Publishing

[sleepyscholar]

Just to try to keep some momentum (having done two posts in as many days), I thought I should mention that although I'm going to be trying to include more about my Bao stories on this blog, what I actually spend most of my spare time writing is academic treatises about fandom. This is something of a novelty for me, even though my academic career

Comments

[doc_mystery]

Your comment on derivative works has me comment that the insanely popular 'Fifty Shades of Grey' series started off as Twilight fan-fiction.

However, SF and fantasy abound in derivative works. One author in particular, John Scalzi, seems to have made a career out of this, starting off with Old Man's War (an homage of sorts to Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers', then he wrote his own Fuzzy book set in H.Beam Piper's universe, and now has a book called 'Red Shirts' that seems to be channeling a certain 1960s SF TV show.

::B::

[sleepyscholar]

Thanks for reminding me about Fifty Shades of Grey which I had read about the same place I learned about the Scott & Bailey novel.

I'm wondering whether the abundant derivative work in SF and fantasy is connected with the highly active fan base in those areas, compared with, say, mystery novels (I know there is a fanbase, just that it isn't quite as active).

[doc_mystery]

Fan-fic is more acceptable in SF & Fantasy than in other literary genres. Some of it can even be commercially published (I'm reminded of the various 'sequels' for H. Beam Pipers' first two Fuzzy nevoels, and the recent sequel to James Schmitz's 'The Witches of Karres'). If you go back a generation or two, H.P. Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness' is supposed to be sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym'. And 'Forbidden Planet' is derivative of the Shakespearean play, 'The Tempest'.

But such derivative works and sequels exist in other genres. While at the bookstore today I saw yet another (of many) sequels to Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Treasure Island', a book called 'Silver' written by Andrew Motion; going to wikipedia there are about 15 more 'sequels' to this classic book alone!

And 'Pride & Prejudice & Zombies' isn't the only Jane Austen derivative work; there are about a dozen more.

::B::

[sleepyscholar]

This connects with what seems to be the modern take: it's OK to do derivative works if the original is purloinable. I use that word for want of a better: the rise of IP ideology phrases everything in terms of ownership of thought with the likes of Disney constantly trying to extent their period of ownership. But older works are free for all.