Digest whorl.v012.n146

The Whorl list — 2 messages, 1 voices, 21 Jun 2001
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1458

Josh Levitan21 Jun 2001, 13:41original
----- Original Message -----
184 quoted lines · 1–3 deep
From: <whorl-errors at lists1.ba.best.com> To: <whorl at lists1.ba.best.com> Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2001 8:34 AM Subject: Digest whorl.v012.n146 -------------- BEGIN whorl.v012.n146 -------------- 001 - "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaro - RE: (whorl) Fan fic Fooey? Fooey. 002 - "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaro - Re: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. 003 - Michael Straight <straigh - Re: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. 004 - "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <dda - Fooey, fooey, oh, baybee, say me gotta go now... 005 - Michael Andre-Driussi <ma - (whorl) mantis on TBOTSS and fanfic 006 - Adam Stephanides <adamste - Re: Fan fic Fooey? Fooey 007 - Adam Stephanides <adamste - Re: (whorl) Fan fic Fooey? Fooey. 008 - William Ansley <wansley@w - RE: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. 009 - Spectacled Bear <spectacl - Re: (whorl) mantis on TBOTSS and fanfic 010 - "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaro - Re: (whorl) mantis on TBOTSS and fanfic WHORL Digest -- for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.1 --------------- From: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney at ungames.com> Subject: RE: (whorl) Fan fic Fooey? Fooey. Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 12:14:00 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed In-Reply-To: <200106201542.f5KFgM551707 at lists1.ba.best.com> At 08:40 AM 6/20/01 -0700, Blattid wrote:
As a matter of fact, on the website I cited earlier for Pullman fanfic, there is quite a lot of fanfic dealing with real people, namely music groups (the vast majority of it on boy bands: there are over five thousand Nsync fanfics).
I'm not sure what the correct term for this stuff is, but it's different from fanfic as known in the world of SF fandom.
I don't think so. It's different from the core fanfic of the early Trek fandom, but everything and everyone gets pulled into the broader sweeps of fanfic. >Duh. Should of thought of that one myself. Or maybe Silk/Horn, though it would be hard to locate that in the received chronology... Maybe Jolenta/Dorcas... Well, Jolenta/Dorcas is just off-stage, so it would seem obvious.... I'm trying to think of the most appalling possible New Sun fanfic. Father Inire and the mandrake? Little Severian and Typhon? Thecla and an avern? The Green Man and Master Ash could actually be pretty cool. -- Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at ungames.com Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction http://www.nyrsf.com --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.2 --------------- From: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney at ungames.com> Subject: Re: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 12:15:02 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed References: <200106191739.f5JHdeG37910 at lists1.ba.best.com> <200106191739.f5JHdeG37910 at lists1.ba.best.com> In-Reply-To: <200106200300.f5K30pO45116 at lists1.ba.best.com> At 10:59 PM 6/19/01 -0400, William A wrote:
For all of those who were as puzzled as I at this reference to Mary Sue, here is a useful definition:
"A Mary Sue is a character who is smarter than Spock, braver than Kirk, and more compassionate than McCoy, and sleeps with all three." -- Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at ungames.com Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction http://www.nyrsf.com --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.3 --------------- From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu> Subject: Re: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 12:37:01 -0400 (EDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII In-Reply-To: <200106201615.f5KGFrF51944 at lists1.ba.best.com> On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Kevin J. Maroney wrote:
At 10:59 PM 6/19/01 -0400, William A wrote:
For all of those who were as puzzled as I at this reference to Mary Sue, here is a useful definition:
"A Mary Sue is a character who is smarter than Spock, braver than Kirk, and more compassionate than McCoy, and sleeps with all three."
And isn't a Mary Sue generally thought to be the author's fantasy-self? Isn't that a major part of the ickyness of it: watching the author imagine herself a terrific-in-every-way character in an existing universe? -Rostrum --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.4 --------------- From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com> Subject: Fooey, fooey, oh, baybee, say me gotta go now... Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 11:38:09 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Me:
I'm not sure what the correct term for this stuff is, but it's different from fanfic as known in the world of SF fandom.
Wombat:
I don't think so. It's different from the core fanfic of the early Trek fandom, but everything and everyone gets pulled into the broader sweeps of fanfic.
Wellll, as I said, I sort of come from a mid-'70s headset about all this stuff. Been there, wrote the story, sold it to Forry.
I'm trying to think of the most appalling possible New Sun fanfic. Father Inire and the mandrake? Little Severian and Typhon? Thecla and an avern? The Green Man and Master Ash could actually be pretty cool.
Howzabout "Journeyman Torturer Mary Sue?" Smarter than Severian, prettier than Barbatus, stronger than Baldanders, gets to torture them all... --Blatt!d --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.5 --------------- From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com> Subject: (whorl) mantis on TBOTSS and fanfic Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 17:26:37 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hoo, boy. Look here. I mean it! 1) TBOTLS is revealed near the end to have been written by Horn. 2) TBOTSS starts off with some revision to that--it wasn't just Horn, but Horn and his wife Nettle. There is also talk about the trials of publishing, from making the paper on up to the writing of the text in each book. TBOTSS is presumably being written by the narrator Horn alone this time, since Nettle is staying at home. Now it will be 100% Horn. 3) Deep into OBW (TBOTSS vol. 1) it is revealed that there are some editors involved. 4) Toward the end of TBOTSS it is revealed that the narrator wasn't so much Horn writing about Horn's adventure as it was Silk writing about Horn's adventure in absence of Horn (a switch on the situation in TBOTLS, where it was "Horn" [Horn/Nettle] writing about Silk's adventure in the absence of Silk). Then Silk leaves Blue and Nettle leaves, too. 5) Toward the end of TBOTSS it is revealed that some chapters were not written by the narrator Horn, and that these chapters were cobbled together by the editors (all born on Blue; two of them, Hoof and Hide, raised on/with/through TBOTLS). Now then, the editors Hoof and Hide. They are intimately connected to TBOTLS, but not as primary creators. They are immersed in the matter; it is in their mother's milk, if you like. They are so steeped in the stuff that I liken them to "fans," even though they did not voluntarily get into it (and fandom is voluntary, ain't it?). Because of their unique position, they are compelled to step up to the bat and take a wack at completing the manuscript--and they do. When H & H write about The Whorl, we know fully that they have never been there themselves, but ah--they =have= been there through the text of TBOTLS, just as we fans have. So again, H & H are equal to us readers in not knowing The Whorl at first hand and not knowing Silk at first hand. So the writing by H & H, while buttressed by interviews, snatches of conversation, and editorial consensus, amounts to a patch written by fans, which is rather like a fan fiction in the broad sense (rather than the specific sense of "slash" or "Mary Sue"). Now their wives are not likely to be as steeped as the twins are, but they nonetheless have an influence on the shaping of TBOTSS, and since they don't have so many memories of the people involved, their source of inspiration will be TBOTLS. TBOTSS is, therefore, part secondary creation--again, rather like fanfic in the broad sense. It is largely based upon characters and settings depicted in TBOTLS. Neither Horn, nor Nettle, nor even Silk is around to help them in this: nobody involved in the primary creation (TBOTLS) is available. All they have is their memory and the text of TBOTLS. =mantis= Sirius Fiction Has Moved To http://www.siriusfiction.com/ --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.6 --------------- From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net> Subject: Re: Fan fic Fooey? Fooey Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 21:46:58 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
Okay, I'm not a libel lawyer, but there's a reason for all those "no resemblance to any person living or dead" disclaimers you read in the front of books, and there's no way any of those Nsync fans could claim that their fictional characters bore no resemblance to the real bandmembers. Oy, whatever.
Just as a digression, I've always wondered whether those really do any good. A lot of books with such disclaimers contain charaters whose "resemblance to persons living or dead" is more than coincidental; and in the one case I've heard of in which an author was sued for libel and lost for her portrayal of a fictional character, I'd bet that the disclaimer was there.
If there were Lupine slash, I'd lay odds that the most popular relationship would be Horn/Krait.
Duh. Should of thought of that one myself. Or maybe Silk/Horn, though it would be hard to locate that in the received chronology... Maybe Jolenta/Dorcas...
I thought of that last one, but m/m seems to be a lot more popular than f/f.
But functionally, I would argue that the sections are fiction, and should be read as fiction, with a protagonist who is distinct from Narr, but based on the editors' view of Narr.
Functionally, I would disagree strongly. By interspersing their reconstructions with the Narr's manuscript, I feel that they've implicitly claimed for it a status of equivalent facticity, to which it is not entitled. Which drags me back to the Gospel According to Luke... but I'll let that one swing.
Okay, "functionally" was not a very good choice of word (I'm not sure now why I used it). I agree that the narrators implicitly claim for their third-person sections equivalent facticity to the Narr's manuscript (or more so, since it's third-person, and occasionally shows us stuff the Narr apparently did not witness). What I was trying to say was that once we realize that the third-person sections do not have this status, the best way for us, the readers, to regard them is as a fiction. Whether or not you want to say the editors are lying depends upon how loosely you're willing to let them apply the term "re-created." (To return to the Biblical analogy for a second, I note that contemporary scholars are reluctant to say that the authors of apocryphal texts, or texts in the Bible believed not to be by their supposed authors, were lying or committing fraud in claiming false authorship. They usually take the stand that this was a convention of the time, to sign some holy person's name to your text as a way of claiming authority for it. To go even further afield, it occurs to me to wonder if there is any evidence that people of the time saw things that way--that the attributed author was merely a convention, making no claim about the real author.) --Adam --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.7 --------------- From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net> Subject: Re: (whorl) Fan fic Fooey? Fooey. Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 21:47:00 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: <200106201614.f5KGEpg51930 at lists1.ba.best.com> on 6/20/01 11:14 AM, Kevin J. Maroney at kmaroney at ungames.com wrote:
I'm trying to think of the most appalling possible New Sun fanfic.
Father
65 quoted lines · 1–2 deep
Inire and the mandrake? Little Severian and Typhon? Thecla and an avern? The Green Man and Master Ash could actually be pretty cool.
A New Sun/Sailor Moon crossover. --Adam --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.8 --------------- From: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net> Subject: RE: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 23:41:40 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT References: <200106201525.f5KFP8151599 at lists1.ba.best.com> In-Reply-To: <200106201525.f5KFP8151599 at lists1.ba.best.com> At 8:23 AM -0700 6/20/01, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
William Ansley wrote: > ... I have been reading SF/F for over 35 years now but I have > always kept my distance from any "fannish" activities. William, William, William... I don't know how to tell you this, but this list is a fannish activity, or, as they used to say -- do they still? -- "fanac." Granted, it's the kind of fanac that isn't usually referred to as "fannish," but only because within fandom "fannish" was (is?) generally used in contrast to "sercon," short for "serious and constructive," where "fannish" was more the "partying with a few thousand of your closest friends" sort of thing. Much of the traffic on this list tends toward the sercon, but it's all fannish in the larger sense. --Blattid
You know, it did occur to me that such a reply might greet my message and I agree with it. I should have said "... I have for, the most part, kept my distance from any 'fannish' activities." But I do have three things to say in response. -As you note, this list is really not what I meant by "fannish." I certainly am not familiar with the jargon of fandom you keep tossing about. -Aside from this discussion list, which I won't deny has suffered from a great deal of my turgid prose, and some postings to rec.arts.sf-lovers, oh, ever so long ago, I have avoided any fannish activities, aside from reading way too much SF/F and watching a relatively few movies and tv shows. -There have been a few postings to this list which have struck me as vaguely repellant and frightening. <G> -- William Ansley --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.9 --------------- From: Spectacled Bear <spectacled.bear at pobox.com> Subject: Re: (whorl) mantis on TBOTSS and fanfic Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 09:10:27 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" In-Reply-To: <200106210026.f5L0QKB56470 at lists1.ba.best.com> At 01:26 2001-06-21, Michael Andre-Driussi wrote: ...
"slash"
It's one of history's great lost opportunities that the inventor of this phrase didn't use one of the other names for the oblique character, "stroke".
Sirius Fiction Has Moved To http://www.siriusfiction.com/
What are the relations, if any, among www.sirius.com, www.siriusfiction.com, www.siriusbooks.com (whose web site shows only a CGI directory, inaccessible), www.sirius-books.com, and the Sirius Book Company who published some of Keith Roberts' work? Spectacled Bear. --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.10 ---------------
Kevin J. Maroney wrote: At 05:26 PM 6/20/01 -0700, Mantis wrote:
So the writing by H & H, while buttressed by interviews, snatches of conversation, and editorial consensus, amounts to a patch written by fans, which is rather like a fan fiction in the broad sense (rather than the specific sense of "slash" or "Mary Sue").
"Fanfic" is not the same thing as "fiction written by fans"; "fan" is not the same thing as "admirer of"; "biography" is not the same as "fiction".
While TBOTSS is not wholly written by its "author," it shouldn't be considered fan fic. Unless you consider works like Kafka's "The Trial" to be fan fiction. Or a celebrity "auto"biography that's ghostwritten, for example. I think those are more analogous than what's generally regarded as fan fiction. It's more a case of the editors wanting to flesh something out, and, in the absence of the original author (for many bizarre reasons), they do it themselves. Narwhal *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
Josh Levitan21 Jun 2001, 13:41original

↳ follows, by subject match Josh Levitan

----- Original Message -----
184 quoted lines · 1–3 deep
From: <whorl-errors at lists1.ba.best.com> To: <whorl at lists1.ba.best.com> Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2001 8:34 AM Subject: Digest whorl.v012.n146 -------------- BEGIN whorl.v012.n146 -------------- 001 - "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaro - RE: (whorl) Fan fic Fooey? Fooey. 002 - "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaro - Re: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. 003 - Michael Straight <straigh - Re: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. 004 - "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <dda - Fooey, fooey, oh, baybee, say me gotta go now... 005 - Michael Andre-Driussi <ma - (whorl) mantis on TBOTSS and fanfic 006 - Adam Stephanides <adamste - Re: Fan fic Fooey? Fooey 007 - Adam Stephanides <adamste - Re: (whorl) Fan fic Fooey? Fooey. 008 - William Ansley <wansley@w - RE: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. 009 - Spectacled Bear <spectacl - Re: (whorl) mantis on TBOTSS and fanfic 010 - "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaro - Re: (whorl) mantis on TBOTSS and fanfic WHORL Digest -- for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.1 --------------- From: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney at ungames.com> Subject: RE: (whorl) Fan fic Fooey? Fooey. Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 12:14:00 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed In-Reply-To: <200106201542.f5KFgM551707 at lists1.ba.best.com> At 08:40 AM 6/20/01 -0700, Blattid wrote:
As a matter of fact, on the website I cited earlier for Pullman fanfic, there is quite a lot of fanfic dealing with real people, namely music groups (the vast majority of it on boy bands: there are over five thousand Nsync fanfics).
I'm not sure what the correct term for this stuff is, but it's different from fanfic as known in the world of SF fandom.
I don't think so. It's different from the core fanfic of the early Trek fandom, but everything and everyone gets pulled into the broader sweeps of fanfic. >Duh. Should of thought of that one myself. Or maybe Silk/Horn, though it would be hard to locate that in the received chronology... Maybe Jolenta/Dorcas... Well, Jolenta/Dorcas is just off-stage, so it would seem obvious.... I'm trying to think of the most appalling possible New Sun fanfic. Father Inire and the mandrake? Little Severian and Typhon? Thecla and an avern? The Green Man and Master Ash could actually be pretty cool. -- Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at ungames.com Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction http://www.nyrsf.com --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.2 --------------- From: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney at ungames.com> Subject: Re: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 12:15:02 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed References: <200106191739.f5JHdeG37910 at lists1.ba.best.com> <200106191739.f5JHdeG37910 at lists1.ba.best.com> In-Reply-To: <200106200300.f5K30pO45116 at lists1.ba.best.com> At 10:59 PM 6/19/01 -0400, William A wrote:
For all of those who were as puzzled as I at this reference to Mary Sue, here is a useful definition:
"A Mary Sue is a character who is smarter than Spock, braver than Kirk, and more compassionate than McCoy, and sleeps with all three." -- Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at ungames.com Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction http://www.nyrsf.com --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.3 --------------- From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu> Subject: Re: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 12:37:01 -0400 (EDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII In-Reply-To: <200106201615.f5KGFrF51944 at lists1.ba.best.com> On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Kevin J. Maroney wrote:
At 10:59 PM 6/19/01 -0400, William A wrote:
For all of those who were as puzzled as I at this reference to Mary Sue, here is a useful definition:
"A Mary Sue is a character who is smarter than Spock, braver than Kirk, and more compassionate than McCoy, and sleeps with all three."
And isn't a Mary Sue generally thought to be the author's fantasy-self? Isn't that a major part of the ickyness of it: watching the author imagine herself a terrific-in-every-way character in an existing universe? -Rostrum --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.4 --------------- From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com> Subject: Fooey, fooey, oh, baybee, say me gotta go now... Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 11:38:09 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Me:
I'm not sure what the correct term for this stuff is, but it's different from fanfic as known in the world of SF fandom.
Wombat:
I don't think so. It's different from the core fanfic of the early Trek fandom, but everything and everyone gets pulled into the broader sweeps of fanfic.
Wellll, as I said, I sort of come from a mid-'70s headset about all this stuff. Been there, wrote the story, sold it to Forry.
I'm trying to think of the most appalling possible New Sun fanfic. Father Inire and the mandrake? Little Severian and Typhon? Thecla and an avern? The Green Man and Master Ash could actually be pretty cool.
Howzabout "Journeyman Torturer Mary Sue?" Smarter than Severian, prettier than Barbatus, stronger than Baldanders, gets to torture them all... --Blatt!d --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.5 --------------- From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com> Subject: (whorl) mantis on TBOTSS and fanfic Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 17:26:37 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hoo, boy. Look here. I mean it! 1) TBOTLS is revealed near the end to have been written by Horn. 2) TBOTSS starts off with some revision to that--it wasn't just Horn, but Horn and his wife Nettle. There is also talk about the trials of publishing, from making the paper on up to the writing of the text in each book. TBOTSS is presumably being written by the narrator Horn alone this time, since Nettle is staying at home. Now it will be 100% Horn. 3) Deep into OBW (TBOTSS vol. 1) it is revealed that there are some editors involved. 4) Toward the end of TBOTSS it is revealed that the narrator wasn't so much Horn writing about Horn's adventure as it was Silk writing about Horn's adventure in absence of Horn (a switch on the situation in TBOTLS, where it was "Horn" [Horn/Nettle] writing about Silk's adventure in the absence of Silk). Then Silk leaves Blue and Nettle leaves, too. 5) Toward the end of TBOTSS it is revealed that some chapters were not written by the narrator Horn, and that these chapters were cobbled together by the editors (all born on Blue; two of them, Hoof and Hide, raised on/with/through TBOTLS). Now then, the editors Hoof and Hide. They are intimately connected to TBOTLS, but not as primary creators. They are immersed in the matter; it is in their mother's milk, if you like. They are so steeped in the stuff that I liken them to "fans," even though they did not voluntarily get into it (and fandom is voluntary, ain't it?). Because of their unique position, they are compelled to step up to the bat and take a wack at completing the manuscript--and they do. When H & H write about The Whorl, we know fully that they have never been there themselves, but ah--they =have= been there through the text of TBOTLS, just as we fans have. So again, H & H are equal to us readers in not knowing The Whorl at first hand and not knowing Silk at first hand. So the writing by H & H, while buttressed by interviews, snatches of conversation, and editorial consensus, amounts to a patch written by fans, which is rather like a fan fiction in the broad sense (rather than the specific sense of "slash" or "Mary Sue"). Now their wives are not likely to be as steeped as the twins are, but they nonetheless have an influence on the shaping of TBOTSS, and since they don't have so many memories of the people involved, their source of inspiration will be TBOTLS. TBOTSS is, therefore, part secondary creation--again, rather like fanfic in the broad sense. It is largely based upon characters and settings depicted in TBOTLS. Neither Horn, nor Nettle, nor even Silk is around to help them in this: nobody involved in the primary creation (TBOTLS) is available. All they have is their memory and the text of TBOTLS. =mantis= Sirius Fiction Has Moved To http://www.siriusfiction.com/ --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.6 --------------- From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net> Subject: Re: Fan fic Fooey? Fooey Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 21:46:58 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
Okay, I'm not a libel lawyer, but there's a reason for all those "no resemblance to any person living or dead" disclaimers you read in the front of books, and there's no way any of those Nsync fans could claim that their fictional characters bore no resemblance to the real bandmembers. Oy, whatever.
Just as a digression, I've always wondered whether those really do any good. A lot of books with such disclaimers contain charaters whose "resemblance to persons living or dead" is more than coincidental; and in the one case I've heard of in which an author was sued for libel and lost for her portrayal of a fictional character, I'd bet that the disclaimer was there.
If there were Lupine slash, I'd lay odds that the most popular relationship would be Horn/Krait.
Duh. Should of thought of that one myself. Or maybe Silk/Horn, though it would be hard to locate that in the received chronology... Maybe Jolenta/Dorcas...
I thought of that last one, but m/m seems to be a lot more popular than f/f.
But functionally, I would argue that the sections are fiction, and should be read as fiction, with a protagonist who is distinct from Narr, but based on the editors' view of Narr.
Functionally, I would disagree strongly. By interspersing their reconstructions with the Narr's manuscript, I feel that they've implicitly claimed for it a status of equivalent facticity, to which it is not entitled. Which drags me back to the Gospel According to Luke... but I'll let that one swing.
Okay, "functionally" was not a very good choice of word (I'm not sure now why I used it). I agree that the narrators implicitly claim for their third-person sections equivalent facticity to the Narr's manuscript (or more so, since it's third-person, and occasionally shows us stuff the Narr apparently did not witness). What I was trying to say was that once we realize that the third-person sections do not have this status, the best way for us, the readers, to regard them is as a fiction. Whether or not you want to say the editors are lying depends upon how loosely you're willing to let them apply the term "re-created." (To return to the Biblical analogy for a second, I note that contemporary scholars are reluctant to say that the authors of apocryphal texts, or texts in the Bible believed not to be by their supposed authors, were lying or committing fraud in claiming false authorship. They usually take the stand that this was a convention of the time, to sign some holy person's name to your text as a way of claiming authority for it. To go even further afield, it occurs to me to wonder if there is any evidence that people of the time saw things that way--that the attributed author was merely a convention, making no claim about the real author.) --Adam --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.7 --------------- From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net> Subject: Re: (whorl) Fan fic Fooey? Fooey. Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 21:47:00 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: <200106201614.f5KGEpg51930 at lists1.ba.best.com> on 6/20/01 11:14 AM, Kevin J. Maroney at kmaroney at ungames.com wrote:
I'm trying to think of the most appalling possible New Sun fanfic.
Father
65 quoted lines · 1–2 deep
Inire and the mandrake? Little Severian and Typhon? Thecla and an avern? The Green Man and Master Ash could actually be pretty cool.
A New Sun/Sailor Moon crossover. --Adam --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.8 --------------- From: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net> Subject: RE: (whorl) Fan fic? Fooey. Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 23:41:40 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT References: <200106201525.f5KFP8151599 at lists1.ba.best.com> In-Reply-To: <200106201525.f5KFP8151599 at lists1.ba.best.com> At 8:23 AM -0700 6/20/01, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
William Ansley wrote: > ... I have been reading SF/F for over 35 years now but I have > always kept my distance from any "fannish" activities. William, William, William... I don't know how to tell you this, but this list is a fannish activity, or, as they used to say -- do they still? -- "fanac." Granted, it's the kind of fanac that isn't usually referred to as "fannish," but only because within fandom "fannish" was (is?) generally used in contrast to "sercon," short for "serious and constructive," where "fannish" was more the "partying with a few thousand of your closest friends" sort of thing. Much of the traffic on this list tends toward the sercon, but it's all fannish in the larger sense. --Blattid
You know, it did occur to me that such a reply might greet my message and I agree with it. I should have said "... I have for, the most part, kept my distance from any 'fannish' activities." But I do have three things to say in response. -As you note, this list is really not what I meant by "fannish." I certainly am not familiar with the jargon of fandom you keep tossing about. -Aside from this discussion list, which I won't deny has suffered from a great deal of my turgid prose, and some postings to rec.arts.sf-lovers, oh, ever so long ago, I have avoided any fannish activities, aside from reading way too much SF/F and watching a relatively few movies and tv shows. -There have been a few postings to this list which have struck me as vaguely repellant and frightening. <G> -- William Ansley --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.9 --------------- From: Spectacled Bear <spectacled.bear at pobox.com> Subject: Re: (whorl) mantis on TBOTSS and fanfic Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 09:10:27 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" In-Reply-To: <200106210026.f5L0QKB56470 at lists1.ba.best.com> At 01:26 2001-06-21, Michael Andre-Driussi wrote: ...
"slash"
It's one of history's great lost opportunities that the inventor of this phrase didn't use one of the other names for the oblique character, "stroke".
Sirius Fiction Has Moved To http://www.siriusfiction.com/
What are the relations, if any, among www.sirius.com, www.siriusfiction.com, www.siriusbooks.com (whose web site shows only a CGI directory, inaccessible), www.sirius-books.com, and the Sirius Book Company who published some of Keith Roberts' work? Spectacled Bear. --------------- MESSAGE whorl.v012.n146.10 ---------------
Kevin J. Maroney wrote: At 05:26 PM 6/20/01 -0700, Mantis wrote:
So the writing by H & H, while buttressed by interviews, snatches of conversation, and editorial consensus, amounts to a patch written by fans, which is rather like a fan fiction in the broad sense (rather than the specific sense of "slash" or "Mary Sue").
"Fanfic" is not the same thing as "fiction written by fans"; "fan" is not the same thing as "admirer of"; "biography" is not the same as "fiction".
While TBOTSS is not wholly written by its "author," it shouldn't be considered fan fic. Unless you consider works like Kafka's "The Trial" to be fan fiction. Or a celebrity "auto"biography that's ghostwritten, for example. I think those are more analogous than what's generally regarded as fan fiction. It's more a case of the editors wanting to flesh something out, and, in the absence of the original author (for many bizarre reasons), they do it themselves. Narwhal *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

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