A Look at Fanfiction

The books we love the most are the ones where you close the book and you’re still thinking about those characters. We want to be drawn into their lives again, because we didn’t get enough the first time.
~Carrie Bebris, author of the Mr. and Mrs. Darcy Mysteries

I myself used to write Star Wars fan fiction when I was tween. I think writing fan fiction is a good way for new writers to learn to tell a story.
~ Meg Cabot 

Art isn't your pet - it's your kid.  It grows up and talks back to you.
~Joss Whedon

Fanfiction is defined as fiction written by fans of a TV series, movie, etc., using existing characters and situations to develop new plots. [Dictionary.com] With the continuing success of E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey, the trilogy which had its beginning in online fanfic, it seems like fanfiction (or fanfic) has never been more in the news, but is it really a new thing?

In England The Romance of the Rose was the paradigmatic example of the medieval form: one writer would begin the story and another would complete it. Even Shakespeare, did not own the stories in his plays. A patron would commission him to retell a story and he was paid in royalties. All stories within the medieval period were re-workings of stories about the same characters, but we could not call them fanfic as copyright law and the printing press had not yet sectioned off the professional, paid, copyright owner of original texts, from the rest of the populace, creating a subclass of fans. [Ewan Morrison, in The Guardian]

Other than Fifty Shades of Grey, fanfic that has achieved mainstream publication lately include the After series by Anna Todd, inspired by the boy band One Direction and originally published online on a fanfic site, and, if "fandom legend" is to be believed, Naomi Novik's first novel, Her Majesty’s Dragon (allegedly started as a Master and Commander fanfic). But several published authors you know and love have fanfic connections:  Hugo Award winner Lois McMaster Bujold published an early Star Trek fanfic zine; YA author Cassandra Clare has written "thousands of pages" of fanfic about The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter; and Neil Gaiman has indulged in Chronicles of Narnia and H.P. Lovecraft fanfics. You can also check the library catalog for proto-fanfic - you'll find many examples of books "inspired by" authors such as William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, or "retellings" of popular myths, fairy tales, and other classics, which arguably could qualify. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys' reimagining of  Jane Eyre from the point of view of Mr. Rochester's first wife, dates back to 1966. From the author's point of view, J.K. Rowling doesn't mind fanfic, Annie Proulx doesn't respect it, Jodi Picoult once tweeted "don't steal a fan base another author's worked hard for", and George R. R. Martin hates it.

Existing between fanfic and original works of literature are book series which have been continued by another author, and tie-in novels and novelizations of TV shows and films which often exist outside the world of the series. Again, you could argue that they are technically "fiction about characters or settings from an original work of fiction, created by fans of that work rather than by its creator". [Wikipedia] For instance, there are actually very few James Bond novels by Ian Fleming - Raymond Benson and John Gardner continued the series. You can also find a new Hercule Poirot mystery that the Agatha Christie estate allowed Sophie Hannah to write; Sebastian Faulks recently published Jeeves and the Wedding Bells: An Homage to P.G. Wodehouse; Eric Van Lustbader has been continuing Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne series for more than 10 years. Like fanfic, these books use existing characters to create new plots. Crucially, these works have been "officially sanctioned" by someone - the family of the original author [Christie] or the production company which owns the rights [Fleming], for instance. The average fanfic writer does not have the blessing of the author and has to worry about possible copyright violations, if an author objects to their writing.

Under the Copyright Act of 1976, a copyright owner has the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, perform and display their work. Any person who infringes upon the right of a copyright owner without their permission has violated someone else’s copyright. If a writer of fan fiction is sued for infringement the writer can make an argument of fair use. Under fair use, there is a four factor test that the courts apply: 1) the purpose and character of the use (commercial in nature or nonprofit educational purposes), 2) the nature of the copyrighted work, 3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work, and 4) the effect of the use on the potential market of the copyrighted work.*

It's perhaps inevitable that, in a world where we try to value creativity and the opinions of others and almost everyone can be nanofamous due to the democratization of information via social media, fanfic would become increasingly accessible and popular. Whatever it transforms to in future permutations, seems like it's here to stay.

Interested in learning about fanfic?  Try reading the two non-fiction books in the catalog which reference it, or Rainbow Rowell's novel about a young fanfic writer:

Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow [contains the essay "In Praise of Fanfic"]

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Or, you can find a plethora of fanfic online. There is fanfic for almost every taste!  To name a few: Orange is the New Black; Sherlock; fashion fanfic on MTV Style; The X-Files; Edgar Allan Poe; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; The Devil Wears Prada; The Hulk; The Great Gatsby; Scandal; Doctor Who mashed with Blackadder; Doctor Who mashed with Downton Abbey; even Peter Rabbit. Some of the biggest purveyors of fanfic are:

Archive of Our Own

FanFiction

Wattpad

Kindle Worlds 

[Please note: content on fanfic sites varies in theme and maturity levels. FanFiction.net rates content M if it is for readers 18+.]

How do you feel about fanfic? Do you read fanfiction?  Do you write fanfiction?


Links

 It's a Fan-Made World [Vulture]

The Lost History of Fifty Shades of Grey [GalleyCat]

What is Fanfiction? A Primer to Get You Up to Speed Reading and Writing in the Vast Community [Bustle - Please note, article contains some suggestive images]

'Shipping' and the Enduring Appeal of Rooting For Love [The Atlantic]

Pop Culture Happy Hour, Small Batch: The Rise of Fan Fiction [NPR]

Organization for Transformative Works
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate. [from their website]

Professional Author Fanfic Policies [Fanlore]

Fan Fiction and Copyright Law [University of San Francisco School of Law]*

Copyright Laws and Fan Fiction [academia.edu]

 

Featured Author: Jennifer Potter

Author Jennifer Potter is primarily known as a horticultural historian, although she has written fiction. Perhaps her most famous work is Strange Blooms, a dual biography of the John Tradescants, the elder and younger, who were botanists, naturalists, and gardeners between 1570-1660. She is also a Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow - the RLF is a British charity which promotes and supports writers - and tutors higher education students in "enhancing their writing practices." Her horticultural microhistories have been called "expert" and "all-encompassing but precisely focused" [Booklist] with "readable style and interesting stories." [Choice Reviews] Just in time for spring, revisit some of your favorite flowers!

Seven Flowers and How They Shaped Our World

Drawing on sources both ancient and modern, and featuring lush full-color illustrations and gorgeous line art throughout, Potter examines our changing relationship with these potent plants and the effects they had on civilizations through the ages. The opium poppy, for example, returned to haunt its progenitors in the West, becoming the source of an enormously profitable drug trade in Asia. In the seventeenth century, the irrational exuberance of the Dutch for rare tulips led to a nationwide financial collapse. Potter also explores how different cultures came to view the same flowers in totally different lights. While Confucius saw virtue and modesty in his native orchids, the ancient Greeks saw only lust and sex. In the eye of each beholder, these are flowers of life and death; of purity and passion; of greed, envy and virtue; of hope and consolation; of the beauty that drives men wild. All seven demonstrate the enduring ability of flowers to speak metaphorically--if we could only decode what they have to say. ~from the library catalog

The Rose: A True History

Ever since Sappho planted roses at the shrine of Aphrodite, no flower has captured the imagination in quite the same way. Here, the acclaimed horticultural historian Jennifer Potter sets out on a quest to uncover the life of a flower that has been viewed so heterogeneously by different cultures in different countries across the centuries. Beginning her story in the Greek and Roman empires, she travels across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas to unravel its evolution from a simple briar of the northern hemisphere to the height of cultivated perfection found in rose gardens today. Whether laying bare the flower's long association with sexuality and secret societies, questioning the Crusaders' role in bringing roses back from the Holy Land, or hunting for its elusive blooms in the gardens of the Empress Josephine at Malmaison, Jennifer Potter reveals why this flower, above all others, has provoked such fascination.~from Google Books

Secret Gardens 

From the sacred groves of Ancient Greece, to the secluded outside rooms of Sissinghurst, this work is a history of secret gardens. A wide variety of secret gardens is explored, from intimate retreats to treehouses, caves and grottoes. Five case studies demonstrate how design principles can be turned into reality. Practical advice, from planting to the skilful use of water and ornaments, aim to help the reader realize the potential of their own garden. A comprehensive plant directory is included. ~from Google Books


Want to learn more about horticultural history? You might also enjoy: The Tulip by Anna Pavord; Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart; My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love edited by Jamaica Kincaid; Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants by Richard Mabey; Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Classic Children's Tales by Marta McDowell; and The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean.

Are you a gardener? Have you visited our Seed Library?

Fairy Tales Revisited

© Adam Cuerden (restoration)

There's a new live-action version of Cinderella in the theaters, and while it follows pretty closely the classic story by Charles Perrault and the 1950 animation version by Walt Disney (rather than the darker version written by the Brothers Grimm), we thought it might be a good time to revisit the latest not-so-classic retellings of fairy tales, fables, and the like.

We are also very excited to share newly discovered fairy tales by Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth, a volume which, according to the publisher, makes "the holy trinity of fairy tales, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen, become a quartet...bring[ing] us closer than ever to the unadorned oral tradition in which fairy tales are rooted, revolutionizing our understanding of a hallowed genre". Schonwerth's works had been lost until recently and are available for the first time in English.

If you'd prefer the original fairy tales, consider checking out: The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen edited by Maria Tatar; The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, newly translated by Neil Philip and Nicoletta Simborowski; or Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner.

For older readers (teen +)

The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth
 Dearest by Alethea Kontis  Off the Page by Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer  Stepmothers and the Big Bad Wolf: Fairy Tale Villains Reimagined by Susan Bianculli [eBook] Damsel Distressed by Kelsey Macke [eBook] Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth The Stepsister's Tale by Tracy Barrett Alias Hook by Lisa Jensen       The Witch: And Other Tales Re-Told by Jean Thompson   Marvel Fairy Tales by C.B. Cebulski   For Children  The Bernadette Watts Collection: Stories and Fairy Tales by Bernadette Watts   Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel by Megan Morrison  A Catfish Tale: A Bayou Story of the Fisherman and His Wife by Whitney Stewart   Hansel & Gretel: A Toon Graphic by Neil Gaiman, Lorenzo Mattotti Puss & Boots by Ayano Imai Beauty and the Beast: A Retelling by H. Chuku Lee     

National Poetry Month: Literary Spotify

Welcome to National Poetry Month 2015, celebrated every April by poetry lovers and the Academy of American Poets since 1996.  How will you be celebrating?  Poets.org recommends 30 ways to celebrate, including: #9, Learn more about poets and poetry events in your state (Poetry & Hip Hop with Keshet Dance Company, anyone?); # 15, Chalk a poem on the sidewalk; and # 27, Watch a poetry movie (not on their list but in the library catalog: Black Butterflies).

You can also celebrate Poem In Your Pocket Day, which is Thursday, April 30th. "Every April, on Poem in Your Pocket Day, people throughout the United States celebrate by selecting a poem, carrying it with them, and sharing it with others throughout the day as schools, bookstores, libraries, parks, workplaces, and other venues ring loud with open readings of poems from pockets." Don't have a poem for your pocket?  Poets.org features many downloadable poems, or you could sign up for their Poem-A-Day.

One of the ways you might not have thought to celebrate poetry is to listen to poetry being read on Spotify! Spotify, as part of their Browse feature, has listed under Genres and Moods a section called Word. Word compiles playlists like "Short Stories", "Guided Meditation", "Learn Spanish", "Mythologies", "Self Help Gems", "Vintage Radio Dramas", and "Once Upon a Time". Also included are playlists like "Love Poems", "A Hipster's Guide to Poetry", "Modern Poetry", and "Langston Hughes In His Own Words". These make a great jumping off point to explore poetry - including poems read by the poets themselves, going all the way back to Walt Whitman - which is often most enjoyable when read aloud.  Alternately, you can also search Spotify using the keywords "poetry" or "poems" to find more.

If you have Spotify, check out our "Literary Spotify" list and celebrate National Poetry Month with poetry readings by poets (including local poets like Jimmy Santiago Baca) and more! You can also find audiobooks of poetry in the library catalog.



Links

Poets.org: National Poetry Month

Sweet Literary Tracks on Spotify [Book Riot]

Celebrities Who Wanted to be Librarians

A couple weeks ago, I posted about LeBron James's support of literacy, and in November, I posted about Taylor Swift's support of literacy. Someone commented on my post about LeBron James and said that B.J. Novak of The Office also has connections to libraries, which leads me to today's post.

I was reading the link given in the comments of the LeBron James post and was delighted to learn that Novak wrote the children's book The Book With No Pictures. I haven't read the book yet, but I've had several colleagues recommend it to me. I had no idea it was written by a celebrity, because I don't watch The Office, and while I don't always like it when celebrities write books, for some reason, I'm thrilled that this one was written by a celebrity--maybe because I don't know anything about Novak.

What's even better about Novak is that once upon a time, he wanted to be a librarian. In the article "B.J. Novak Goes the Extra Mile for Libraries" (this is the link that was given in the comments of the LeBron James post), Novak was quoted as saying, "I was enthralled by the library in my elementary school, where anything could happen and where no one told you where your mind was supposed to be."

This is a completely different way of showing support for libraries. Novak hasn't donated money to libraries or other literacy efforts, but writing for kids and doing readings from his children's book at libraries is a great way to bring awareness to public libraries.

Since there's not much more to say about Novak and libraries than that, I thought I'd dig around to see if I could find other celebrities who support authors. I was delighted to find this list, from Public Library News. I was even more delighted to see Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones on the list. According to an article published by The Economist, Richards, like Novak, once aspired to become a librarian.

Am I the only one who is surprised (in a good way) about celebrities who wanted to be librarians at one point in their lives? Do you know of any other celebrities who have said they wanted to be librarians when they were younger? Let me know in the comments!

Featured Author: Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb is one of the pseudonyms of epic fantasy author Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden. Born in California and raised in Alaska, Ogden, according to her publisher, "raised her family, ran a smallholding, delivered post to her remote community, all at the same time as writing stories and novels. She succeeded on all fronts, raising four children and becoming an internationally best-selling writer." She now lives in Tacoma, Washington.

Ogden started her career trying to write children's books, but later decided "...that there was a corollary to the famous 'Write what you know' advice. That was, 'Write what you love reading.'" A longtime fan of science fiction and fantasy, she decided to change direction. She had tremendous success writing fantasy novels  from 1983-1992 as Megan Lindholm, but when she decided to take an epic fantasy (sometimes called high fantasy) storyline, Ogden felt her new voice required a new name. As Robin Hobb, her books (beginning with Assassin's Apprentice in 1995) encompass several series, but all take place in the Realm of the Elderlings with the exception of the Forest Mage Trilogy.  There are links between the series, and at least two of them run concurrently.

The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince 

 

The Farseer Trilogy

The story of FitzChivalry Farseer (Fitz), a trained assassin.

Assassin's Apprentice [eBook]

Royal Assassin [eBook]

Assassin's Quest [eBook]

Liveship Traders Trilogy

Ship of Magic [eBook + eAudio]

Mad Ship

Ship of Destiny

The Tawny Man Trilogy

The Tawny Man series continues the adventures of FitzChivalry Farseer from the author's Farseer Trilogy, fifteen years later.

Fool's Errand

Golden Fool

Fool's Fate [eBook]

The Rain Wild Chronicles

Takes place years after The Liveship Traders Trilogy.

Dragon Keeper [eBook + eAudio]

Dragon Haven

City of Dragons

Blood of Dragons

The Fitz and the Fool Trilogy

The continuing adventures of Fitz, years later.

Fool's Assassin

The Forest Mage Series

Also called the Soldier Son Trilogy.

Shaman's Crossing

Forest Mage [eAudio] 

Renegade's Magic

Find stories written under her other pseudonym, Megan Lindholm, in the Dangerous Women anthology.


Readalikes: George R. R. Martin, Susanna Clarke, Philip Pullman, Patrick Rothfuss, J.R.R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling.

What Makes a Place?: Reinventing the Atlas

An atlas also let me do a bunch of things I wanted to do. One was to provide a counter to the rush to online mapping with its hideous aesthetics, evanescent images, normalizing tendencies to show all places merely in terms of practical needs, and consumerism. There are all these restaurants and shops on Google Maps, without any indication of, say, where great women lived or endangered butterfly species live.
~Rebecca Solnit

Author, activist, and historian Rebecca Solnit, along with cartographers, designers, researchers, and teams of artists and writers, is putting out a series of city atlases though the University of California Press. The first two atlases explored San Francisco and New Orleans, and the third will focus on New York City. But, be warned - these are not your traditional atlases. Solnit's atlas places an emphasis on the cultural history of the city, and her rendering is admittedly "modest and deeply arbitrary". As Solnit explains "...a big part of my writing has been to try to describe and value those things that are not quantifiable, commodifiable, controllable: epiphanies, awareness, those beautiful moments when people come together as civil society, whether to pick up after a disaster or overthrow a disastrous regime, beauty itself, and the pleasures that don’t get named much."

In Solnit's atlases, maps, rather than just showing city streets and traditional cultural landmarks (museums, etc.), are a mashup of traditional maps, with varying takes on the topography of the city, and cultural history.  The "Cinema City" map in Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, for example, shows the reader locations important to Eadweard Muybridge (a photographer who helped create the earliest technology of moving pictures) and to Alfred Hitchcock and his film Vertigo; you can also find the locations of "1958 movie theaters, surviving" and "1958 movie theaters, gone".

Maps are matched with essays on the topic the map explores. Map 9 in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas is titled "Sugar Heaven and Sugar Hell: Pleasures and Brutalities of a Commodity" - New Orleans is famous for sweet treats such as pralines and beignets. The map shows antebellum sites (e.g. where Jesuit missionaries raised sugar cane in the 1700s), plantation borders, postbellum sites (e.g,. Domino Sugar's Chalmette Refinery), and dialysis centers. The accompanying essay is called "No Sweetness Is Light"; in it, Shirley Thompson talks about "the New Orleans sugar map" and how the craving for sweetness exists alongside the more famous tastes of the city, like fish and hot pepper. It's a brief, often personal essay, touching on diabetes, sugar processing, and slavery.

Both atlases are a pleasure to browse. The maps are coloful and clearly rendered, and there are also some photos and illustrations scattered throughout the book  - many vintage, but some from the past few years. You may not be ready to take a tour of San Francisco or New Orleans after you read these atlases, but we think you will have a good sense of place, and a feel for what lies beneath the city's veneer.

You can find both Solnit's atlases in the ABC Library catalog:

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

The book offers this description of itself on the title page: "Of principal landmarks and treasures of the region, including butterfly species, queer sites, murders, coffee, water, power, contingent identities, social types, libraries, early-morning bars, the lost labor landscape of 1960, and the monumental Monterey cypresses of San Francisco; of indigenous place names, women environmentalists, toxins, food sites, right-wing organizations, World War II shipyards, Zen Buddhist centers, salmon migration, and musical histories of the Bay Area; with details of cultural geographies of the Mission District, the Fillmore's culture wars and metamorphoses, the racial discourses of United Nations Plaza, the South of Market world that redevelopment devoured, and other significant phenomena, vanished and extant."

Maps include: Green Women: Open Spaces and Their Champions; Truth to Power: Race and Justice in the City's Heart; Poison/Palate: The Bay Area  in Your Body; Tribes of San Francisco: Their Comings and Goings; The World in a Cup: Coffee Economics and Ecologies.

Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas

co-authored with Rebecca Snedeker

Potential readers take note, this book is: "Being an atlas in twenty-two maps and nearly that many essays about the city that is at the bottom of the Mississippi drainage of the interior of the North American continent and at the top of the Gulf of Mexico and at the center of the American unconscious, the small mortal city that is the immortal wellspring of much popular music around the world, a city not quite three hundred years old, half of that an era of slavery, all of that an era of striving for freedom; of segregation and mixing; of crime and corruption in secret and of the confident collective celebration in the streets that is their opposite; of wildlife flying over and oil pipelines cutting through; of complicated stories, not all of them black and white;of various heroines, some heroes; of unfinished tasks and interesting possibilities; a city resting on the pillowy softness of river-delivered muck, mud, and sometimes the hard ground of disputed memory; to say nothing of crawfish boils and the sweet loud sounds of brass bands." 

Maps include: Oil and Water: Extracting Petroleum, Exterminating Nature; ¡Bananas!; Snakes and Ladders: What Rose Up, What Fell Down During Hurricane Katrina; The Line-up: Live Oak Corridors and Carnival Parade Routes.


Do these atlases inspire you, as Rebecca Solnit suggests, to "pay close enough attention and move daringly enough through the city [so you] encounter difference, mystery, the unexpected, the tender and desperate little moments of strangers passing by, [and] come to know the rhythms and rites of the city and some of its secrets, and know, too, that there are more secrets than anyone can ever know" in your own town?