It is possible to make money from writing fan fiction.
Just ask Hugo winner John Scalzi. One of novels, Fuzzy Nation, is a 2011 reboot of H. Beam Piper’s 1962 novel Little Fuzzy, with the characters, setting, and themes updated to reflect the changes in technology, scientific knowledge, and social mores between the early 1960’s and the early 2010’s. Scalzi wrote the book solely for his own pleasure, with zero expectations of getting it professional published until his agent struck a deal Piper’s estate. Scalzi himself referred to it as fanfiction, and has sponsored at least one “write fanfic about ____________” contest on his blog, Whatever.
Or ask Ursula LeGuin, at least if she hadn’t inconveniently died a few years ago. Her 2008 novel Lavinia tells the story of a young woman named (surprise!) Lavinia, who is fated to marry a stranger and found a great dynasty. Her story, which she narrates to someone known only as “the poet,” is an obvious reworking of parts of Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid that completes the unfinished poem to include Aeneas’ second marriage. Not only did it sell well, but Lavinia won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy, which is not on the same level as a Hugo or a Nebula but is still pretty notable in the SF and fantasy field.
(Ironically enough, The Aeneid itself is based on Homer’s Iliad, only gussied up, smoothed out, and with many, many gaps in the story filled to give Virgil’s old friend and patron Gaius Octavius Thurinus (aka “Augustus Caesar”) a suitably royal pedigree once he’d seized power and crushed the Roman Republic...but I digress)
Or check out what the critics have “parallel novels,” which are basically reworkings/sequels/ alternate perspectives on already published work:
- Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize winning A Thousand Acres, which is pretty much King Lear in a clever modern disguise; or
- Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, which critiques the patriarchy and colonialism as it tells the back story of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, the allegedly crazy one he stuffs in his attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre;
- Sena Naslund Jeter’s Ahab’s Wife; or, The Star-Gazer, which takes a couple of lines (not even paragraphs, lines) from Moby-Dick and tells the story of Captain Ahab’s wife, who is not at all the meek doormat one might expect from reading Herman Melville’s masterpiece; or
- Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, which not only skewered Margaret Mitchell’s highly popular, highly racist Gone with the Wind, but set a legal precedent for anyone who wanted to rewrite a popular book from the point of view of, say, a secondary character (Harry Potter fans who wish to write 100,000+ words centering on Draco Malfoy take note). Like, say:
- Geraldine Brooks, whose Pulitzer winning March is basically the saga of the man usually known as Marmee’s husband and Amy, Jo, Beth, and Amy’s father among devotees of Louisa May Alcott; or
- Jon Clinch’s Finn, the story of Huckleberry Finn’s father and how he ended up the way he did.
Movies do this, too, and television shows, and comic books, and songs. One of my personal favorites, if only for its utter and total weirdness, is Earl Mac Rauch’s film The Adventures of Buckeroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, a modern sequel/prequel/reworking of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, which in turn was an updated and considerably altered adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds. And I simply don’t have the time or the space to go into detail about all the other adaptations of the radio play, or the films it’s inspired, or the films based on the original book, or the great irony that H.G. Wells was adapted by Orson Welles in the first place.
Then there are all the authors (most of them female, oddly enough) who’ve learned enough about the actual craft of writing from their fan works that they’ve gone on to win awards, top the bestseller lists, and reshape fantasy and science fiction in unexpected ways:
- Lois McMaster Bujold, whose Vorkosigan Saga began as a Star Trek fan novel about Federation officer Cordelia Naismith and her encounter with a Klingon who was later renamed Aral Vorkosigan.
- Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant, whose Newsflesh books have been nominated for (and won) multiple awards, got her start when a professional editor noticed her fan fiction, liked it, and asked if she had any original stories to tell.
- Nebula-winner Naomi Novik, who not only got her starting writing the Age of Sail/Pern mashup Temeraire and its sequels, but co-founded the biggest fanfic, Archive of Our Own, which has now been nominated for a Hugo in its own right. And oh yeah, she still writes excellent fanfic under the name “Astolat.”
- Cecilia Tan, whose Magic University books are erotica set in a world that’s very much like Harry Potter (deliberately so)...and she also still writes fanfic, primarily Harry Potter slash.
And then there’s Sherlock Holmes fandom, which puts everything and anything fan writers prior to the 1980’s did, thought, or imagined to shame.
Sherlock Holmes, greatest of detectives, first appeared in print in 1886 when Arthur Conan Doyle dashed off a potboiler for Beeton’s Christmas Annual because he needed some quick cash. The character, originally intended as a one-off, soon had starred in a second novel and a series of short stories, and was so popular that by 1893 Conan Doyle’s friend J.M. Barrie had penned the very first known parody (aka derivative work, aka — yes, really — fanfiction) based on the Great Detective. Soon there were parodies, pastiches, foreign knock-offs (one of which pits Holmes against Jack the Ripper), even plays about the Great Detective. Russia, Spain, Italy, Germany, even Japan...by the turn of the last century Sherlock Holmes was one of the best-known, best-loved fictional characters of all time.
Conan Doyle himself had little use for Sherlock Holmes — he thought his detective stories detracted from his real work, historical fiction like The White Company or Brigadier Gerard — and even tried to kill him off in “The Final Problem.” The resulting avalanche of bad publicity and hate mail were the last thing he expected, and after eight years of abuse Conan Doyle finally caved and brought Holmes back in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
A year later he was knighted, allegedly for his role in the Boer War.
Allegedly.
Regardless, Sir Arthur now found himself committed to churning out yet more exploits of Sherlock Holmes whether he liked it or not. To his credit, he devoted as much care and craft to them as to any of his other works, even if he would have rather been writing about Sir John Hawkwood. Most notably, he kept Sherlock Holmes a man of reason and rationality rather than injecting his own belief in Spiritualism into the stories, which has won him the gratitude of Holmes aficionados for nearly a century.
All good things much come to an end, alas, and in 1927 Sir Arthur announced that “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place” would be his last Sherlock Holmes story. He’d earlier written a story where Holmes retired to keep bees on the Sussex Downs, and it was time for his creator to do likewise albeit with no insect companions. Fans were disappointed — some of the recent stories were not quite up to snuff but most were just fine — but as long as their beloved detective was alive, it was all good. Sir Arthur turned his attention to Spiritualism and science fiction, and that should have been that.
Then he received the letter from a young American writer named August Derleth.
In Re: Sherlock Holmes, and many, many, many other collections, by August Derleth — August Derleth is one of the great enigmas in American letters. A Guggenheim Fellow when he was only 29, protégé of Sinclair Lewis and Edgar Lee Masters, he was a major American regionalist whose Sac Prairie Saga was intended as an American answer to the deep multi-novel explorations of place and time pioneered by Balzac and Proust. His first novel was edited by no less than Maxwell Perkins, while critics raised his early work as having “the perfection of a carved jewel,” and “the quality of an old Flemish picture.” If he’d simply stuck to the Sac Prairie Saga and other work about his beloved Wisconsin, he might well be mentioned in the same breath as William Faulkner or Thomas Wolfe today.
Unfortunately for Derleth, his interests ranged far beyond Sauk City, his lifelong home. He loved pop culture, comic books, and genre fiction, which back then meant those very unliterary magazines called “the pulps.” At the same time that he was writing his first Sac Prairie books he was churning out dozens of stories for Weird Tales, corresponding with H.P. Lovecraft, and reading every horror story and comic book he could get his hands on. Worse, he wasn’t trying to pretend that he wasn’t just as obsessed with the Cthulhu Mythos or the adventures of ___________ superhero as he was with outdoing Honoré Balzac. Rumor had it that he’d used his Guggenheim Fellowship cash award to bind his comic book collection instead of traveling abroad, and it was more than rumor that Lovecraft’s references to “Comte d’Erlette” were based on Sauk City’s favorite son.
Then Lovecraft died in 1937, most of his work still moldering in back issues of Weird Tales and other pulps. Derleth and his friend Donald Wandrei decided that this could not stand, and after a collection of Lovecraft’s stories they’d rescued from the newsstands was rejected by every major publisher, they decided to take matters into their own hands. The Outsider and Other Stories was only the first of many volumes of horror and science fiction published by Arkham House, Derleth’s new business, which was the first of the midcentury small presses that preserved the best of Golden Age science fiction, fantasy, and horror from disappearing after World War II.
As valuable as this work turned out to be for genre fiction, it horrified mainstream writers and critics. In a foreshadowing of the critical brouhaha that followed Michael Chabon’s defense of the well-wrought tale a few years ago, Derleth’s vast interests and willingness to write more than literary fiction soon made him an outcast. Within a decade he went from brilliant newcomer to “a burly, bounding, bustling, self-confident, opinionated, and highly-sweatered young man with faults so grievous that a melancholy perusal of them may be of more value to apprentices than a study of his serious virtues” in the words of one-time mentor Sinclair Lewis. His regional and historical works were no longer reviewed in serious magazines, his non-fiction and poetry were all but ignored, and by the time of his death in 1971 he was largely forgotten except by science fiction fans, specialists in Midwestern regionalism, and the residents of Sauk City, Wisconsin.
And the fans of mystery fiction, especially devotees of Solar Pons, the able and worthy successor to Sherlock Holmes.
Pons had his genesis when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle announced that he would no longer write Sherlock Holmes stories. August Derleth, who was all of eighteen years old, promptly wrote to Sir Arthur asking permission to continue the series, despite his lack of professional publications, his youth, and the fact that he’d spent almost his entire life in Sauk City, not London. Sir Arthur, who seems to have been amused rather than appalled, turned him down but thanked him for his interest, then went back to tipping tables and writing about Professor Challenger. So Derleth, who was a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, began writing about Solar Pons.
Solar Pons, whom Derleth saddled with one of the least convincing first names in detective fiction, is an admitted and unabashed carbon copy of Sherlock Holmes, at least in the early stories. Tall, lean, and gray-eyed, he wears a deerstalker hat, smokes horrible shag tobacco, and shares a flat at 7B Praed Street with his dear friend and amanuensis, Dr. Lyndon Parker. He exhibits remarkably Holmesian powers of observation and deduction, sometimes works with or for his brother Bancroft, and basically fulfills the same role for 1920’s and 1930’s London as the Great Detective did in the 1880’s and 1890’s. Several of his cases take their titles directly from the Holmesian canon (“The Adventure of the Aluminum Crutch” and “The Adventure of the Politician, the Lighthouse, and the Trained Cormorant,” to name just two), while others intersect with the works of H.P. Lovecraft (of course) and Sax Rohmer. He even has a long-suffering housekeeper, Mrs. Johnson, who tut-tuts and flits in and out just like Holmes’ landlady Mrs. Hudson.
About the only ways this doesn’t qualify as blatant fanfiction are a) Derleth changed all the names of the characters (what fic writers call “filing off the serial numbers), b) there’s no overt romantic or sexual relationship between Pons and Dr. Parker (or Mrs. Johnson, or anyone else), and c) Derleth got paid for writing them. That Sir Arthur’s son Adrian didn’t sue for plagiarism is probably thanks to differing copyright laws, but seriously, anyone who reads an early Solar Pons story will immediately think “hoo boy, he is cutting it close here.”
This did not prevent mystery lovers, particularly the Sherlock Holmes fandom, from all but having orgasms over the mere existence of Solar Pons. This small but influential group began when editor/novelist/critic Christopher Morley decided that his Three Hours for Lunch Club should be about something other than spending three hours at lunch, realized that most of his fellow lunchers loved Sherlock Holmes, and founded a society dedicated to the study of the Holmesian canon. The only rules were that members had to be male (since rescinded) and that all conversation, essays, and pastiches had to be based on the assumption that Holmes was a real person, Watson’s stories described real cases, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was merely Watson’s literary agent/sometime editor.
Needless to say, this “Great Game” proved irresistible to Morley and his friends. Soon the Baker Street Irregulars included luminaries such as Rex Stout, Vincent Starrett, and Manfred Lee and Fred Dannay, the cousins who wrote and edited under the name “Ellery Queen,” and before long their meetings featured papers devoted to such fine and worthy topics as “Watson Was A Woman.” They also wrote and edited a journal that included offerings such as Vincent Starrett’s “The Adventure of the Unique Hamlet,” a “pastiche” that would be a fine and worthy addition to Archive of Our Own’s Sherlock Holmes tag…but I digress.
That the Irregulars and their friends loved Sherlock Holmes was a given…but unlike the rest of the literary New York, they didn’t turn up their noses when August Derleth squandered his talent (sic) writing about Solar Pons. They loved the Pons stories, too, especially since Derleth had a singular ability to write about London as if he’d lived there most of his life instead of in Sauk City, Wisconsin. Vincent Starrett, Ellery Queen, Edgar W. Smith, and Anthony Boucher wrote introductions to Pons collections, and a small but devoted fanbase began dissecting the saga of the Second Greatest Detective just as fervently as Morley and his friends had explored the Doyle stories.
Soon Solar Pons, who had a more outgoing, less superior personality than Sherlock Holmes, was considered a major detective character in his own right, with his own appreciation society (The Praed Street Irregulars) and his own publishing house (Mycroft & Moran, an imprint of Arkham House). He received the singular tribute of having his own fanfiction/pastiches/continuations/whatever when British author Basil Copper began writing his own Solar Pons stories after August Derleth died in 1971. There’s even a recent story (professionally written and published by David Marcum in 2013) where we learn that Solar Pons was actually born Siger Holmes, youngest son of Sherlock Holmes’ eldest brother Sherrinford, and chose his ridiculous moniker because he wanted to make his own name as a detective rather than piggybacking on his famous uncle’s reputation.
As for the actual stories…yes, there are Americanisms. Yes, Derleth tried almost too hard to write like Conan Doyle. Yes, the name “Solar Pons” is beyond absurd…but the stories themselves are a great deal of fun. Dr. Parker is sharper than Dr. Watson, Solar Pons isn’t nearly as abrasive as Sherlock Holmes, and seeing how someone like Holmes could operate in the 20th century is more than worth a few hours if one can track down a copy of a Solar Pons book or two.
As for August Derleth…after several decades in the critical wilderness, his reputation is starting to recover. The stigma against anything that smacked of the pulps is largely gone, and Derleth’s contributions as an editor, genre writer, and pioneering conservationist are finally receiving their due. He never managed to finish the Sac Prairie Saga, but his own work with Arkham House, Mycroft & Moran, and the Cthulhu Mythos has ensured that he will not be forgotten. If nothing else, he can certainly claim to be the most important writer to hail from Wisconsin, and that is no mean achievement.
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Have you ever heard of Solar Pons? August Derleth? Been to Sauk City, Wisconsin? Read a book published by Arkham House? It’s a blistering night here at the Last Homely Shack, so pour a cold glass of your beverage of choice and share…
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