Merged Minds? (or, the Fanfic I Wrote in the '90s)
Posted by: Anonymous User (---.hsd1.md.comcast.net)
Date: August 14, 2007 01:23AM
How fascinating it was to discover Jasper Fforde this weekend through purchase of his first two "Thursday Next" books from one of our local book superchains, after having been impressed by the front and back cover of "First Among Sequels". It was especially fascinating because the whole concept of the JurisFiction office absolutely set my hair on end with deja vu.
You see, back in the early 1990s, I was engaging in that most disreputable of literary activities, writing media-based fan fiction. And after cranking out a few of those stories (not for profit or pay of any kind, naturally, except for copies of zine issues), I got POWER STAR zine to publish a story I wrote called "DVO", and a sequel to it, "FHPA." DVO stands for Demise Verification Officer, but the deja-vu-inducing detail is that the DVO in the story, a fellow by the name of Mickey Chang, was able to travel between fictional universes to prevent "unnecessary sequels." He did this for the Fictional Hero Protection Agency, or FHPA. In the second story, Chang goes missing from the FHPA and the abductor is the author himself. I'd intended to write a third story, written in second person, where the main character is THE READER of that very story, and you have to team up with Robert Anton Wilson to resolve some recursive-fictional-multiverse tangle. It got too philosophically deep too fast. Also, POWER STAR folded before I got it all down.
As you can probably guess, because this was fan fiction and not for profit, I used characters from all over popular fiction: movies, television series, underground comix. It was fun to write, but ABSOLUTELY UNPUBLISHABLE outside of fanfic's relaxed boundaries. It is very very very VERY good to discover that Mr. Fforde is blazing trails reminiscent of my crude attempts (howbeit much more literarily or copyrighteously safe) in his wonderful novels... I look forward to reading each one of them.