And one more thing…

All this debate about fan fiction, here and on Diana Gabaldon’s blog and Charlie Stross’s blog and ten or twenty or a hundred other places on the internet, has generated (I hope) a certain amount of light and (I know) an enormous amount of heat.

Why is that? I wonder. Why do both sides get so incensed about this issue?

There’s a lot been said about copyright and trademark and infringement and fair use and who has the right to make money off what, and all that’s well and good, valuable stuff, worth discussing and debating… but the fanfictioneers keep saying that it’s all about love, never about money, and as I ponder this, I think they’re right.

It is all about love.

On both sides.

Let’s forget about all the legal and financial issues here. We’ve discussed those to death. Let’s just talk about the emotions.

Here’s the thing. I think the fan fictioneers write about certain characters because they love them. And I think the writers who object to having their characters written about do so because they love them too. Which brings us back to the “my characters are my children” thing, which may be central.

Now, not all writers feel this way, certainly. Some will say, “Do whatever you want with my characters, I don’t care, so long as you don’t impinge on my ability to make a living. If you start f*cking with my income stream, I’ll shut you down. Elsewise, have fun.” Which is fine, if you share that view. But y’know, I don’t. I’ll never say something like that. I DO care what you do with my characters.

Fiction is fiction. It’s all made up. Dreams and visions made of word on paper. Every writer who isn’t insane knows that. Every reader too. But still…

When I was kid back in the 50s, I read a lot of comic books, including Superman books — SUPERMAN, ACTION, LOIS LANE, JIMMY OLSEN. At that time, those comics would occasionally publish what they called “Imaginary Stories.” Even as a kid, I knew that was a stupid name. I mean, ALL the stories were imaginary, weren’t they? Today we’d call them “What If” stories or “Alternate Universe” stories. They were stories outside the usual Superman continuity. “What If Krypton Never Blew Up” and “What If Superman and Lois Got Married,” stuff like that. Some of them were pretty good stories. Lots happened in them — more than ever happened in the “real” Superman stories of the 50s. Even so, they never completely engaged me. Because they weren’t REAL.

Of course, Superman himself wasn’t real. None of the stories were real. I knew that, even when I was eight years old. But there’s a contract between reader and writer. I’m telling you a story, trying to make it all as real as possible. And you, the reader, while you’re reading the story, you’re going to pretend that these people are real, that the events in the story actually did happen to them. Without that pretense, why would you care?

(Once, at a Milford Conference several decades ago, I got in a long and heated argument with two New Wave writers who put forward the proposition that since fiction is not real, it should not pretend to be real, that good fiction is all about the words, that stories should celebrate their “paperiness” the same way abstract art celebrates its two-dimensionality, as opposed to earlier styles of painting that tried to create the illusion of three dimensions. Maybe that’s why I have never liked abstract art. I certainly don’t like stories that celebrate their paperiness. I want the illusion. I want the stories and the characters to be as real as they can possibly be, at least during the time it takes me to read them. And maybe afterwards as well).

The imaginary stories were intellectually interesting, as “what if” stories, but they never engaged me on an emotional level. I knew, as I read them, that nothing in them really mattered. If Superman or one of his friends died, well, it was no big thing. They would be back next issue, unchanged. On the other hand, a few years later, when Gwen Stacy died, I was almost as devastated as Peter Parker. Gwen Stacy was real to me.

(Which is also, by the way, why I hate hate hate the retconning that has become so f*cking common in today’s comic books and films. It seems to me to be a breach of that unwritten contract between writer and reader. You told me that Peter Parker married Mary Jane, you had me read a decade’s worth of stories where they were man and wife, you never said they were imaginary stories, you claimed that this was what was really happening to Spidey in his real life… and now you turn around and tell me, no, not only are they not married, they were NEVER married, none of that actually happened, nyah nyah nyah, but keep buying our comic, now we’re going to tell you what really did happen. Sorry, no. Strike up the Who, I won’t get fooled again. I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it).

As a reader (books, comics, whatever) and a viewer (television, film), I want characters I can care about, engage with, believe in. If I don’t find them in the work, I’m going to lose interest very quickly. If I do find them, though… well, even though I know such creations are just fictions, I will nonetheless begin to care very deeply.

F’rinstance, I have never seen the third ALIENS movie. I loved ALIEN and ALIENS, but when I read the early reviews of ALIENS 3, and learned that the new movie was going to open by killing Newt and… what was his name, the Michael Biehn character?… well, I was f*cking outraged. I never went to the film because I did not want that sh*t in my head. I had come to love Newt in the preceding movie, the whole damn film was about Ripley rescuing her, the end was deeply satisfying… and now some asshole was going to come along and piss all over that just to be shocking. I have never seen the subsequent Aliens films either, since they are all part of a fictional “reality” that I refuse to embrace. Not even the film with Ron Perlman in it, and Ron is a both a friend and an actor I greatly admire.

Thing is, it hasn’t worked. Though I’ve avoided seeing the films, the reviews I read still poisoned the well. I know too much about what happens in ALIENS 3. I know Newt dies. And just that little bit of knowledge has seriously crimped my ability to enjoy ALIENS itself. It’s still a fine, exciting film, but now when I get to the end, when Newt is climbing into the tube and asking Ripley if she’ll dream, instead of the frisson of emotional satisfaction that I used to get, the little teardrop at the corner of my eye, I remember, “F*ck, Newt has an alien inside her, she’s going to die,” and I get pissed off and sour all over again.

All over a character who does not exist, has never existed. I know that. It does not make the feelings any less strong.

And if I can feel that strongly about characters created by other people, can you possibly imagine how strongly I feel about my own characters?

That’s why I liken them to my children. I can care about Newt and Gwen Stacy and Frodo and Captain Ahab and the Great Gatsby and on and on… but I care about the Turtle and Abner Marsh and Tyrion Lannister and Jon Snow and Haviland Tuf and Daenerys and my own guys a thousand times more. They are my sons and daughters.

There are lots and lots and lots of people like me, I think. And it’s that which accounts for the emotional vehemence of these debates on fan fiction, on both sides.

The fan fictioneers fall in love with a character or characters, and want to make things come out right for them… or come out the way they want things to come out. I know that much of the old BEAUTY AND THE BEAST fanfic was posited on the basis of Catherine and Vincent consummating their relationship and living happily ever after, with occasional adventures. There was certainly a ton of it based on wiping away our entire third season; many B&B fans feel about Catherine’s death just as strongly as I feel about Newt’s. They want to undo it. I would strongly suspect that out there somewhere there must be ALIENS fanfic where Newt does NOT die horribly too. It’s love of the characters that prompts people to write these things. Hell, if I was ever hired to write a new ALIENS film, the first thing I would do would be to say, “Hey, remember how at the end of ALIENS Newt asks if she will dream? Well, she will. All the films from that moment have just been her bad dreams. We’ll open my new movie with Newt and Ripley waking up…” Which would be a sort of retconning, I know, which I just denounced. So sue me. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. It would also be the most expensive fanfic in history, I guess. Too bad I’ll never get the chance.

But let’s turn it on its head, and look at the things from the writer’s perspective. As much as the fans may love our characters, we love them more. And suddenly we are confronted with stories in which other people are doing all sorts of things with our children… things we never envisioned, never authorized, and may even find stupid and/ or repugnant. Characters we killed come back to life. Living characters are killed. Villains are redeemed. Straight characters become gay. Romeo and Juliet don’t commit suicide, they survive and live happily ever after and have seventeen children.

Sure, we could shrug and say, “None of these things really happened. These stories are not canon. They’re just imaginary stories. They’re not REAL.” And I’m sure many writers do this. But I can’t. All legal and financial aspects aside, I don’t want to read your fanfic where Gatsby and Daisy run off together, and I certainly don’t want to read the ones where Gatsby runs off with Tom Buchanan, or the two of them and Daisy have a threesome, or Gatsby rapes and murders Daisy… and I’m pretty sure F. Scott Fitzgerald wouldn’t want to read ’em either. Now, plug in Jon Snow and Jay Ackroyd and Haviland Tuf and Daenerys Targaryen, or any of my characters, for Gatsby and Daisy and Tom, and I’m pretty sure that you can figure out my reaction.

It’s like with Newt. I don’t want those pictures in my head. Even if they’re nice pictures, if you love my characters and only do nice, sweet, happy things to them. You’re still messing around with my people. I won’t use any analogies here, I know how that upsets people… but there is a sense of violation.

It’s not rational, perhaps. These are all just made-up people. Words on paper. Who cares what happens to them? Let’s just all celebrate their paperiness.

But I’m not wired that way. And neither, I suspect, is Diana Gabaldon.

This has nothing to do with money or copyright or law. It’s a gut-level emotional reaction. And it’s all about love. On both sides.

Or to put it another way:

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My position on so-called “fan fiction” is pretty well known. I’m against it, for a variety of reasons that I’ve stated previously more than once. I won’t repeat ’em here.

My position is not unique. It is not universal either, I realize. Some writers actually encourage fan fiction (I know some of them, have heard their arguments), others don’t seem to care one way or another (I know many of those). Many writers have no idea that it exists, no concept of what it is (in part because of the confusing term “fan fiction,” which subject I will return to later), and have given the subject no thought. So there’s a wide range of opinion on this matter, even among writers.

There are lots of us who oppose fan fiction, though. One such is my friend Diana Gabaldon, author of the mega-bestselling OUTLANDER series… and the occasional terrific short story and novella, some of which Gardner Dozois and I have been privileged to publish in our anthologies. Diana recently outlined her own feelings about fan fiction — especially fan fiction involving her own world and characters — in a series of posts on her blog:

http://voyagesoftheartemis.blogspot.com/

Subsequent to Diana’s first post, all hell broke loose. (As it seems to do more and more often on this “interweb” thingie). A thousand comments on her first two blog posts on the subject. It’s all there, for those who want to check out the “debate.” Which soon, alas, became heated, as hundreds of… what’s the correct term here? fanficcers? fan fictioneers? fans of fanfic? defenders of fanfic?… arrived from all over the internet to take issue with Diana. A good number of them seemed to open their posts with variations on ‘I don’t know who you are and I’ve never read your books and I’ve never visited this blog before, but I’ve come by specially to lambast you.’

Sigh.

I have a colorful metaphor in mind to describe what this reminds me of, but I won’t use it. Metaphors seemed to spark much of the outrage here. Writers have a natural prediliction for the colorful phrase, the striking comparison, but in political discussions — and this is, at base, a political discussion — that can lead to hyperbole, which can lead to anger.

So let me try to eschew all that and remain calm.

I am not going to rehash the arguments for and against “fan fiction.” If you want to read those, go to Diana’s blog. In between the shouting and the abuse and the endless restatement of the same three or four points by several hundred different posters, there’s actually some fairly cogent posts on both sides, arguing the pros and cons of the issue.

I would like to say a couple of things that I don’t think anyone else covered, however (and yes, I read all thousand-plus comments, though admittedly I skimmed some that just seemed to be more of the same).

As I said, my reasons for opposing fan fiction have been stated in the past. They are more-or-less the same reasons as those cited by Diana Gabaldon, and pretty much the same reasons that would given by any writer who shares our viewpoint on the matter. So I won’t repeat them here. But I’ll add a few thoughts.

One of the things I mislike about fan fiction is its NAME. Truth is, I wrote fan fiction myself. That was how I began, when I was a kid in high school writing for the dittoed comic fanzines of the early 1960s. In those days, however, the term did not mean “fiction set in someone else’s universe using someone else’s characters.” It simply meant “stories written by fans for fans, amateur fiction published in fanzines.” Comic fandom was in its infancy then, and most of us who started it were kids… some of whom did make the mistake of publishing amateur fan-written stories about Batman or the Fantastic Four in their ‘zines. National (what we called DC back then) and Marvel shut those down pretty quickly.

The rest of us knew better. Including me. I was a fan, an amateur, writing stories out of love just like today’s fan fictioneers… but it never dawned on me to write about the JLA or the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man, much as I loved them. I invented my own characters, and wrote about those. Garizan, the Mechanical Warrior. Manta Ray. The White Raider. When Howard Keltner, one of the editors and publishers of STAR-STUDDED COMICS, the leading fanzine of its day, invited me to write about two of his creations, Powerman and Dr. Weird, I leapt at the chance… but only with Howard’s express invitation and permission.

So that’s the sort of fan fiction I wrote. How and when the term began to be used for what is called fan fiction today, I don’t know. I wish there was another term for that, though I confess I cannot think of one that isn’t either cumbersome, vague, or prejorative. But it does bother me that people hear I wrote fan fiction, and take that to mean I wrote stories about characters taken from the work of other writers without their consent.

Consent, for me, is the heart of this issue. If a writer wants to allow or even encourage others to use their worlds and characters, that’s fine. Their call. If a writer would prefer not to allow that… well, I think their wishes should be respected.

Myself, I think the writers who allow fan fiction are making a mistake. I am not saying here that the people who write fan fiction are evil or immoral or untrustworthy. The vast majority of them are honest and sincere and passionate about whatever work they chose to base their fictions on, and have only the best of intentions for the original author. But (1) there are always a few, in any group, who are perhaps less wonderful, and (2) this door, once opened, can be very difficult to close again.

Most of us laboring in the genres of science fiction and fantasy (but perhaps not Diana Gabaldon, who comes from outside SF and thus may not be familiar with the case I am about to cite) had a lesson in the dangers of permitting fan fiction a couple of decades back, courtesy of Marion Zimmer Bradley. MZB had been an author who not only allowed fan fiction based on her Darkover series, but actively encouraged it… even read and critiqued the stories of her fans. All was happiness and joy, until one day she encountered in one such fan story an idea similar to one she was using in her current Darkover novel-in-progress. MZB wrote to the fan, explained the situation, even offered a token payment and an acknowledgement in the book. The fan replied that she wanted full co-authorship of said book, and half the money, or she would sue. MZB scrapped the novel instead, rather than risk a lawsuit. She also stopped encouraging and reading fan fiction, and wrote an account of this incident for the SFWA FORUM to warn other writers of the potential pitfalls of same.

That was twenty years ago or thereabouts, but that episode had a profound effect on me and, I suspect, on many other SF and fantasy writers of my generation.

Okay, it was one incident a long time ago, you may say. Fair enough. Let me bring up a couple other writers, then. Contemporaries of an earlier age, each of whom was known by a set of initials: ERB and HPL. ERB created Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. HPL created Cthulhu and his Mythos. ERB, and later his estate, was extremely protective of his creations. Try to use Tarzan, or even an ape man who was suspiciously similar to Tarzan, without his/ their permission, and their lawyers would famously descend on you like a ton of bricks. HPL was the complete opposite. The Cthulhu Mythos soon turned into one of our genres first shared worlds. HPL encouraged writer friends like Robert Bloch and Clark Ashton Smith to borrow elements from his Cuthulhu Mythos, and to add elements as well, which HPL himself would borrow in turn. And in time, other writers who were NOT friends of HPL also began to write Cthulhu Mythos stories, which continues to this day.

Fair enough. Two writers, two different decisions.

Thing is, ERB died a millionaire many times over, living on a gigantic ranch in a town that was named Tarzana after his creation. HPL lived and died in genteel poverty, and some biographers have suggested that poor diet brought on by poverty may have hastened his death. HPL was a far more beloved figure amongst other writers, but love will only get you so far. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to have a steak too. The Burroughs estate was paid handsomely for every Tarzan movie ever made, and collected plenty on the PRINCESS OF MARS movie I worked on during my Hollywood years, and no doubt is still collecting on the one currently in development… though the book is in the public domain by now. Did the Lovecraft estate make a penny off THE DUNWICH HORROR movie, the HERBERT WEST, REANIMATOR movie, the recent DAGON movie, the internet version of CALL OF CTHULHU? I don’t know. I rather doubt it. If they did, I’ll betcha it was just chump change. Meanwhile, new writers go right on mining the Cthulhu mythos, writing new stories and novels.

Cthulhu, like John Carter, is in the public domain by now, I know. But it wouldn’t matter. Because HPL let so many others play in his sandbox, he essentially lost control of his own creations. That’s what I mean by (2), above. The fan fiction door, once opened, is hard to close again.

A writer’s creations are his livelihood. Those copyrights are ultimately all that separates an ERB from a HPL. Is it any wonder that most writers are so protective of them?

Those of us, like Diana Galabdon and myself, who prefer not to allow fan fictioners to use our worlds and characters are not doing it just to be mean. We are doing it to protect ourselves and our creations.

Furthermore, we HAVE to do it. That’s something no one addressed, in those thousand comments about Diana’s blog. There was a lot of talk about copyright, and whether or not fan fiction was illegal, whether it was fair use (it is NOT fair use, by the way, not as I understand the term, and I have a certain familiarity with what is and isn’t fair use thanks to my own experiences with THE ARMAGEDDON RAG), but no one mentioned one crucial aspect of copyright law — a copyright MUST BE DEFENDED. If someone infringes on your copyright, and you are aware of the infringement, and you do not defend your copyright, the law assumes that you have abandoned it. Once you have done that, anyone can do whatever the hell they want with your stuff. If I let Peter and Paul and Nancy publish their Ice & Fire fanfics, and say nothing, then I have no ground to stand on when Bill B. Hack and Ripoff Publishing decide they will publish an Ice & Fire novel and make some bucks. Peter and Paul and Nancy may be the nicest people in the world, motivated only by sincere love of my world and characters, but Bill B. Hack and Ripoff don’t give a damn. They just want the bucks.

Once you open that door, you can’t control who might come in.

No one would ever do that, I hear someone muttering in the back. Hoo hah. The history of publishing is full of such cases. Even the famously and fiercely litigious ERB estate was famously victimized back in the 60s, when someone forget to timely renew the copyright on a Tarzan book, and a bottom rung comic company noticed and promptly started up a completely unauthorized (and unpaid for) Tarzan comic.

Those are some of the reasons writers like me will not permit fanfic, but before I close, let me put aside the legal and financial aspects of all this for a moment, and talk about more personal ones. Here, I think, Diana Gabaldon absolutely hit the nail on the head in the latest of her blog posts on the subject. And here, she and I agree completely. Many years ago, I won a Nebula for a story called “Portraits of His Children,” which was all about a writer’s relationship with the characters he creates. I don’t have any actual children, myself (Diana does). My characters are my children, I have been heard to say. I don’t want people making off with them, thank you. Even people who say they love my children. I’m sure that’s true, I don’t doubt the sincerity of the affection, but still…

I have sometimes allowed other writers to play with my children. In Wild Cards, for instance, which is a shared world. Lohengrin, Hoodoo Mama, Popinjay, the Turtle, and all my other WC creations have been written by other writers, and I have written their characters. But I submit, this is NOT at all the same thing. A shared world is a tightly controlled environment. In the case of Wild Cards, it’s controlled by me. I decide who gets to borrow my creations, and I review their stories, and approve or disapproval what is done with them. “No, Popinjay would say it this way,” I say, or “Sorry, the Turtle would never do that,” or, more importantly (this has never come up in Wild Cards, but it did in some other shared worlds), “No, absolutely not, your character may not rape my character, I don’t give a fuck how powerful you think it would be.”

And that’s Wild Cards. A world and characters created to be shared. It’s not at all the same with Ice & Fire. No one gets to abuse the people of Westeros but me.

Anyway…

I have gone on longer than I intended, but I think this is important stuff. “Fan fiction” — or whatever you want to call it — has been around for a long time, but never like now. The internet has changed everything. Whereas before the fanfic might be published in obscure fanzines with a circulation of a hundred, now tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, can read these… well, let’s just call them “unauthorized derivative works.” (Except in cases where the writer has authorized ’em, which I suppose would be “authorized derivative works.”) More than ever, we need some boundaries here.

I salute Diana Gabaldon for opening the debate.

And now I step back, and await the onslaught.

(But a word of warning. I’m not nearly as nice a person as Diana is, and this Not A Blog is screened and monitored by my assistant Ty. Diana was willing to let everything go in her comments section. I’m not. So — my roof, my rules. Disagree, if you want. Disagree vigorously. Argue your points. But no name-calling, no abuse, no threats. And you can spare me the “I have never read any of your books, but now I’m not going to, and I’m going to tell all my friends not to read your books either” posts as well. Fine, you just want to read books by authors who support fan fiction, go ahead, do that, there are a number of very fine writers in that group, we don’t need to hear about it here. No derailing the discussion, please. Let’s talk about the issue, not tone. I’d love to see some rational discourse here, thanks).

(And yes, the title of this post is a reference to the classic xkcd cartoon that can be seen here: http://xkcd.com/386/)

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