Fan fic Fooey? Fooey.

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 20 Jun 2001, 08:40 · from whorl-v0012.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (whorl) Fan fic Fooey?  Fooey.
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 08:40:54
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0862 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0862.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Adam writes:

> And I agree the sections aren't literally fanfic.  But mantis used
> the term, iirc, to indicate
>
> 1) That the third-person sections are fictional, at least in part;
> and
>
> 2) That the motive of the fictionizers is to fill in emotionally
> satisfying bits absent from the original narrative.
>
> The former of these is true, I would argue=20

Stipulated: within the completely fictional universe of discourse,
the third-person narrative sections of RttW are fictional(ized)
accounts of the activities of the Narrator Formerly Known as Horn.

> (see below) and the latter seems likely to be at least partially
> true for the conversation with Remora, and may well be true of
> the Whorl material.

Also stipulated: the claimed motives of fictional editors is to
round out the incompleted narrative of the Narrator Latterly=20
Known as Silk. Further stipulated: this is at least a part of=20
their actual motivation.

> 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
suspect it might be actionable in a larger sense than copyright
or trademark violation -- not clear if it would actually be
considered libellous, but certianly it doesn't qualify as=20
protected, either as reportage, as "satire or parody," or=20
under any other protection I can think of. Okay, I'm not a
libel lawyer, but there's a _reason_ for all those "no=20
resemblance to any person living or dead" disclaimers you read=20
in the front of books, and there's no way any of those Nsync
fans could claim that their fictional characters bore no=20
resemblance to the real bandmembers. Oy, whatever.

> "Slash" isn't necessarily pornographic or erotica. =20

Maybe now. It was originally. (Sorry; old fart speaking
here. I'm remembering the antediluvian 1970s and early=20
stuff like "The Rising.")

> 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...

> Are those novels dealing with historical figures, which
> don't contradict the historical record but which invent
> situations and conversations not appearing in the record,
> outright lies? =20

All fiction is lies ;*P

More seriously: if well-done, such a piece can be _true_
even though not _factual_. If presented as fact, it's a lie;
if presented as a fictional reconstruction, it's not a lie.

And that gives the editors a kind of out: since they did go
to the trouble of inserting --  no, not a disclaimer, just an
explanation of what they did -- it's a non-lying fictional
reconstruction.

Except, perhaps, for that interlude in the conversation with=20
Remora: as others have noted, there is no plausible way for=20
the editors to have done anything but make it up from whole
cloth.

> 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=20
which it is not entitled. Which drags me back to the Gospel
According to Luke... but I'll let that one swing.

--Blattid

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net