I don't know anything about the original-original Trek writers, only about the first wave of people who Pocket bought books from after that first movie. (There were tie-ins published before that, and then there was a long lag before the movie and revived publishing interest in the franchise.) But no, not a case of fan writers being invited to make their work official, or not for the most part. That first round of books came from people like John M. Ford and Barbara Hambley, and the Trek books weren't their first novels.
Anyway, I haven't been reading you as claiming that WUIoF is superior by its nature to work that is both derivative of a source and dependent upon it for its effectiveness but isn't WUIoF (or vice versa). It's seemed to me that this is a quest for accuracy/truth, not a claim of hierarchical rank. And on my part, I'm batting away at it under the same terms -- as is probably obvious, given that it's impossible to say one is better than the other if you're having trouble wrapping your mind around the suggested distinction at all.
Where I'm having trouble may be with the very idea of fandom as some special type of community. Because on one level, almost all creative work is shaped to some extent by the producer's community and its discourse. The Troubadour poets will have been influenced by one another (and no doubt the ones attached to the same courts at the same time would, like members of the same fandom, have an extra degree of interdependence and influence on one another). And so on, in any community I can imagine. So I totally accept that fandom is likely to have some influence on the work of anyone in the community who writes -- well anything at all, really, including fan work, because most people's minds don't come with pre-installed Chinese walls.
But if that's generally true of all writers who aren't living as hermits, making a specific claim that fandom shapes work in some particular and distinguishable way, so that we can recognize works made under that influence, seems to me to imply that there's some characteristic set of attitudes or approaches to the material that we could identify. Only once we do that, if we can, then we're back to the issue of work that doesn't seem to have whatever those characteristics are. Which to me seems problematic, because I come from a fandom where writers have blithely ignored canon and had radically divergent notions of characters, such that there's not a lot of point in even talking about OOC-ness as an aesthetic standard. All the body of work produced really has in common is that without the background a reader will miss a lot of what the stronger writers are doing in any given story.
And I'm still not sure how that's any different from "just derivative fiction." Or at least, I'm not sure unless I go back to my starting place about the need for the audience to have the relevant background knowledge to understand the fan work. I can imagine derivative work that wouldn't have that kind of interplay with the original text -- that is, derivative work that is not fan fiction -- but I can also readily imagine derivative work that does depend on the original text, but that doesn't come out of a fan community at all. With the first type (I write an epic fantasy about Paolo and Francesca di Rimini's rebellion against the powers of Hell, stealing imagery and the occasional story element from Dante but writing a pulp adventure that isn't intended to exist in any kind of creative discourse with the original), we've got something I can readily classify as derivative work but not fan work.
But if I write that epic in such a way that it only works if you actually know the Dante, it's a different creature: now it's derivative work of a kind different from that pulp epic, one that requires an entirely different reading strategy and set of background information. And I'm having trouble seeing how that isn't the case regardless of whether I-the-writer am or ever have been involved with fandom, or whether (assuming I am) there's a Dante fan community. It's the same book, regardless of the circumstances of its production. Isn't it?
no subject
Date: 1 Jun 2010 04:23 am (UTC)Anyway, I haven't been reading you as claiming that WUIoF is superior by its nature to work that is both derivative of a source and dependent upon it for its effectiveness but isn't WUIoF (or vice versa). It's seemed to me that this is a quest for accuracy/truth, not a claim of hierarchical rank. And on my part, I'm batting away at it under the same terms -- as is probably obvious, given that it's impossible to say one is better than the other if you're having trouble wrapping your mind around the suggested distinction at all.
Where I'm having trouble may be with the very idea of fandom as some special type of community. Because on one level, almost all creative work is shaped to some extent by the producer's community and its discourse. The Troubadour poets will have been influenced by one another (and no doubt the ones attached to the same courts at the same time would, like members of the same fandom, have an extra degree of interdependence and influence on one another). And so on, in any community I can imagine. So I totally accept that fandom is likely to have some influence on the work of anyone in the community who writes -- well anything at all, really, including fan work, because most people's minds don't come with pre-installed Chinese walls.
But if that's generally true of all writers who aren't living as hermits, making a specific claim that fandom shapes work in some particular and distinguishable way, so that we can recognize works made under that influence, seems to me to imply that there's some characteristic set of attitudes or approaches to the material that we could identify. Only once we do that, if we can, then we're back to the issue of work that doesn't seem to have whatever those characteristics are. Which to me seems problematic, because I come from a fandom where writers have blithely ignored canon and had radically divergent notions of characters, such that there's not a lot of point in even talking about OOC-ness as an aesthetic standard. All the body of work produced really has in common is that without the background a reader will miss a lot of what the stronger writers are doing in any given story.
And I'm still not sure how that's any different from "just derivative fiction." Or at least, I'm not sure unless I go back to my starting place about the need for the audience to have the relevant background knowledge to understand the fan work. I can imagine derivative work that wouldn't have that kind of interplay with the original text -- that is, derivative work that is not fan fiction -- but I can also readily imagine derivative work that does depend on the original text, but that doesn't come out of a fan community at all. With the first type (I write an epic fantasy about Paolo and Francesca di Rimini's rebellion against the powers of Hell, stealing imagery and the occasional story element from Dante but writing a pulp adventure that isn't intended to exist in any kind of creative discourse with the original), we've got something I can readily classify as derivative work but not fan work.
But if I write that epic in such a way that it only works if you actually know the Dante, it's a different creature: now it's derivative work of a kind different from that pulp epic, one that requires an entirely different reading strategy and set of background information. And I'm having trouble seeing how that isn't the case regardless of whether I-the-writer am or ever have been involved with fandom, or whether (assuming I am) there's a Dante fan community. It's the same book, regardless of the circumstances of its production. Isn't it?