The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [30]
The goofy glory of the final necklace design is all Elise's doing, partly driven by technical considerations such as not attempting to cut up the pin backs, risking breakage. I'd like to think I do the same thing to genre tropes in my writing, but that's not for me to judge.
LSC: It's for your fans to judge. Is there a difference between your fans, that is, the people who enjoy your work, and Fans with a capital F?
LMB: Not really; fandom fans are a subset of the broader reader ship, in my experience. I first found fandom, or it found me, in the fall of 1967, just after I'd graduated from high school and was working in the book department of a downtown department store. I met a fellow from the local SF fan club, who invited me to a meeting. (The guys vastly outnumbered the girls, back then.)
I went to a few local conventions, and attended two Worldcons—my first was BayCon in '60-hum-something, '68 or '69. So when I returned to the convention scene in the mid-Eighties as a wanna-be pro, it was a fairly socially comfortable milieu for me. I understand some writers who first encounter fandom after they are published are a little baffled how to go on there, as it doesn't really fit expected commercial, literary, or academic models of writer-reader relationships, though it partakes of all of them. But most writers seem to learn pretty quickly. Note, fandom is not a unified body so much as an alliance of varied special interests; you have to locate your own kindred spirits in the array.
I have the fondest memories of sitting around the hotel bar in St. Petersburg, Russia, when I went to an SF conference there, discussing our mutual favorite old SF novelists with the full-blooded Tartar computer programmer from Kazakhstan. This stuff gets around.
LSC: Which brings us to the subject of fan fiction, and through that, to the Internet.
LMB: What the Internet has done to fan fiction has been fascina ting. Fan fiction has completely exploded. What has stunned me and blown all my prior theories of fan fiction out of the water was the number and variety of things that have fanfic written about them. I would never in my wildest dreams have expected there to be fifty fan fictions based on 1984 on one site, and even Flatland had some. Say what? Pat Wrede has a theory that the Arthurian Cycle was actually medieval fan fiction, and the more she points out parallels the more you realize she's right! People took their favorite characters and wrote expanded stories about them. They didn't have the Internet, but they did their best.
The Internet has made the idea of fan fiction accessible to a whole bunch of people who have never heard of fandom, run across the mimeographed magazines, or otherwise discovered the genre. So you had things like 35,000 Lord of the Rings stories, and over 125,000 Harry Potter stories on that same site where I found the ones based on 1984. (More by now, no doubt.) Many of them are dire, but even the bad ones have this weird fascination at first. And once in a great while, there's a brilliant one that could only be fanfic, as part of its brilliance comes from a sort of embedded commentary on the original text.
During the year leading up to and away from my mother's death—she passed away in 2003 at the age of 91—I discovered and read a huge amount of on-line fanfic (not on my work, I should add). Besides the sheer novelty and fascination of seeing what a form I'd first discovered thirty-five years ago was now mutating into, it was about the only thing I could stand to read—it felt like fiction for which I was in no way responsible, I suppose, at a time when my real-life responsibilities had no possible happy outcome, but still had to be