How fanfic took over the web

John Sutherland
8 Jun 2009

A couple of years ago I was phoned by someone at NME asking: “What do you think of slash'?” Treading water, as any Professor Trendhound does in such situations, I said that I could live with it, if done by Cronenberg, but thought Saw and Hostel were nasty. “No, no,” it was explained. “Slash — as in fanfic.” I didn't know Fanfic from Harpic.

I'd spent my life reading fiction and writing about it. And a whole trend in “my” field — perhaps the biggest trend in the two decades since the world became web-connected — had happened without my noticing.

I'm not alone. Fanfic, and its many subgenres, are as much terra incognita, I suspect, for many readers of this newspaper as they were for me. But they're important and, more importantly, exciting.

They may also be signposts to our post-book future. It's not the Kindle or Sony Reader that will transform our relationship with the world of story-telling but the free-form stories currently being spun out, in their hundreds daily, on the web.

There are already, I would guess, more works of fanfic out there than there are books in print.
What is “fanfic”? More importantly, what is it aiming to do? According to the authoritative book on the subject, Sheenagh Pugh's The Democratic Genre, it is writing by fans who either want more “of” their favourite works; or who want more “from” their favourite works.

Fanfic, when dutifully done, has elaborate conventions about such things as “respect for canon” and “character rape”. If you want to see it at its most tasteful, go (no surprise) to the Bits of Ivory fanfic niche on the Jane Austen site, The Republic of Pemberley.

Jane Austen won't complain. Some living authors, such as JK Rowling, are tolerant — except when Harry-fic (there's an awful lot of it) gets paedophiliac (quite a lot of that, too, unfortunately). Anne Rice, the great Vampire chronicler, objects violently: “I do not allow fan fiction,” her website decrees. “My characters are copyrighted.” No matter. There are plenty more fish in this sea. Nor can Rice stop the fanfictioneers who play games with her creative property.

The essence of fanfic is that it's free. It has the same relationship to the printed novel that a jazz solo does to sheet music (think John Coltrane versus Julie Andrews on My Favourite Things). Fanfic can only work on the web because it's outlaw territory: the Wild West of creative activity. Does fanfic have its Coltranes? Not yet — although some would say the gifted Cassandra Clare, who has spun elaborate webs of fanfic round Harry Potter and Tolkien, is getting close.

The laws of copyright, libel, trademark and obscenity wilt in the ether. It's wrong, of course. One frowns disapprovingly at all that intellectual property theft and downright filth out there on the web. But part of one can't help thinking that this intellectual outlawry may have its upside as well.

Currently fanfic and — let's call it straightfic, the kind of stuff Waterstone's sells — occupy different worlds. JD Salinger went to court last week to suppress an unauthorised sequel to Catcher in the Rye, called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. It's a book Salinger is worried about. The ancient thing of paper, ink and board which Caxton or Gutenberg could have run off, on their 15th-century presses.

As it happens, there has been unlicensed “Catcher” fanfic on the web for years, on monster sites such as fanfic.com. Enjoy. Or not, if you happen to be the violated author. But as well catch sunbeams in a jar as go after it legally.

Most fanfic is, one suspects, as much fun to write as it is to read. And that is the whole point. It represents the inexorable growth of reader power and participation. This is one of the major cultural trends of our time. Another, closely linked, is the explosive growth of reader-groups. It's like trade unionism in the late 19th century. One feels the consumers taking over the means of production.

Fanfic is, as Pugh's title says, similarly “democratic”. No one buys it, no one sells it. Above all, no one owns it. It's like the medieval ballad. What are the Robin Hood ballads and tales? Proto-fanfic. Who hasn't wondered what Hamlet got up to at the University of Wittenberg or whether Jane Rochester really managed to keep her wayward spouse, Edward, in line. I do. Fanfic goes into all those areas, writing novels about novels.

Things get trickier in that subgenre of fanfic called Real Person Slash. Go to fictioncircus.com and you'll find a gladiatorial “slash contest” between (imaginary) JD Salinger and American science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card. It's libellous but creepily fascinating.

Even creepier are the multitude of slash fantasies about icons such as David Beckham. Does Goldenballs object, or does he regard slashfic as grist to his and Victoria's mill? Or does he take Rowling's line: OK, so long as it doesn't get nasty.

Not all football stars are happy with slashfic. A couple of years ago Ashley Cole's lawyers launched a web-survey trawling for fanfic featuring the footballer, after his 2008 sexual shenanigans. The website's since gone down.

Ashley's wife, Cheryl, may well think of reviving that site. At the end of this month there will be a trial at Newcastle Crown Court that will swing a spotlight on the whole Real Person Slash industry. More particularly, that dark fringe of it which borders on porn.

A Newcastle fanfictioneer, Blake Sinclair (it's a nom-de-web), posted on an adult website a perverse Sadeian fantasy about Girls Aloud. All the singers named, all identifiable.

A main line of defence, if the case comes to trial, will be that there's a ton of similar fanfic — including porn fantasies about Girls Aloud. You'll find as many as you can bear to read on the archive site, literotica.com.

For me, a little goes a very long way. On the other hand, I was called as an expert witness for the Sinclair defence and, in a world where a 10-year-old can go into Waterstone's and buy Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, I don't think fantasy is “obscene” — which is what it's charged with.

Are fanfic and Real Person Slash a welcome democratisation of fiction — or travesty? I'm in two minds. What I do know is that if Salinger succeeds in suppressing Sixty Years Later it will be available on the web 20 minutes later.