Sanity
Check it: Cory Doctorow writes "In Praise of Fanfic", in Locus magazine:
We subscribe to Locus but I tend to read it only in chunks when I trip over the Locust stack on a weekend. I note they reviewed a nice Jack Vance collection. Which I won't be purchasing because we subscribed to that enormous reprint-everything-Jack-Vance-wrote project a few years ago, and thus we have it all. Jack Vance is one of my major inspirations as a writer. Anyway, check that, too!
Writers can't ask readers not to interpret their work. You can't enjoy a novel that you haven't interpreted — unless you model the author's characters in your head, you can't care about what they do and why they do it. And once readers model a character, it's only natural that readers will take pleasure in imagining what that character might do offstage, to noodle around with it. This isn't disrespect: it's active reading.He also talks about the importance of active, literary fanfic readers & writers to a field that's seeing its readership dwindle. SF has always had less of a wall between amateur and pro anyway. Fans turn into pro writers, and writers stay fans.
We subscribe to Locus but I tend to read it only in chunks when I trip over the Locust stack on a weekend. I note they reviewed a nice Jack Vance collection. Which I won't be purchasing because we subscribed to that enormous reprint-everything-Jack-Vance-wrote project a few years ago, and thus we have it all. Jack Vance is one of my major inspirations as a writer. Anyway, check that, too!
Can anything be done to stop The Mouse, btw? I was just reading that the RIAA has decided that the radio royalty exemption is bad, and so we're in for a fight there. The trend is very much in the wrong direction. (Exception: the likely end of digital restrictions on music files, as the iTunes Music Store leads the way.)
Still, I do think our fandom in general has a particularly high standard of writing.
(is all smug about that)