I think that in the future, fanfic will be considered the literature of our age.
One of the first things I ever wrote was fanfic, though I didn’t know it at the time. I was in first grade. I wrote a story about Star Trek. (The original series. Next Gen didn’t exist yet. I’m old.) I didn’t use the series characters. The ship (so help me I think I named it USS Business because that was what the thesaurus gave me for “Enterprise”) had a female crew, with the exception of a male nurse. Because I was a girl and that was what I wanted. I may have named the nurse “Mr. Token.” He had a crush on the science officer.
I digress. There’s something extraordinary about this world we live in where people are engaging actively with published material. People are having sex with stories.
History is full of the literary establishment slowly coming to acknowledge the value of unvalued genres. There’s little less valued right now than fanfic – just about every market out there has a “no fanfic” clause in their submission guidelines. Yet it is being written, for its own sake. To scratch mental itches. Reams and reams written by people who know they’ll never make a dime. BAM. Art for art’s sake.
You are welcome, future literary snobs.
