Fanfiction

[Jeff Prucher]

Brave New Words takes it back to 1939 in Wilson "Bob" Tucker's fanzine "Le Zombie" (online here: http://www.midamericon.org/tucker/lez11b.htm), although in that use it's specifically referring to fan vs. professional quality, rather than amateur writing in the setting of another's work, which is what people mostly mean nowadays.  There's another, largely obsolete sense of "fan fiction" as well, which is (amateur) fiction written about SF fans, which I can only date back to the 1944 Fancyclopedia, but which is clearly older, and may predate the other sense (it's been html-ized here: http://fanac.org/Fannish_Reference_Works/Fancyclopedia/Fancyclopedia_I/f1.html#8, although the keying is not especially trustworthy).

Jeff Prucher




> From: victor steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>

> The OED has citations going back to 1944 Fancyclopedia

VS-)

On Wed,
> May 19, 2010 at 4:14 PM, victor steinbok <
> ymailto="mailto:aardvark66 at gmail.com"
> href="mailto:aardvark66 at gmail.com">aardvark66 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> A follow up on "fanboy". Several law blogs got into a
> discussion of
> "fan fiction". There is already a Wiki
> entry:
>
>> Fan fiction (alternately referred to as fanfiction,
> fanfic, FF, or fic) is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories
> about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than
> by the original creator. Works of fan fiction are rarely commissioned or
> authorized by the original work's owner, creator, or publisher; also, they are
> almost never professionally published. Fan fiction, therefore, is defined by
> being both related to its subject's canonical fictional universe and
> simultaneously existing outside the canon of that universe.
>
>
> VS-)

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