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FMK #26: This Is Flat-Out Fanfic

#26! The projected halfway point of a year's worth of reading the backlog! And in fact I went in over the last couple weeks and sorted all of the remaining into piles, so I didn't end up stuck with just a bunch of boring mismatched ones toward the end, and it looks like it might actually come out to exactly 52 weeks without me having to try too hard?

It looks like there will be more non-spec-fic weeks coming up, though, I ended up with 8 more weeks worth of that. I know fewer of you get excited about those but that's what I have on my shelves. There's also four more anthology weeks.

This week's anthologies also did not garner a huge number of votes. I will reiterate you don't have to know anything about the books to vote! A lot of these I bought just 'cause I liked the title so you do not have to feel bad if you vote that way. I suspect last week's voting was on that basis, given that it was a dead heat between Carmen Miranda's ghost is haunting space station three and Brave New Girls: Girls and Gadgets. Brave New Girls won F in the end! Cats In Space won K. Surely... surely ya'll don't have something about Cats in Space? I read all the Catfantastics back in the day; I will have to at least check that one to see how much overlap there is.

I finally finished Locke Lamora, so I have three reviews to get through; IDK if I'll do that first, or a proper yuletide letter...

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

For the midway point, we have a very special theme this week: PEOPLE GETTING PAID PRO RATES FOR FANFIC! Hoorah!

Poll #18919 FMK #26: Fanfic

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 60

View Respondents

Slan Hunter by Kevin J. Anderson (and Van Vogt) (1995)

F
5 (20.8%)

M
1 (4.2%)

K
18 (75.0%)

The Enchanter Reborn by L Sprague de Camp (1996)

F
12 (52.2%)

M
5 (21.7%)

K
6 (26.1%)

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (1997)

F
24 (64.9%)

M
6 (16.2%)

K
7 (18.9%)

Flashman: from the Flashman Papers by George MacDonald Fraser (1969)

F
12 (42.9%)

M
7 (25.0%)

K
9 (32.1%)

The Magicians by Lev Grossman (2009)

F
18 (41.9%)

M
3 (7.0%)

K
22 (51.2%)

Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis (1956)

F
20 (57.1%)

M
9 (25.7%)

K
6 (17.1%)

Wicked by Gregory Maguire (1996)

F
21 (46.7%)

M
6 (13.3%)

K
18 (40.0%)

The Girl With The Golden Bouffant: A Jane Bond Parody by Mabel Maney (2004)

F
13 (56.5%)

M
5 (21.7%)

K
5 (21.7%)

The Independence of Miss Mary Bennett by Colleen McCullough (2008)

F
15 (57.7%)

M
5 (19.2%)

K
6 (23.1%)

There And Back Again by Pat Murphy (1999)

F
14 (53.8%)

M
8 (30.8%)

K
4 (15.4%)

Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven (1999)

F
8 (33.3%)

M
2 (8.3%)

K
14 (58.3%)

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi (2011)

F
18 (56.2%)

M
2 (6.2%)

K
12 (37.5%)

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson (1888)

F
16 (64.0%)

M
7 (28.0%)

K
2 (8.0%)

Pride & Promiscuity edited by Arielle Eckstut (2001)

F
15 (60.0%)

M
4 (16.0%)

K
6 (24.0%)

Foundation's Friends edited by Martin H. Greenberg (1989)

F
10 (47.6%)

M
2 (9.5%)

K
9 (42.9%)

Weird Tales from Shakespeare edited by Martin H. Greenberg (1989)

F
20 (74.1%)

M
3 (11.1%)

K
4 (14.8%)

The Day The Magic Stopped edited by Christopher Stasheff (1995)

F
8 (42.1%)

M
2 (10.5%)

K
9 (47.4%)

Fantastic Alice edited by Magaret Weis (1995)

F
14 (58.3%)

M
4 (16.7%)

K
6 (25.0%)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yeah, I think the fundamental problem is that I first read Little Fuzzy as a teenager, and I still like it enough to do an occasional reread, as many problems as I now realize it has. (I even wrote fic for it for Yuletide one year.) So I really, really was not the target audience for Fuzzy Nation. I'm still not sure if I would've liked the book if I hadn't read the other one first, because of finding most of the characters so unpleasant, but I imagine I would've hated it less and probably appreciated what it was trying to do more.

Yeah absolutely -- I didn't read Piper's work in my teens, but I think it was, at the latest, in my early twenties. I know I have the exact opposite of an unbiased opinion about it, but at the same time it just strikes me as a really strange continuation of the original work. Not quite like with Pullman and "Let me rewrite the Narnia books RIGHT!", but I was just like....IDK. Maybe I'm wrong to be so disconcerted, but while I love fanfic AUs, it seems really odd to me for a pro writer to basically write a fanfic AU for fun and then decide he wasn't going to try to file off the serial numbers, he was going to publish it as part of the writer's work. He said he wanted to make it "approachable" to people who haven't read the original books, and to give fans of the books "the fun of seeing some old friends in new settings," and I honestly think he fails on both counts. Piper's vision is different enough that I think people who read his books as a result might be weirdly confused, and it wasn't so much "old friends in new settings" as "characters with the same names acting totally differently and at odds with the creator's vision." If he'd released it for free like the Brust Serenity novel I probably would have thought not much more than "Hunh," but....IDK. Maybe I'm just being too precious about it. It was sort of like reading a published pro "take" on Jane Eyre where Jane helps Rochester smother Bertha and runs off with him to the South of France, or something. maybe not that bad

--- Although I was thinking, and one of my favourite books ever is Jane Eyre, and another favourite is Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys's "take" on it. But she's not "rebooting" it -- it's the same plot, same people, same details. She just completely reimagines it but in a way that adds depth and huge poignancy to the original, that makes you look at the old book and see new things in it. But that was meant as a reflection, a kind of sister-book, not the possible opening of an independent franchise. ....clearly I'm just overthinking this. There's just something under my saddle blanket, sort of.

Edited (because I needed to wander on some MORE I guess) 2017-10-11 00:52 (UTC)

Scalzi wrote a long essay about why he wrote it back when it got published, that you might find interesting--I never read the original book, so it kind of bounced off me mentally.

I like his essays but tend to bounce off his books.

I like his essays but tend to bounce off his books.

Yeah, me too. Same thing with Jim Hines. And Wil Wheaton actually. They're all very likeable engaging guys, but they just don't seem to make the switch from blogging to narrative well. Which is odd, because a lot of their blogging is storytelling.

(altho actually now that Scalzi's blogging a lot less the Big Idea guest posts are bugging me. I wish he'd put them under a readmore cut or something)

I liked Hines' Princess series a lot, but haven't read beyond that.

(I appreciate his using them to spotlight people, though.)

I didn't read that, but I did read the Ex Libris series, and it was....disappointing. Particularly the parts about the dryad, which were a lot less liberated than I think he thought they were.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only