serai

This evening, Spike and I were having one of our animated conviviala, as we are wont to do. (That woman is Discussion Gold, by the way - a conversation with her is never wasted time.) And we were commenting on the fact that, were it not for the Tolkien family Old Guard sitting on the canon like a cop defending his donut, there would doubtless be literally scores of books written in Middle-Earth by now. If not before, then certainly after the films had begun to come out; I imagine that the New Line suits are fairly annoyed at not being able to get in on the publishing action, and with such a ready and willing pool of potential providers, who could blame them?

Take a look at the Star Trek publishing industry. How many novels are there now? Probably well over 300, counting all the incarnations. Imagine if all of us fanfic writers actually had a shot at selling our stuff to the legitimate market. There are quite a few substandard Strek novels, but there have been some that I've really enjoyed, clever and absorbing tales peopled with a familiar cast. My goodness, how lovely it would be to have a whole shelf of ME novels written by loving enthusiasts who cut the editorial mustard, right under my set of favorite ST books. Most of the ones on my shelf would be hobbit books, of course, though I don't doubt there'd be a few elf books as well, and a couple of rough-and-ready frontier-type romances about brave and stalwart men. *sigh*

I mention ST in this context notably because it was really the first introduction I had to the idea of fanfiction, i.e., the concept of a reality set created by one person (or group of people), being used by subsequent writers to create other stories not included in the original. In reading these books over the years, I built up a particular set of criteria for what I would now call a good fanfic story - basic technical soundness, believable character reactions, the ability of the writer to dovetail his own style with the constraints of a world already established, etc. Interestingly enough, I was able to perceive the workings of these things more easily in the ST books than I had with original fiction, even though I had been an avid reader since I discovered the magic of books. I think it was the very familiarity with those characters, the fact that I didn't have to expend time on learning who each of them were all over again in every book, that freed a lot of my attention up to absorb other aspects of the stories. And it was a comfort, after all, to go to all these bizarre and grand and frightening places with a set of people I already knew and was fond of.

Still, I wonder if a great deal of the reason that Tolkien's work has such attraction and integrity is the very nature of its uniqueness in that sense, and if the proliferation of books using the framework would somehow dilute the power of the central tale. There is a qualitative difference between reading fanfic and reading an actual book, although I'd be hard-pressed to try and put it into words. I suppose for me it has a lot to do with the sacredness of books as repositories of knowledge; as a writer, I can hardly imagine a more desired outcome than seeing my words enshrined that way.

So please regale me (and each other, and everybody else, too) with your thoughts on this matter. What would the fantasy shelves look like if authorized ME novels were a reality? If you were to write one that got published, what would it be about? Which of the stories that you've already written would you want to see between the covers of an actual book, stocked at Walden's or Borders or Brentano's? What would you like it to look like - the cover, the binding, the pictures (if it had any)? Who would it be intended for? Whose reading and good opinion of it would tickle you the most?

What effect do you think this situation would have had on the fantasy genre? Do you think there's any possibility of the gates being opened in the future? Would you want them to be? If there were books, what about a TV series? (Imagine the possibilities - Aragorn, The Legend Continues!) There was a lot of kvetching from the Canon Camp about Tolkien being "sullied" by the commercial boom that came with the films. If the canon were something that were not inviolable, more available to other writers, how likely is it that the results would be worth having?

These are the things that keep me up nights, you know.

Step right up. The microphones are on.