favorite characters from literature, television, and film onto the playing field.