Wombat on TBOTSS and fanfic

Kevin J. Maroney · 21 Jun 2001, 16:32 · 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: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney at ungames.com>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Wombat on TBOTSS and fanfic
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 16:32:02
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0879 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0879.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 12:15 PM 6/21/01 -0700, Mantis wrote:
>SHORT/LONG SUN                     EARTH
>biography                          fiction
>autobiography                      fiction
>biography masked as autobiography  fiction
>autobiography masked as biography  fiction
>docudrama                          fiction
>based on a true story              fiction

I'm not sure what point this table is making. You're being too compressed=20
again.

 >Many people on Blue have read TBOTLS, a biography in novel form *

Actually, they've read _The Book of Silk_, but I mostly agree with your=20
characterization of it as "a biography in novel form".

>People
>who have never met Silk in the flesh are huge "admirers of" him...

Yes. But they're not "fans" of Silk any more than the author of "Acts of=20
the Apostles" was a "fan" of Jesus, Paul, and Peter. They're historians=20
writing historical narrative for a didactic purpose.

>Funny, I don't recall all this definition gaming/term policing when people
>were calling Robert Borski's work "fanfic"--I guess I must've dozed and
>missed all of his slash and Mary Sue stuff! (I could've sworn that others
>used this term, but who knows, perhaps I started misusing it even then!)

I missed the initial discussion and only noticed it when Blattid put=20
"fanfic" in the subject line. Checking the archives, I can't find anyone=20
using the term "fanfic" to describe Borski's pieces.

The term was introduced into the discussion to describe *Wolfe's* work as=20
being fanfic-like--"wouldn't it be neat if Silk met Severian?" is the type=20
of impulse which drives fanfic. But it makes no sense to apply the term to=20
what Hoof and Hide (or any other unnamed redactors) are doing, because=20
they're not writing fiction about fictional characters.

--=20
Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at ungames.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction
http://www.nyrsf.com

*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