Welcome back to our journey through Sequel Country, where since last week we’ve been travelling through a great forest. Maybe there are giant spiders nearby, except… hasn’t that been done before?
But so what? Why shouldn’t I write a sequel to the Hobbit following the adventures of the brave and clever spiders of Mirkwood? Of course, there’s the small matter of copyright protecting it until 2043, but if I don’t want to make any money from my sequel by publishing it commercially, that might be okay (although in this case, probably not, given that the law firm “protecting” the intellectual property has been known to issue angry cease-and-desist letters to a pub serving cocktails with Hobbit-themed names, which could not possibly financially affect the movie or books). Anyway, one can quite legitimately write a sequel to works already out of copyright, such as those by Austen, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Hemingway, or more to my taste, Virginia Woolf. The problem there is more one of inviting comparisons between your writing and that of the most celebrated writers in English literature!
Still, I’m sure lots of us have daydreamed about what might happen next to our favourite characters, or imagined a new character of our own in a familiar literary setting. People have been writing fiction of this kind for decades – or probably much longer. I first became aware of it when I got active on social networks (in the late 80s; I wrote about this in part 42 collaborative fiction), when I learned it was called fanfic, fiction written by fans for their own amusement. Before the 90s, it was most often shared in home-made zines and through APAs, Amateur Press Associations which were networks of people sharing zines by post, going right back to the 19th century. APAs typically involved sending material to a single person for compilation and mailing out, but computer networks eliminated the need for a single co-ordinator, as well as the need to pay for postage.
Fanfic went far beyond literature, adopting characters and settings from other media, particularly TV shows (and especially sci-fi and fantasy shows). Around 1990, by which time I was using Usenet every day, I became aware of a sub-genre of fanfic called slash fiction, which I initially imagined to be the literary equivalent of “video nasties”, designed for shock value. But I soon learned that it’s actually erotica, exploring the romantic (or just sexual) possibilities of two stock characters, as in Kirk/Spock (pronounced Kirk slash Spock) or for a more recent example, Harry/Draco. Often characters are chosen whose sparring can be re-imagined as erotic tension.
Perhaps sci-fi and fantasy are so often chosen because of the open-ended nature of their settings. In a literary novel, settings and situations are invented purely to support the characters and plot of the novel; material irrelevant to either of these will be cut by the editor (or would have been, in the days when all novels were carefully edited). But in a SF&F TV series, or in any series of genre novels (whether SF&F or other genres such as police dramas, detectives, “cosy crime” or whatever), the setting and situation are deliberately fleshed out and made open-ended, whether to provide readers with an enjoyably immersive experience, or to make space for writers of different episodes (or the author of the series) creative freedom to explore new directions.
Some scenarios are even deliberately designed to enable and invite contributions. One example is the Secure Contain Protect scenario, a kind of open-source setting which has accrued thousands of contributions in a wide range of genres including surrealism, comedy and satire as well as serious-minded fiction. But the idea of shared worlds is much older, one of the most famous being Larry Niven’s Known Space setting. Having once published the following note
If you want more Known Space stories, you'll have to write them yourself.
many writers took him at his word, and although he later back-pedalled and announced he might withold permission, the fact of the invitation being published, and its widespread takeup, would no doubt serve as a defence. As a parallel, once you’ve given something away with an open source or open data license, you can’t revoke that license unless it was agreed that it was revocable at the time.
An important concept in this arena of shared-world writing is the idea of canon, in the sense of of a set of officially approved material (the term comes from Christianity where only certain texts are considered genuine parts of the gospel, as decided by canons of the church). In TV shows and movie franchises, the publicly released material is usually considered canonical; licensed novelisations sometimes are, but not always. (An unusual variation is provided by the Dr. Who spin-off audio adventures, which were later promoted to canon by the TV show when it was revived.) Fan fiction is not inherently canonical, but its writers usually strive to maintain consistency with the canon, though this work is sometimes demolished when a new episode, film or book comes out. There is even a useful term for this material, headcanon, meaning anything someone has dreamed up which is consistent with the canon but is their own private invention.
Ultimately, the strength of this kind of writing, extending an existing canon, is the familiarity which readers will already have with it. There’s a ready-made readership available, and fun can be had teaching old characters new tricks. The problems include the difficulty of not contradicting canon, sometimes the need to undo a satisfying ending provided by the original author, and of course the pressure to live up to the standard of ideas and writing of the author who was original enough to have come up with the world or scenario described in the original work.
Personally, this isn’t the kind of writing I enjoy doing myself. Maybe writers who enjoy setting fiction within an existing world (whether that’s an alien world or a well-known city that’s the haunt of a famous detective inspector) find that their imagination wants to explore that kind of space, or perhaps it’s that they find it easier to come up with new plots for existing characters; but I’m the opposite, I’m always full of character ideas and plot is what I find harder; and I find the need for any plot not to contradict existing canon makes me grind to a halt – which is actually part of the problem I’ve been having with writing the sequel to my own novel this year. But more of that another time, perhaps. For now, we are out of the woods and there will be something different to explore in Sequel Country next week. If you know someone who might enjoy coming along with us, please share it using this button…