Like many other things, it probably didn’t get started on the 'net, but only proliferated. Prior to that, what might have been the first movie or TV show that inspired people to write their own spinoffs? ST:TOS, maybe? Star Wars?
I can’t say about fanfic in general, but slash goes back to the Kirk/Spock ladies of the late 1960’s.
Star Trek was eessentially first – people started writing about it after it went off the air (slash came later, BTW – most early Trek fiction was straight adventure).
Before ST, there may have been fanfic of other TV shows or movies from time to time, but ST made it into a phenomenon.
It obviously had to be about a science fiction show, though, since fanzines in science fiction dated from the 30s and often had fiction. Nothing else had an outlet for anyone who wanted to write fanfic.
I’ll agree with ST being what made fanfiction into a phenomenon, but don’t forget books. Bored of the Rings, despite its publication, is definitely fanfiction, and was, IIRC, published in the seventies.
I wouldn’t be surprised if fanfiction of some sort or another had existed before ST, even - just not distributed. Fanzines and later the internet were facilitators, but they didn’t create fanfiction.
I don’t know if you’ll count this as fanfiction, but, sometime in the late 12th century, Chrétien de Troyes died, leaving his epic novel Perceval le gallois unfinished. This led to several minor authors writing “continuations” of the story.
The legend of the Grail predates Chrétien, but those works were based on his telling of the story.
Fanfic is probably as old as litterature. It just found its perfect distribution medium in the internet.
Deep in the land of Mordor, in the Fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged a master ring, and into this ring he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life.
I researched slash fiction for one of my projects, and it’s pretty much widely accepted in the slash and non-slash circles that ST:TOS is what started it all…Now I’m sure people were making up stories of their favorite characters long before that but I think it didn’t have any recognition or a name until ST:TOS. Or if it did, nobody I’ve come across remembers it…
Well The Trouble with Tribbles episode of ST TOS may be the ultimate fan fiction. It was written by a fan and submitted to the producers of the show and they bought it. Star Trek used to have a ‘you may submit scripts’ policy.
After the Lord did smite the publishers, he told his chosen people to go forth and write fic…
I’d suspect Comic Book fan fiction predates Star Trek. I believe Roy Thomas started out writing fanfic for a fanzine called Alter Ego, and he was hired by Marvel as a pro in 1966 or so.
Blame Hugo Gernsbeck. His “scientifiction” magazines, starting with Amazing Stories in 1926, had letter columns that printed the names and addresses of the writers. They shortly started writing to one another, and the more adventuresome noticed that so many of them lived in and around NYC that they could start clubs.
And the clubs begat fanzines, although the term appears not to have been coined by Russ Chauvenet until 1941.
The first fanzine is credited to the Science Correspondence Club’s The Comet in May 1930, edited by the soon to be well known Raymond A. Palmer, followed closely by Allen Glasser’s The Planet from the New York Scienceers in July 1930.
As indicated by the names of the groups, these zines were slanted toward science discussions at first, but they and the hundreds of other fanzines in the 30s expanded to allow virtually any kind of related work into their pages. I don’t know when the first piece of fan fiction appeared, but definitely before the end of the decade. Ray Bradbury’s first published stories were in the pages of his own fanzine, Futuria Fantasia, which he produced from 1939-41, and that was already a commonplace.
Many, many thousands of fanzine titles have appeared since the 1930s. I would be surprised if no one wrote about whatever shows or movies were currently the rage - lots of people wrote their own Conan or Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes stories, e.g. - but it’s certainly true that the graph takes a sharp upward turn after Star Trek appears.
Info taken from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
Well, it depends on how you define fanfiction. Would you consider Paradise Lost fanfiction? It takes the characters from the Bible and uses them in a story that is over and above that which is found in Genesis…
Failing that, and, well, actually, this is earlier, there was something of a fad amongst Elizabethan writers to write the nymph’s reply to the shepard, based on Christopher Marlowe’s poem whose title now escapes me, but I’m pretty sure it’s something like “The Passionate Shepard to a Nymph” and its most famous line is “Come live with me and be my love.” I would think that these poems would certainly qualify as fanfic.
Sorry to be so late in replying; for some reason, I could never pull up this thread. Anyway, it all sounds about right. As far as pre-TOS and non-SF fan fiction, I’ve heard of Beatlemaniacs circa 1984 Mary-Sueing themselves into the Fab Four’s embraces.
I’m inclined to agree with jovan and a wizard song for thee. The concept has been around for as long as people have been writing stories in the first place. You could argue that The Oresteia is Homer-based fanfiction, and I’d be really surprised if the Victorians didn’t have a shot at rewriting Dickens from time to time. I mean, stories that come out in installments with lots of cliffhangers are an irresistible temptation, and there were all those people who didn’t want Little Nell to die…
(What, me, trying to come up with an intellectual rationale for my favorite guilty indulgence? Nah…)
Would you mind providing me with an actual example of Dickens fanfiction? His life and his effect has been thoroughly examined by scholars and they would surely know who and when and where and under what circumstances these stories were written.
I just don’t believe in 19th century fan fiction of this type. I don’t think people of that age saw it as an irresistible temptation. I think you do and are trying to project it back to a time in which it doesn’t belong.
But I am more than willing to be proved wrong on this, if you can come up with a solid cite.
I don’t usually post when I don’t have anything a propos to add, but am I the only person who got this pun?
::still giggling::
If you’ve written a paper on this, I’d be interested to see it!
I’ve met K/S ladies at slash conventions who say they were writing stories in the late '60’s; I’ve no reason to disbelieve them, but that’s not really a verifiable citation, is it? The best I’ve come up with in a quick Google search is A Short History of Early K/S, which indicates that the first K/S fanzines were published 1974-75.
I suppose the ladies in question could have meant that they were writing privately–just for themselves or a few friends.
I thought fanfiction was about people writing themselves into their favorite TV shows, ultimately leading into some sort of erotica.
Queen Elizabeth wrote pages of poetry in which Pistol gets it on with Bardolph.
There are different types of fanfic:
Genfic (general fan fiction) - Not erotica; it can even be written by and for children. You’re just using the characters you like in adventures of your own imagination.
Mary Sue - This is where you write a super-idealized version of yourself into your chosen series, or a super-idealized character of your own design but not yourself. TNG fanfic fans will know Stephen Ratliff’s Marissa stories. Again, not necessarily erotica, although it can be if a teenager or grown-up is writing. But a lot of children write this sort of thing too; between the ages of 10 and 12, I wrote a number of TOS fics in which my Mary Sue character saved the Enterprise from many dangers, without any pre-pubescent romantic designs on Kirk, Spock, or even Chekov.
Slash - This is erotica like the Kirk/Spock stories I’ve referred to, in which the writer (usually female) likes the idea of two (usually both male) characters getting together, and proceeds to write scenarios in which they do so. The writer doesn’t usually put herself into it (I never do). There is also hetero fic similar to slash; Scully/Mulder, for example, from the X-Files, but since I don’t write it, I don’t know much about it.