Should there be

[james_davis_nicoll]

A best fanfic Hugo?

Comments

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

What would you call fanfic of a public domain work, that doesn't file off the serial numbers? (ie Sherlock Holmes/Dracula crossovers, etc.)

[kla10.livejournal.com]

Fiction?

Are August Derleth's Mythos stories fanfic? Farmer's Holmes/Tarzan crossover? A hypothetical Dracula revival written by, say, Stephen King?

What makes it fanfic for me, I guess, is, you're playing in someone else's sandbox *while it's still their sandbox*.

(Admittedly, the fact that there are currently two different Sherlock Homles TV shows currently on the air, both generating fanfic, complicates things.)

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

The idea of defining a fictional genre by copyright status has never made a lot of sense to me. By this definition if I (an American) and my friend (from Spain) each sit down and write a "Peter Pan" story, mine is not fanfic, but hers is, at least until 2018. I know an author who's written novel-length fanfiction for the same licensed properties (in this case, a TV show) that they've written official tie-in novels for. Does it really make sense to think of those two novels as being in such different genres that they should be nominated for different Hugos? And this definition also has the odd effect that eventually, all fanfiction will "time out" and not be fanfiction any more. Which technically has already happened to a lot of works-- for instance: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7734966/1/Aeneid *G* But my point is, whether a work is copyrighted or not isn't really useful as a way to define *genre*.

(Also, speaking of Stephen King, he actually wrote a tiny bit of fanfiction for Dorothy Sayers' "Lord Peter Wimsey" series. Sayers herself was an Old Holmesian and wrote Sherlock Holmes fanfic.)

Really, half the stuff on (US) TV these days is fanfic. You already mentioned "Elementary," and there's a new "Sleepy Hollow" on Fox, "Revenge" is a modern Count of Monte Cristo, "Once Upon A Time" is based on Disney movies based on fairy tales, there was that Jekyll & Hyde set in a hospital thing (it flopped, but they tried), there's apparently going to be a modern day Les Mis, not to mention "Agents of SHIELD," and on and on.

[kla10.livejournal.com]

But what would you like to see in a fanfic Hugo?

Redshirts, Cumberbatch/Freeman Sherlock, and/or Star Trek novels?
Or Steve/Tony romance, Dr Who/Morrowind crossovers, and/or Star Wars characters in a 1980s high school AU?

Because, really, the only way I can see to fit the latter works into an award category would be to define fanfic based on copyright status, or to just have a catchall "amateur fiction" or "online fiction" category for works published online and not offered for sale.

Otherwise, you'd just be putting works like Diane Duane's Rihannsu cycle, or Brian Herbert's Dune books out of the running for the regular Hugo categories. (Which some of the "SF is serious business" crowd might approve of...)

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't think I *would* like to see a fanfic Hugo. I guess I have the same objection as the people who don't want a YA Hugo because the nominees and winner would just be "whatever Scalzi/Doctorow/Stross/Gaiman types decided to write a YA novel this year" and not reflect the actual YA community or collective body of work. I mean, I liked both "A Study In Emerald" and "The Things"-- but it's kind of pointless to create a Fanfic Hugo category if it's just going to be one more variant of Hugo for already-established SF authors like Gaiman or Watts to sweep every year.

(Although I do think it would be amusing to see someone actually try to work out a precise measurement for how derivative/transformative a work has to be in order to be "original" and not "fanfic.")

An amateur/not-for-profit fiction category might be interesting, actually.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

The idea of defining a fictional genre by copyright status has never made a lot of sense to me.

I agree, which is why no one else is using that word. Every Hugo (with one or two exceptions) are for the speculative fiction genre; the categories indicate different lengths and media.

Does it make sense that adding or removing a word from a story should change its category? Does it make sense to nominate someone as Fan Writer at the same time one of their traditionally published books is also nominated?

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

Well, that's sort of what I was asking. Does it make sense that "Peter Pan in Space" by an American can be published and nominated for a regular Hugo, but the exact same story written in Spain has to be nominated for the fanfic Hugo? And does it make sense that a story that is clearly fanfiction, and gets most of its aesthetic effect and cultural meaning from *being* fanfiction-- but has a thin fig leaf of "but I changed/never said the main character's name!"-- can then be nominated for the regular Hugo while non-fig-leafed fanfic goes into another category?

Note, this is not a slam on books like "Redshirts" or Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" which are really engaging more with an entire genre than a specific text, but I'm sure we've all read stuff like Greg Egan's "Oracle" and thought "honestly, how much of this comes across if you don't know these characters are Turing and C.S. Lewis?"

(What I will say about "Redshirts", actually, is that if you'd handed me that and "Code Name Verity" and asked me which one was YA and which one was not, I'd have bet you any amount of money "Redshirts" was the YA before remembering that even a complicated, brutal war story about pilots and spies is still going to be shoved into YA, because the pilots and spies are young women. The in-jokey fluff about spaceships with paper-thin characterization is obviously the real grown-up book.)