Interesting discussion here on "fanfiction" and related issues. A week or two back, some idiot wrote an unauthorized "Star Wars" novel and put it up for sale on Amazon, and since then there's been a lot more blogging buzz about this than usual.

I've never felt any inclination to read the stuff myself, so I guess I wouldn't really know one way or the other, but my (ignorant) guess is that 90% or more of fanfiction is probably drek, just like 90% of everything else. (This observation itself is of course plagirized from a well-known source, so we're getting awful meta- here.) Of course, with more conventional forms of fiction there are filtering mechanisms--like professional editors, magazines with good reputations--in place to help the reader track down the other 10%. These are, for obvious reasons, less likely to exist in the case of material that by its nature infringes copyrights and thus must exist on the margins.

Now, I'm an open-source guy by instinct and conviction, but I do have one reservation about the very notion of fanfiction. Here's the whole of my objection to the stuff:

There's nothing wrong with paying homage to, making fun of or embellishing previously used conceptual material. This is a natural, healthy and large part of literature, as it has been no doubt since long before humans developed a written language. However, the time-honored, conventional way to either pay homage to or make fun of or embellish previously used conceptual material is to thinly disguise that material in a form that you do not intend to fool any one. (E.g. no one who's read, skimmed through or even heard of Starship Troopers wil have to read more than four sentences of the back cover of "Old Man's War" to recognize that the set-up to the plot of the latter involves a tip of the hat to the former.) There is a good reason for this system. Several in fact, from good manners to copyright laws to the fact that the conventional system increases the readers' appreciation of the commentary, because decoding the reference, however transperant, or even noticing instances of a reference that has been decoded for them, makes people feel clever. (Tell me you don't get a least a mild ripple of pleasure from figuring out a cross-word puzzle, even if the clue to the last piece is something like, "two-letter word for the opposite of 'yes.'" It's human nature. We like figuring things out.)

So, to take Hal Duncan's (I very much hope *hypothetical*) example from the link above, next time you get a brilliant idea for a story, a story that just must be written, about a really depraved, BDSM-type sexual liason between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, then by all means, write it up. Just switch up the letters of their names into annagrams of the originals, call Hogwarts something else, and we'll be by 5 by 5.