I do hate to break it to the Trek fans, but there was Sherlock Holmes fan fiction going on even before Doyle himself was finished writing about the Great Detective. Many of Holmes’s fans were rightfully upset that Doyle attempted to kill the famous consulting detective in “The Final Problem” and they, the fans, tried to fill the gap themselves. One such story was written by a friend of Doyle’s: J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. If I remember right, it’s “The Adventure of the Two Collaborators” or something similar.
Another such story (“The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage”, perhaps? I’m working without a net here) was sold to Doyle in hopes that he would use some aspect of it in a new story of his own. Doyle never used the tale, and the manuscript turned up decades later as a “lost Sherlock Holmes story,” causing a certain amount of furor. (Some Sherlockian can undoubtedly correct my facts here if I am in error. I don’t have my references in front of me.) Ronald Knox began writing his own Sherlock Holmes pastiches in the 1920s or 1930s, if I remember aright: well before Captain Kirk, at any rate.
So much for verifiable publications. I can’t point you to any 19th-century Sherlock Holmes slash fiction.
On the other hand, in many ways, I think the idea of fan-created fictional material began with the numerous stories of the adventures and tribulations of the Greek gods. Dear me, Mr. Holmes, but those gods got into a lot of wacky sitcom-style trouble. Turning into bulls and cuttlefish, turning people into flowers, taking mortal lovers and starting wars over apples? I figure most of that was just storytellers playing fast and loose with the characters in a quest for new material. Call it what you want; I call it fanfic.
I think if you stretch the meaning of the term “fanfic” enough, you can get it to encompass all of literature, but in its present incarnation it’s strictly an Internet phenom and there’s no sense in pretending it isn’t. The radical ability of individuals to publish their fantasies easily for other fans has made fanfics into something more like mini-genres of fiction rather than the isolated subcultures they were prior to the Internet.
Yeah, but what do ya mean by fanfic? I wouldn’t call stuff like the answers to the passionate shepherd fanfic. I also wonder how often women wrote prior to the twentieth century – widespread illiteracy and repression of women made women who did anything other than bear children rare for almost all of recorded history.
Heh, you won’t find any Mary-Sues in my fanfic, thankyouverymuch. The fanfic I write and read are generally explorations of the chosen characters.
As Miss Happ pointed out, fanfic doesn’t ahve to be erotica (though Idon’t think i’ve ever written non-erotica fanfic…). And I’d go so far as to say that good fanfic and Mary-Sue fic are mutually exclusive.
No, no, no. This will not do. It is simply not possible to redefine words sufficiently to make “The Adventure of the Two Collaborators” into fan fiction.
The two collaborators are Barrie and Doyle himself. They had tried to write a play together, but failed miserably. So Barrie wrote a private parody on the business for Doyle’s amusement. He was not a fan; he was a close personal friend and fellow professional. He did not publish it; he sent it directly to Doyle. It did not see print until Doyle included it in his autobiography. It is as far from fan fiction as a note from his editor would be.
Can any of the early Holmes parodies and pastiches be called fan fiction? I think not. Whether serious, affectionate, or barbed they were all designed to be published and to make money for the author. The “undiscovered” story alluded to by Fish is actually “The Man Who Was Wanted,” by Arthur Whitaker, who wanted it to be a collaboration with Doyle. He was not writing fan fiction. He wanted to be paid.
“The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage” is by Ronald Knox, published in the Strand, but not until 1947.
I think we have to make a distinction here. If it was in print - or intended for print - in a professional publication by a professional author, it is not fan fiction. We would have to discover a Sherlock Holmes story in the private collection of an ordinary person before the era of fanzines for it to count. And I don’t honestly know of any examples of those.
Well, I’m afraid the best I can do is a fictional example, but how about the newspaper put out by the Pickwick Club in Little Women, where the girls borrow the pen names and style of their favorite Dickens characters?
I freely admit, however, that this idea is mostly unsupported speculation on my part. It’s hard to know anything about what people are writing for fun in the privacy of their own parlors, unless those writings are preserved by some fluke accident.
