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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%)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

I loathed Fuzzy Nation, although in a conflicted way, because I completely agree that the issues he's addressing in the original book (fond of it as I am) are valid issues. It is kind of amazing, though, that he managed to take one of the best things about the original -- its optimism and the general likability of the characters; even the main antagonist is a decent enough guy that he got a redemption arc in the sequel -- and completely did away with that. Fuzzy Nation has a cast composed entirely of unpleasant assholes, including the aliens. (Especially the aliens!)

Edited 2017-10-10 23:25 (UTC)

My eternal grudge against KJA leads me to say killllll, even though I don't know what fandom he's writing fic for for that one, I just have issues from star wars and dune.

Kill the magicians.

I'm a bit meh on the red tent. It wasn't horribly bad? It was vaguely memorable? idk. I also just typed "the rent tent" instead and I feel like I would actually read that fic if it was Rent the musical.

The KJA one is a "posthumous collaboration" with the original author of Slan. The writing is probably terrible, but then nobody ever read Van Vogt for polished prose either.

I think the Jedi Academy Trilogy may be the first time I ever read novels that I was consciously aware were really badly written. Important milestone! (I still like the Young Jedi Knights books, though! His wife must have done most of the writing on them.)

I honestly was not expecting this much ire against The Magicians! I remember DW having a vaguely positive response to it when it came out (which is probably why I ended up owning the thing.)

"Not horribly bad" is, let's face it, a pretty high hurdle for published Bible fic.

Ugh, that sounds like it really did kill everything good about the book. :/

I like, in principle, that people are still randomly continuing to publish Fuzzy fanfic, but I suspect I won't like that particular one.

I mean, the magicians is the one with the interesting premise that turns into "cs lewis was a pedophile", so...

I read Fuzzy Nation as a standalone book, since I read it before Little Fuzzy, and as its own thing it was very enjoyable. But yeah it has very different priorities than Little Fuzzy so liking it has to come from entirely different things-to-like.

YEAH, I got introduced to H Beam Piper's work long before it was back in print, and I think Scalzi was one of the very worst choices to "continue" it. It does have giant issues like most of his work, I agree.

(I didn't like Redshirts much either FWIW for our hostess)

What I didn't like about The Magicians is that basically everyone in it is a deeply horrible person.

I enjoyed Wicked, but I found it hard going - somewhat on the literary pretentious side.

Going with the ones I've read/friends have read:

K - The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (1997)
Long ago a friend of mine read this and went on such a vivid diatribe about how horrible it was I've never been able to pick it up.

F - The Magicians by Lev Grossman (2009)
Hoo boy. Most everyone I know hates this, actually with pretty good reason. The author basically set out to deconstruct Harry Potter (when JKR already....did that....but okay) and it's all about how much your life would suck if the golden time was high school. IDK. However, there are two really great female characters, Alice and Julia. I love them and have written fic about them. I loath most everything else about the books though. Maybe try it and see if you can get over wanting to drown the hero in a bucket.

M - Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis (1956)
I love this book. It's a pretty idiosyncratic retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth.

K - Wicked by Gregory Maguire (1996)
I couldn't finish more than ten pages of this. I found it terrible.

K - Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi (2011)
I couldn't read much of this either because I read the original way back when and my brain kept chanting "IT'S ALL WRONG" and it was hard to make out the words over the din. I wonder what the reaction of someone who'd never read Piper's work might be.

F - Fantastic Alice edited by Magaret Weis (1995)
I have this and think it's pretty good? I don't remember much about it, though.

The Magicians has an interesting setup and intriguing side characters, including two women who are wonderful. Unfortunately they are subordinate to the terrible hero, whom everyone wants to punch in the face because you are supposed to want to punch him in the face. They would have been fine books if the author had just cut out the terrible self-insert schlub, who makes Neil Gaiman's schlub heroes look like men of action. It's frustrating, because some of the theories about magic and how it works are neat, but it's also all heavily filtered through the gaze of a white privileged sheltered young guy and after a while it's just unbearable.

The show is much better because it makes the schlub the butt of a lot of jokes but also doesn't treat him as The Chosen One, and lets him have an individual personality, and since everything isn't centered around him he's much less awful. And the actor is sort of an endearing doofus.

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)

I love the Oz books. Plural. Because there's a whole universe there, not just one damn book. Gregory Maguire took a look at the depth of Oz canon, decided he didn't care, and wrote pretentious faux-literary twaddle. The musical of Wicked is a different thing and I can almost tolerate it; the book is crap.

The Magicians is not even close to HP deconstruction, it's Narnia deconstruction, and its POV characters are horrible people. If you like spending time with horrible people and you want a perverse Narnia deconstruction, maybe give it a try, but again, the TV series is almost tolerable and the book is crap.

The Magicians has such a great premise and interesting worldbuilding, all of it let down by the fact that it's just unpleasant reading about all these really unpleasant people.

I used to have Fantastic Alice and I vaguely remember enjoying it, but that's about all I remember, so take that as you will.

Voted K on Flashman: from the Flashman Papers purely because it wasn't called Flashman: from the Flashman Papers 2, the Flashy and the Flashier or something that would make the repetition of 'flashman' hilarious instead of just clunky.

Why do people write so many books like that? And then people read them and review them?
It always leaves me wondering if most humans really do live in a world where they are that unpleasant and think everyone is like them.

At least a character you are supposed to want to punch in the face is better than one that you are supposed to admire but want to punch in the face instead.... but y'all are making that one sound not just punchable, but boring.

...okay then...

Ok yeah, neither of those is really my kind of book, it sounds like.

OK, so the consensus seems to be I need to look for an alice-and-julia only abridgement of The Magicians...

Yeah, it seems like so much of published fanfic by dudes is "I am going to ignore most of canon and all the other people who have done this and write my version, which will be DEEP and PHIloSOPHICAL unlike all those others, which I have probably not even looked at." sigh.

I do that when I reread the books! Heh. Also, Plum, in the third book, is great. Really if he had just focused on the female characters it would have been an amazing series. Or at least not focused totally on Quentin.

It looks like The Flashman Papers is usually treated at the series name, IDK why my version thinks it's a subtitle,

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Fraser would totally have gone with Flashman 5: The Flash and The Furious if it had been a thing when he was writing. :P

I am reading SO MANY long fantasy novels lately where my conclusion seems to be "if you had just made it about the female characters instead, it could have been so good".

I actually read the Ardeth Mayhar published Fuzzy fanfic shortly after I read the original, way back in high school, so I don't have that same sense of loyalty to Piper that I think a lot of you do : I have always thought of it as a sort of a weirdly shared canon. On the other hand, reading them back to back gave me REALLY strong opinions on what a Fuzzy continuation should be (I had issues with some of Mayhar's choices, too), so I suspect I will have philosophical disagreements with Scalzi on what that is.

(Also, I am still kind of holding a grudge that almost none of the coverage of Scalzi's book mentioned the Mayhar at all, and acted like Scalzi was the first one to ever think of publishing a reimagining of Little Fuzzy. Um. No. He's like at least the fourth, possibly the fifth depending on how you count the picture-book version.)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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