Fanfic as Criticism (Only More Fun). Fanfiction is being produced online at a rate of millions of words per month. Fanfiction can expand on a shorter work, change a work’s themes, or even attempt to “fix” things the author is felt to have done “wrong” (e.g., provide a backstory to explain otherwise undermotivated behavior). These dynamics are not unheard of outside of Internet fandom communities — Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway attempts to “fix” James Joyce’s Ulysses (which itself retells Homer’s Odyssey). In what ways can fanfiction be a valuable part of the criticism of a text? Can it appeal as criticism to readers outside the fanfiction community? If so, how can they find the most interesting works?

The first of the description’s three questions is the central one, I think, and as is probably clear from the fact that I’m doing the panel, I do think fanfiction can be a valuable part of the criticism of the text. Valuable to whom, and in what ways are trickier questions, but let’s start with the basics.

What Is It?

I’m not very interested in taxonomic disputes, but for the purposes of this post and the upcoming panel, here’s my take.

Fanfiction is a subset of a larger group of artistic responses to works of art—a group that includes such works as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Wide Sargasso Sea, Finn, and Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D.[1. I'm open to other definitions of fanfiction except for the one that recapitulates a common conversation about SF: "If it's good, it's not fanfiction." AKA "Frankenstein isn't science fiction, it's literature" or "I'm Margaret Atwood and it's not SF because I say so." This dumb little hopping dance lets readers whose investment in mainstream-as-good makes it impossible for them to consider seriously the virtues of non-mainstream lit define genre fiction as bad by eliminating its founding texts and best examples. Finn and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Wide Sargasso Sea work in exactly the same ways as fanfiction, and the fact that they're really quite good doesn't make them a different species—it just makes them some of the best examples of the form. (They're all based on public domain source texts, of course, because most serious writers aren't going to set aside a few years to write a novel or play based on a source text that's still in copyright, because they couldn't then sell the resulting work.)]

Fanfiction also:

• comes with its own subcultural connotations, expectations, and contexts that affect the reactions of those who read and think about it.
• is generally written by adolescent girls and adult women who aren’t professional writers.
• exists in a grey area of copyright law, and is thus typically published online.
• includes several highly visible subgenres that center on romantic and sexual relationships, queer and otherwise.

It’s possible to consider fanfiction as a separate phenomenon from the larger body of art that responds to and criticizes other works of art. It’s also possible to consider the responsive and critical functions of fanfiction within the larger body of work, rather than as a separate category of literary production. Both perspectives are interesting, but that it’s important to be clear which one is under consideration at any given point.

In any case, fanfiction, even narrowly defined, encompasses forms that go well beyond pastiche or simple “missing scenes” stories. Many “alternate universe” stories maintain some features of the source text while introducing new settings, characters, plots, and themes. These range from stories in which most of the source text’s characteristics are maintained to those in which almost none of them are. An example of the latter might include a story about two adults in a nonmagical world who interact in ways that have nothing to do with the source text’s plot or themes, but who are nevertheless intended to be read as shadows or echoes of characters from the Harry Potter series. Or Lust Over Pendle, which is the first of a series of very funny golden age detective novels and short stories in which some of Rowling’s characters co-exist with many others. Or “Corridors of Power: Being An Originally Intermittent Account of the Political (Mis)Adventures of the Viscount Northallerton, Lord Malfoy of Wimbledon; and the Rt. Honourable Harry J. Potter, Member of Parliament for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Liberal Democrat).”

Other stories exhaustively develop characters or subplots that are only briefly alluded to in the source text. “Dust is Gonna Settle,” for example, is a short story about a couple of brilliant people who happen to meet at Los Alamos in 1945. Nothing in the story itself suggests that it’s fanfiction, and the characters are developed from scratch, but the details gain additional resonance if you know it’s intended to depict the meeting of Tony Stark’s parents (that’s Iron Man for you non-comics-readers, bless your hearts). And then you have crossover fiction in which you have, for example, Sherlock Holmes appearing in a Dracula story, or Hermione Granger as a vampire slayer.

What’s It Do?

A few propositions:

• Most fanfic, like most of everything else created by human hands, is terrible. Bad fan stories are interesting to me for social and cultural reasons, but not really for literary ones.
• Some fanfiction is beautifully written, but doesn’t function as literary criticism.
• Some fanfiction accomplishes a great deal of critical work. Of this subcategory, some are clumsily written and characterized, while others are quite good.

Here’s an example: In the Harry Potter books, a Slytherin character named Gavin Montague bothers “good” characters Fred and George Weasley, and they shove him into a vanishing cabinet, which is a device that will later be involved in a major plot point. Montague shows up some weeks later, trapped inside a toilet, having been zapped around through physical space all that time, and he’s so psychologically traumatized that he’s considered mad and sent home. And none of the “good” characters involved are punished, or even found out. Moreover, readers only see the world from the good characters’ perspective.

But there’s a story on Livejournal about Montague losing his shit in terrifying ways and making a sort of military/sexual alliance with Draco Malfoy to get his revenge. So that’s a great example of a story doing things that are clearly critical, questioning the ethical framework of the book’s world and depicting the disintegration of an adolescent’s personality while also providing interested slash readers with an erotic charge re: the sexual relationship and suggesting a whole new alternate future for the series’ plot.

The story’s prose isn’t particularly refined or subtle, but it has the potential to change the way in which readers approach the source text, and perhaps make them more likely to question some of its moral assumptions and so on. (It won’t be read by people who are uncomfortable with slash, and the story’s author and fans are fine with that.)

Range of Motion

Plenty of fanfiction doesn’t function as criticism in any way that I can spot, but some of it does. And when it does, it can:

• raise all sorts of interesting questions about a source text’s underlying assumptions (moral, sexual, etc.),
• criticize plot or character developments that don’t seem to have been properly introduced and grounded (importantly, this is not limited to tacking on happy endings — it’s often quite the reverse),
• complicate characters in interesting ways by carving out backstories that make their behavior in the source text more interesting, or explain oddities,
• retell a source text’s story for a new audience (Harry Potter with sex and drugs in, “Snow White” as an echo of the Persephone myth, just about anything as pornography),
• reveal new aspects of a work by isolating certain of its elements and examining them in a different context (AU, crossover),
• reveal thematic or plot connections between two disparate works, and
• train readers to think about authorial choices in more active ways.

I tend to think that that last one’s especially important.

Notes

To my great delight, the lovely folks at Strange Horizons have brought me on as a first reader for their very fine magazine. I’ve been reading the magazine on and off for years, and I’m really looking forward to the first batch of story submissions, which drops January 1.

Slush reading is one of those tasks that I think all new editors should do for a year or so (I did it for years and years over at A List Apart) because it teaches you so much about the shape of the work, and about common design patterns and tropes.

When you’re reading slush, the thing that keeps you going through stacks and stacks of stories you can’t use is the flare of recognition that lights up in your brain when you find something wonderful. I tend to think that the senses you sharpen by reading slush are some of those you use most often in actual editing. I’m tickled pink(er) to have the chance to do it for Strange Horizons.

Here are some of my favorite stories published at Strange Horizons in 2009, as an introduction to those of you who haven’t been reading it all along:

• “A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc; or; A Lullaby,” by Helen Keeble (that’s part one; here’s part two)—A beautifully executed maritime/mermaid story that kept on being wonderful every time I thought it was going to take an easy way out.
• “Bespoke,” by Genevieve Valentine—A story that pretends to be about time travel when it’s really about craftsmanship and the world on the far side of the shop counter.
• “The Regime of Austerity” and “Lily Glass” by Veronica Schanoes—A pair of treats that I’m linking to not because their author is a professor of mine, but because the first is precisely the sort of classic speculative story I loved in the Year’s Best anthologies when I was growing up, and the second reminds me so much of Cocteau.

• clawed my way onto the Island Itself,
• moved house,
• finished two gigantic book-editing projects and a handful of other gigs,
• comprehensively overhauled my academic plans,
• similarly reshuffled my professional life,
• been quite ill,
• gotten much better,
• married off two dear friends,
• started the most intense and expansive project I’ve ever done for money,
• sort-of learned to cook, live, and host visitors in an apartment the size of a creme egg, and
• obtained sufficient shelf space for the NYC branch of my personal library.

Something I haven’t done is write here on or the Hope Mirrlees site. Or much at all, outside academic work and work-work. A part of that is the reality of cognitive side-effects of medication that left me without a functional short-term memory and devastated my vocabulary and my ability to string together simple sentences. That’s behind me, for the most part—I’m back to my usual spoonerisms and faux-Oxonian spaciness, but that’s to be expected as finals approach. (The fact that my academic research this semester centers on Kelly Link, Kathryn Davis, Dracula, and my favorite critical thinkers has been a huge help keeping my brain squishy, but it’ll be good to get back to my personal projects as well.)

It’s wonderful to be living in Manhattan—something I never imagined would be possible until the recession changed things so much. I loved living in Brooklyn and although our relationship was challenging and our breakup ugly, I imagine Queens and I will be friends again. But this is the New York I fell in love with as an 18-year-old kid with a big suitcase coming into Grand Central for the first time and my god, look at that ceiling. There is a machine-holiness about this place, and I don’t expect I’ll ever get over it. (Which isn’t to say I don’t miss Portland and my people there and the City of Books. I do, daily.) But there’s a lot of good here, and I look forward very much to unfurling a bit as Things continue to ease up.

…the story of Amanda Valentino, told through an interactive website and book series for readers aged 13 & up. On the website, readers are invited to become a part of the story as they help the main characters search for Amanda.

My own (totally unofficial) elevator/Readercon hallway pitch goes something like this: It’s a book series and a website and a few other things besides. Think Veronica Mars by way of The Westing Game, except that we’re actively soliciting in-character, reader-created stories and art, some of which will be folded into the official printed books and into the online stories. (And if our beta testing period is anything to go on,  these readers are extraordinarily cool.) The first book, by the fabulous Melissa Kantor, is forthcoming from Harper Collins in September; the web stories are live now for members* of theamandaproject.com.

I can never say enough about the people I work with at Happy Cog. They’re amazing. I am so lucky to be working with them. And these Fourth Story people? They’re some of the sharpest, coolest, most delightful clients I could imagine.

Which leads me to my second bit of news. When Lisa and co. invited me to join Fourth Story’s staff to organize web projects and lead community management for the Amanda Project, I said O YES INDEED. I’ll still be working on content strategy with Happy Cog, and I’m still doing freelance editorial work. But now I’m also a key-carrying member of the Amanda Project crew.

Come play with us!