A better blogger than I, Paul Raven at Velcro City Tourist Board, has been involved in a discussion about fan-fiction with A R Yngve who slightly over-reacted to this article by cyber-princeling Cory Doctorow from the May issue of Locus.

My sympathies lie mostly with Doctorow on this. Like him, I got started on writing by appropriating the universe and characters created by another writer (though in my case it was Stan Lee and I was writing and drawing Spider-man and Ant-man and the guys). While I no longer make or read fan-fic I can see positives for both those who do write it (an outlet for creativity, a tool for binding them to a community) and those who originate the material (free publicity, the creation of a dedicated fanbase) and few, if any, drawbacks if the fan-fiction is restricted to a non-commercial basis.

As a writer who has had some short fiction published, I’m all for writers getting paid for their work. But I’m also keenly aware that the copyright laws as they now stand are ludicrous and serve only to make criminals of us all.

But I don’t really want to get into that argument.

What this argument set me thinking about is why writers of any type – fan-fiction writers, professionals, dabblers like me – are so often drawn to playing in other people’s worlds.

The phenomena is hardly new. Take a look at the mythologies of most cultures and you’ll find a hodge-podge of stories built up over generations reworking the lives and adventures of heroes and gods. Almost all the great plays of the classical Athenian era are reworkings of traditional tales for the modern audience. Shakespeare, famously, never had an original plot idea in his life (except maybe the Merry Wives of Windsor, I think) and all his plays tell stories of characters that the audience may already been familiar with.

We have a whole genre – high fantasy – that effectively takes the basic world set down by a handful of folklorists and good old JRR Tolkien and reworks it again and again. I’ve just finished Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real and that essentially takes perhaps the most familiar fantasy trope – the mystical, beautiful, unknowable elves – and dresses it up in rock ‘n’ roll and quantum physics. But much of the effectiveness of the story relies entirely on our preconceived notions of what elves must be like in fiction like this.

Taking old characters, familiar stories and common themes and reworking them seems to be a compulsion that stretches back through mankind’s history.

Now you can take the reductionist line and claim that all these writers are just lazy, thieving bastards who are out to rob hard-working mid-to-bottom list authors of their few cents worth of royalties, or you can wonder what is it that makes such an activity irresistible?

There are three reasons, I think, why we might like to consider that this form of activity offers something more important to those who practice it.

First we can see it as a type of “bricolage” that activity that Michel de Certeau describes as the way those without power in society find ways to impose their own control over a cultural ground that has is handed down to them by their place in society/the economy. It’s a form of taking back some power by taking cultural objects and reforming their meaning to make them fit with their own experience of life. Hebdige’s famous study of punk fashions The Meaning of Style uses this idea of bricolage to as a tool of subversion. In fan-fic it certainly applies to slash fiction – where, for example, the gay community rework straight cultural items to match their preferences – but I also think there’s an element of it in other fan-fic. When a powerful company like Paramount control a cultural item like Star Trek and exploits it for their own profit, then the action of taking some of that back is a demonstration, in however small a way, of resistance. While I’m sure most fan-fic writers don’t think of it in these terms, there’s a definitely an element in fan-fic that I would identify as “political” – it’s those who are normally talked at finding ways of talking amongst themselves using the creations of the powerful.

The second reason is linked to the fundamental importance of telling stories. At least as far back as Aristotle’s Ethics philosophers have been arguing that one of the characteristics that defines humanity is our propensity for making patterns – from learning how the movement of the savannah grass might hide a predator to staring at the stars and seeing bulls and gods – our understanding of the world is fundamentally tied to our almost irresistible urge to put a mesh of patterns over things. So it is with lives and people. When I was thirteen at school our class did Macbeth and I remember it having an enormous impact – but not as our teacher wanted. I remember us becoming somewhat obsessed with what happened next and the teacher having enormous difficulty in persuading us that such speculation was pointless. And of course it was pointless from an educational point of view, no examiner was going to be interested in the increasingly baroque theories we were constructing for a post regime change Scotland (as an aside, for all Macbeth’s crimes, a classroom of catholic northern Irish schoolboys were willing to side with him rather than Duncan’s sons – who committed the ultimate crime of bringing the English army to Scotland!). But of course it is fundamental human reaction to want to know what happens next – to finish off the dangling threads of the pattern – and when we’re not provided with that information we can hardly help ourselves but speculate. We build patterns, we imagine consequences, we construct worlds and we do it all compulsively.

The third reason, I think, returns us to the importance of mythology. As a boy growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1970s I can just remember the tail-end of a great storytelling tradition – in a time when not quite everyone had a television people really did make their own entertainment (and most of it was rubbish!) and stories were a big part of that culture. And most of those stories were based around variations on a set of folklore traditions – a mix of the profane and the religious – dark magic and dark Catholicism. The stories took themes, setting and characters from a familiar pool but you rarely heard the same story twice. It seems to me that this is, more or less, what the fan-ficcers are doing except that their mythological pool is Star Wars or Star Trek or Harry Potter. I think there is a tendency to see mythology as something handed down – the term summons up images of Greek and Roman gods – but of course mythologies don’t belong just to the powerful, they can be constructed from the bottom up. The tradition of folklorists before the 20^th Century has been to try and place these stories into single meaningful arcs as if they were somehow planned and represented a “history” – but of course the contradictions are inherent in the stories passed down because they were not created by one mind or with one purpose. They have to be tamed for those in control to use them.

Fan-ficcers aren’t doing anything new. People have been distributing unofficial “sequels” to popular stories for as long as there have been printing presses – that’s why we have our archaic copyright system. The only thing that’s different about modern fan-fic is that we live in an era of cheap/free reproduction, which makes it easier for those interested in this type of thing to find like-minded folk and it makes it easier for the publishers/authors to find the stuff online.

One might rail against it. Powerful interests might even succeed in driving it back underground. But nothing’s going to stop it, and pretending otherwise is to ignore the powerful impulses that producing this sort of thing helps address.