From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Fan fic Fooey?  Fooey.
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 20:51:05 

on 6/19/01 4:10 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes at ddanehy@siebel.com wrote:

> Or pfui. With all due respect to the various people who've
> used this term, I'm just about apoplectic from not shouting
> at you about it, and now I will.

It wasn't originally my term, and it wasn't a term I would have applied on
my own.  And I agree the sections aren't literally fanfic.  But mantis used
the term, iirc, to indicate

1) That the third-person sections are fictional, at least in part; and

2) That the motive of the fictionizers is to fill in emotionally satisfying
bits absent from the original narrative.

The former of these is true, I would argue (see below) and the latter seems
likely to be at least partially true for the conversation with Remora, and
may well be true of the Whorl material.

> Look. Whatever _tBotSS_ is (or the editors-written third-
> person parts of it, or even "selected bits" of those), it
> ain't fanfic. The term is specific, refers to the parasitic
> creation of new stories in a _fictional_ world _created by
> some other person or corporate entity_, on an amateur or
> not-for-profit basis, and usually (but not always) quite
> _bad_.

As a matter of fact, on the website I cited earlier for Pullman fanfic,
there is quite a lot of fanfic dealing with real people, namely music groups
(the vast majority of it on boy bands: there are over five thousand Nsync
fanfics).

> The best-known, if not actually dominant, forms,
> are the [erotic|pornographic] "slash" fiction* and the
> MaryJane.

"Slash" isn't necessarily pornographic or erotica.  It posits a romantic or
sexual relationship between two characters of the same sex, but need not
depict sex.
 
> * The concept of / fiction in the Lupiverse has its own
> peculiar horrors to offer. Severian/Severian?

If there were Lupine slash, I'd lay odds that the most popular relationship
would be Horn/Krait.

> What makes the concept ludicrous is this: Who is the
> fan writing the fanfic? Not Wolfe, certainly; he's the
> creator of all this. Not the editorial kids; what comes
> from them isn't fiction -- it's either reconstruction
> or outright lies.

Are those novels dealing with historical figures, which don't contradict the
historical record but which invent situations and conversations not
appearing in the record, outright lies?  True, the editors did not present
their third-person sections as fiction, and to that extent they are lying,
at least by implication.  But functionally, I would argue that the sections
are fiction, and should be read as fiction, with a protagonist who is
distinct from Narr, but based on the editors' view of Narr.

--Adam


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