At least a few pro fantasy writers -- not going to name names here, aside from saying that the names listed here doesn't include the ones I know of -- are said to be anti-fanfic for a reason that will never be honestly admitted: it's altogether too likely that some amateur writers, doing fanfic for this author's works, will produce work of higher quality than the originals.
This is...more common than you might think. Let's, for the sake of example and because I know of few works in English which have such a rich body of professionally and amateur-produced transformative works, look at what there is for Sherlock Holmes.
Well, to start with, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a few fanfics. Yes, the author of the original works himself is responsible for some of its earliest transformative works. It probably says something that they'd mostly be classed as crackfics and parodies, too, but I'm not going to try to figure that out myself. Suffice to say, they're not canon and finding them can be a matter of sheer luck.
Of the transformative works produced by professionals, the quality varies dramatically. Unfortunately, the majority of those written in the last 50 have generally raised the question of if the person who wrote them has actually read the work he (or she) is supposedly basing it upon, something you'd rather hope a person being paid to write a derivative/transformative work would take the time to do. Some of the better ones merely leave one wondering if the author has thought to invest time in researching the setting.
Looking at...well, pretty much whatever is in the FF.net archive for Sherlock Holmes, it is...well... I should admit here that, unfortunately, I have had the pleasure of finding some rather good historical research on homosexuality during that period & I've spent perhaps too much of my life reading late Victorian lit for somebody who isn't getting a degree in it, too. I skip the slash stories because, aside from finding them utterly boring when slashed, I also have serious doubts about it being anything more than than accident.
(Incidentally, if you want something Victorian where there is definitely slash involved, try the Raffles books; the title character is based off of somebody whom the author didn't know was gay. It also needs much, much more love than it gets!)
However, there are some very fine works to be found there, some of which are sadly unfinished so their quality cannot be quite properly determined. It doesn't hurt that many show signs that the writer, despite being an amateur, has done sufficient work to have a good sense of what the setting was really like (proving that it is, in fact, quite easy to avoid such things as sticking female characters in outfits that would inspire questions about their rates!) and an equally good sense of the characters themselves.
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winterfish
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Date: 2010-06-10 06:16 am (UTC)This is...more common than you might think. Let's, for the sake of example and because I know of few works in English which have such a rich body of professionally and amateur-produced transformative works, look at what there is for Sherlock Holmes.
Well, to start with, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a few fanfics. Yes, the author of the original works himself is responsible for some of its earliest transformative works. It probably says something that they'd mostly be classed as crackfics and parodies, too, but I'm not going to try to figure that out myself. Suffice to say, they're not canon and finding them can be a matter of sheer luck.
Of the transformative works produced by professionals, the quality varies dramatically. Unfortunately, the majority of those written in the last 50 have generally raised the question of if the person who wrote them has actually read the work he (or she) is supposedly basing it upon, something you'd rather hope a person being paid to write a derivative/transformative work would take the time to do. Some of the better ones merely leave one wondering if the author has thought to invest time in researching the setting.
Looking at...well, pretty much whatever is in the FF.net archive for Sherlock Holmes, it is...well... I should admit here that, unfortunately, I have had the pleasure of finding some rather good historical research on homosexuality during that period & I've spent perhaps too much of my life reading late Victorian lit for somebody who isn't getting a degree in it, too. I skip the slash stories because, aside from finding them utterly boring when slashed, I also have serious doubts about it being anything more than than accident.
(Incidentally, if you want something Victorian where there is definitely slash involved, try the Raffles books; the title character is based off of somebody whom the author didn't know was gay. It also needs much, much more love than it gets!)
However, there are some very fine works to be found there, some of which are sadly unfinished so their quality cannot be quite properly determined. It doesn't hurt that many show signs that the writer, despite being an amateur, has done sufficient work to have a good sense of what the setting was really like (proving that it is, in fact, quite easy to avoid such things as sticking female characters in outfits that would inspire questions about their rates!) and an equally good sense of the characters themselves.