Richard Hannay
New Member
"Fan Fiction", briefly, is fiction in which the author takes characters from the public domain or popular culture and continues their adventures- examples include any of the myriad Sherlock Holmes pastiches and most post-Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos tales.
"Fan Fiction" gets a lot of bad press these days, and for understandable reasons- a lot of the examples that most people are exposed to is pretty terrible stuff, published in such a format that the author is unlikely to receive criticism for it, and so will not improve. However, when it is professionally published, with well-known authors behind it, it can prove to be quite entertaining.
The genre is at its most interesting when the author takes the characters and uses them to tell a message, or to take them outside of the context of the original stories. Examples of this include Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which plays with the idea that Moriarty is a creation of Sherlock Holmes' cocaine-addled mind; Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, which charts the decline of popular culture over the Twentieth century; and Kim Newman's Anno Dracula, which is set in an alternate reality where Dracula killed Abraham Van Helsing.
I'd be interested to see if anyone has had any similar experiences reading these pastiches, and whether any of them measure up to the original.
(I'm sorry if this has already been discussed on the forums.)
"Fan Fiction" gets a lot of bad press these days, and for understandable reasons- a lot of the examples that most people are exposed to is pretty terrible stuff, published in such a format that the author is unlikely to receive criticism for it, and so will not improve. However, when it is professionally published, with well-known authors behind it, it can prove to be quite entertaining.
The genre is at its most interesting when the author takes the characters and uses them to tell a message, or to take them outside of the context of the original stories. Examples of this include Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which plays with the idea that Moriarty is a creation of Sherlock Holmes' cocaine-addled mind; Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, which charts the decline of popular culture over the Twentieth century; and Kim Newman's Anno Dracula, which is set in an alternate reality where Dracula killed Abraham Van Helsing.
I'd be interested to see if anyone has had any similar experiences reading these pastiches, and whether any of them measure up to the original.
(I'm sorry if this has already been discussed on the forums.)
