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iN Praise of faNfic
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In Praise of Fanfic
(Originally published in
Locus,
May 2007.)
I wrote my first story when I was six. It was 1977, and I had just
had my mind blown clean out of my skull by a new movie called
Star Wars
(the golden age of science fiction is twelve; the golden
age of cinematic science fiction is six). I rushed home and stapled
a bunch of paper together, trimmed the sides down so that it
approximated the size and shape of a mass-market paperback,
and set to work. I wrote an elaborate, incoherent ramble about
Star Wars
, in which the events of the film replayed themselves,
tweaked to suit my tastes.
I wrote a lot of
Star Wars
fanfic that year. By the age of twelve,
I’d graduated to
Conan
. By the age of eighteen, it was Harlan El-
lison. By the age of twenty-six, it was Bradbury, by way of Gibson.
Today, I hope I write more or less like myself.
Walk the streets of Florence and you’ll find a copy of the
David
on practically every corner. For centuries, the way to become a
Florentine sculptor has been to copy Michelangelo, to learn from
the master. Not just the great Florentine sculptors, either — great
or terrible, they all start with the master; it can be the start of a
lifelong passion, or a mere fling. The copy can be art, or it can be
crap — the best way to find out which kind you’ve got inside you
is to try.
Science fiction has the incredible good fortune to have at-
tracted huge, social groups of fan-fiction writers. Many pros got
their start with fanfic (and many of them still work at it in secret),
and many fanfic writers are happy to scratch their itch by working
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