Quote:
Originally Posted by solitarywolf
Over the years I have found that originally I liked fan fiction, but tired of it as I got older. When I go back and re-read the original, I now find that I love more than the storyline and characters. I love how it was written. I fall in love with the era it was created in.
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I've read fan fiction that is more true to the original than not only authorized continuations, like the Gardner stories you mentioned, but even the canon author's own later writing. When someone writes a series over a period of decades, their style can shift considerably, and not always for the better. (see the above mentions of Anne McCaffrey)
And, of course, that's assuming there even
is some definable "era" and some definable "original". Take, say,
Star Trek. Over the past forty-odd years, official
Star Trek canon has encompassed four TV series of varying quality, eleven movies, many dozens of books, assorted comic book series, some random number of computer games, and more. Not only can't you say that fan fiction is necessarily worse than the original (given the execrable quality of most of those books, not to mention odd-numbered movies, it's hard to say
anything is worse) but it's not easy even defining what the original
is. Do all the movies count? Even the bad ones? Even
Star Trek V? How about the books? I had the misfortune to read some of the "engineering" series a couple of years ago, and not only have I read better fanfic, I've criticized better fanfic ... for sucking. Do you count all the TV series, even the ones you dislike? Even when they contradict each other? Do we have to include Q?
That's something else fanfic can give us: a selected subset of our chosen world. Let's say, for instance, that someone likes the first two years of ST:TOS but thinks the third season, which gave us treasures like
Spock's Brain, is just bad. So they can write their fanfic as if the official Star Trek canon consisted only of those first two original seasons, and go off in any direction they choose. Readers who agree with their choices will enjoy reading what they write, and a fair number of other readers, including the ones who endure things they don't agree with because they're
Star Trek, will read and like the stories, too. I've never looked, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that there is, say,
Pern fanfic where the story of Moreta's Ride follows the original description, not the mess that McCaffrey retconned later, and I know that for a very old TV show I write fanfic for, most writers simply ignore the highly problematic pilot (we have good precedent: the canon writers did, too!).
I think that fanfic, as a fundamental part of itself, embodies participation rather than passive consumption. Even when it's bad (and yes, it can get very, very bad) it's still an example of fans participating in, and creating within in, something they like. In today's world of passive entertainment, that's actually a rather surprising thing. You look at a hundred years ago and people, even rich people, played parlor games, played musical instruments, sang together, and so on; today, entertainment is mostly non-participatory: you watch TV and don't actually
do anything. Fanfic authors are getting off their non-participatory butts and participating. Even if they're bad stories, they're doing something, not sitting waiting for someone else to do something. There's a lot to be said for that.
Going back to James Bond: The original Ian Fleming stories certainly had a distinct feel to them, one that the later Gardner books lacked. The movies didn't even have that much, and some could be called parodies of the series and the genre. They're canon. They're "real" James Bond. Personally, I would prefer fanfic written by someone trying for consistency in style and time with the original novels to movies like
Moonraker, canon be hanged.