On any given day, all too many new books are published. Even if one were to judge them by the strictest criteria (prose, plotting, relatable characters, and all the other good stuff that quality fiction is supposed to offer), there should be enough really, really good books to satisfy even the most ravenous of readers. Why then, do so many people happily read crap?
When I say “crap,” you know the books I mean. Paper-thin characters. Plots that reprise the plots of previous volumes. Plots that have clearly bounded out of their author’s control. Worldbuilding that is dubious at best. Stories focused entirely on the author’s particular pet peeve or hobby. Prose that suggests that the author is hellbent on revenge against the English language (the English language having killed a beloved pet, which was the gift of the author’s late spouse). Bad English!
Why would readers subject themselves to such misery?
- Social pressure? (Maybe your best friend loves the book.)
- Advertising1?
- Bribery by crypto-Pythagoreans?
I think the actual answer could be much simpler: quality isn’t the whole story. Sometimes the right flawed book at the right time can be far more satisfying than the wrong aesthetic gem at the wrong time.2
People who have particular itches that are rarely scratched will treasure books that scratch that itch, even if the books in question are otherwise flawed. Indeed, the flaws may be completely invisible to a reader finally encountering a novel that scratches that itch (especially if they didn’t know the itch existed in the first place).
Sometimes, readers want to read about someone like them who is presented positively. If a book offers that, other criteria don’t matter as much.
Sometimes readers want a story where things work out in the end and they’re willing to forgive the author if the path to that satisfactory, enjoyable ending does not entirely make sense.
Sometimes a reader wants the comfort of predictability to distract from the endless chaos of everyday life. So, another book in an endless series.
Sometimes readers simply want ripping adventure stories inspired by the unusual behavior of water at 374 C under a pressure of 218 atmospheres.3
Thus, the success of books about which detractors might say:
- “This is an inferior knock-off of Lord of the Rings by an author who didn’t understand what Tolkien was getting at.”
- “This is a mediocre fantasy novel whose only distinguishing positive feature is sympathetic LGBTQ+ characters.”
- “This is a novel featuring aliens whose forms are alien indeed and whose minds are inexplicably indistinguishable from those of human New Englanders.”
Readers are not reacting to the absence of the qualities that distinguish great books, but the presence of other elements. Entire successful careers have been built on addressing otherwise overlooked demand.
And there’s nothing wrong with this! Not every book has to be the best of all possible books. Or rather, “best” is context dependent. If it happens the qualities for which a reader is looking don’t happen to be artfully crafted prose, three-dimensional characters, and/or plots that make sense4, then it does not matter if those qualities are absent. It’s enough that the books offer readers the occasional moments of joy and comfort, or at least momentary distraction from the ever-worsening dystopias in which we live.
At least, that’s what I tell myself as I revisit old favourites. What’s your excuse?
- Why do all the mid-list authors laugh bitterly whenever I mention their lavish ad campaigns? ↩︎
- Classics forced on students under conditions seemingly designed to make the kids hate them is a matter for a different essay. ↩︎
- Yes, yes, eutectic water/ammonia mixes are also cool. ↩︎
- One of the more horrifying observations by John Rogers was that by and large viewers did not care if Leverage’s plots made any sense as long as they hit the right notes in the correct order. I’m a reader who loves plots and that appalls me. It’s probably best that in the long run I just accept that other people are looking for different qualities from fiction than I do. ↩︎
Nostalgia.
The Narnia books were the first books I read as a child that are still readable as an adult. Yes, I see all the problems they have (colonialism with a touch of racism, strongly defined sex roles, thinly disguised Christian allegory, and on and on), no I’m not Christian. Yet every few years if I have an hour to kill I pull one of them out (well, not Last Battle) for a quick read.
Star Trek: Strange New worlds. Somehow someone got some fanfic published by an actual publisher and in bookstores. I was a Trekkie at the time and there wasn’t a whole lot of new Trek available, so I read it. The stories haven’t aged well, but boy do they bring up memories.
I’d say “anything by Asimov”, but I haven’t dared to reread any of his stuff since I discovered just how bad his robot stories actually are…
I think you’re confusing two different things. You seem to be referring to Bantam’s Star Trek: The New Voyages anthologies from 1976 and 1978, which were collections of stories that had mostly previously been published as fan fiction. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was a series of contest anthologies from Pocket/Gallery Books from 1998-2007 and 2016 (predating and unrelated to the TV series of the same name). They were open to writers with two or fewer professional sales, so they were often mistakenly called “fanfic anthologies,” but their entire purpose was to give new writers the chance to break into the industry with professional sales (and indeed they did begin several professional careers, e.g. novelists Dayton Ward and William Leisner and TV writer-producer Geoffrey Thorne).
“they were often mistakenly called “fanfic anthologies,”
There’s no mistake there, they absolutely are fanfic anthologies. So is 95% of the Marvel and DC canon, and ~1000 years of Arthuriana, including such iconic bits as The Sword in The Stone (created in 1938 by famous Malory fan T.H. White), Lancelot Du Lac ( created by Monmouth fan Chretien de Troyes), and many more. To paraphrase Sturgeon, 90% of fanfic is crap, but 90% of everything is crap. There’s a vast amount of Shakespeare and Austen fanfic out there as well, much of it under publisher’s imprint. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with fanfic, although I normally personally never read fanfic of authors I really like because it’s so hard to get the voice right.
It’s not about value judgments or quality, it’s about the objectively correct definition of the word. Fanfiction, by definition, is unlicensed, unofficial amateur fiction done for recreation with no monetary gain. The Strange New Worlds anthologies were officially licensed publications that contracted and paid their authors for their stories. As I said, the entire purpose of the anthology contest was to give amateur writers, or those who had made no more than two prior professional sales, an opportunity to gain professional publishing credits that could give them a foothold in the industry. I guarantee you (because I saw it happen countless times over the years on the Trek Lit forums), if you told the editors of the SNW anthologies that they were “absolutely fanfic anthologies,” they would immediately correct your mistake. And so would Paramount/CBS’s lawyers, because fanfic authors cannot legally profit from their unauthorized writing, but the SNW authors were absolutely paid for their contracted and licensed work and no doubt continue to receive a small amount of royalties for it to this day.
Equating professional work to fanfiction is like saying that an NBA contract is no different from a pickup game with your friends in the neighborhood park, or that running a restaurant is no different from cooking recreationally at home. It’s not about whether one is better than the other, and it doesn’t mean that professionals can’t be fans (that’s taking the idiom too literally). It simply means that there is a fundamental and meaningful difference between a hobby and a paying job.
I see where the miscommunication has arisen; it is, apparently the difference between a legal term of art (referring to whether an author has permission from the legal owner of the IP, if there is one), and a standard, non-jargon usage (referring to whether or not the author is , in fact, the creator of the characters and/or setting about/in which the story takes place). In the general usage, licensed fanfiction doesn’t change its fundamental nature as fanfic, and published authors have described published work as such for decades. (Viz Neil Gaiman’s reply to someone asking his position on fanfic, in which he stated that as he had won a Hugo award for a piece of fanfiction he could hardly be against it. The fanfiction in question is “A Study in Emerald”, which won the 2004 Hugo for short fiction.)
The legal definition you quote is an arbitrary matter of copyright law, equivalent to the once-common disclaimer about how “this is a work for fiction, any resemblance to real people living or dead is purely coincidental.” Everyone knows perfectly well when some of the characters are most definitely based on real people, and nobody would consider taking that seriously when watching e.g. Citizen Kane. It’s there to satisfy some legal dictate or precedent and has nothing to do with how people interact with the work.
“In the general usage, licensed fanfiction doesn’t change its fundamental nature as fanfic”
On the contrary, the two are profoundly different. Fanfiction is a personal, recreational activity, something anyone can do on their own initiative without being answerable to anyone else, so it can be whatever its creators want it to be, no matter how much it deconstructs or transforms the source material. Professional tie-in writing is contract work. We are hired by a licensee of the IP owners to write something on their behalf, and our job as their contractors is to write something that fits the series as they define it. Don’t get me wrong — contrary to what laypeople tend to assume, we usually get to come up with the specific story ideas ourselves, since that’s what they’re hiring us to do; but everything we come up with still has to be approved by the licensor, because we’re working for them, not for ourselves. So we can’t be as uninhibited, idiosyncratic, or deconstructive as fanfic authors can be. That makes for a massive difference in the content and nature of the work.
The most obvious example of the difference is slash fanfic. Fanfic authors are free to redefine characters’ sexualities and attractions to put them in relationships that professional tie-in authors contractually obligated to conform to existing canon never could. That freedom to interpolate same-sex or queer relationships into franchises that canonically forbade them has always been one of the greatest benefits of fanfic. Fanfic can be wish-fulfilling in ways pro fiction can’t, because fanfic is purely personal. Pro fiction can be personal too — I’ve been free to put a lot of my own interests and interpretations into my Trek tie-in fiction — but only within the limits of existing canon and the indulgence of my editors and the studio, and there have been times in the history of Trek Lit that the allowed parameters have been narrower than they’ve been in my day.
“On the contrary, the two are profoundly different. Fanfiction is a personal, recreational activity, something anyone can do on their own initiative without being answerable to anyone else,”
You’ve just described writing in general. You only become answerable to anyone if you send it to a publisher or distribute it in an illegal fashion (or if the content is, in and of itself, illegal where you are, of course)
“but everything we come up with still has to be approved by the licensor, because we’re working for them, not for ourselves. So we can’t be as uninhibited, idiosyncratic, or deconstructive as fanfic authors can be. That makes for a massive difference in the content and nature of the work.”
Again, that’s a legal technicality. Plenty of Trek fanfic writers absolutely would publish their stuff and take money for it if the IP holders would let them. In cases like the aforementioned “A Study in Emerald,” the IP holders are dead and nobody presently holds copyright on the characters of Sherlock Holmes or Cthulu, and Neil Gaiman can write a crossover story that would appall Doyle and sicken Lovecraft if he wants to. It’s precisely the same category of work as the Star Trek: More Spacetime Anamolies, though.
“Fanfic authors are free to redefine characters’ sexualities and attractions to put them in relationships that professional tie-in authors contractually obligated to conform to existing canon never could. That freedom to interpolate same-sex or queer relationships into franchises that canonically forbade them has always been one of the greatest benefits of fanfic.”
Like Nicola Griffith’s Spear, published just last year, by a real publisher and everything. It’s a retelling of the story of Perdur, Knight of the Round Table, only she wrote Peredur as a lesbian disguised as a man, because Geoffrey of Monmouth lived and died centuries before there was any such thing as copyright law, and he can’t stop her.
The confusion is probably due to published works sometimes coming off as fan fiction, with all the negative hallmarks we associate with it. I might suggest we create some new cutesy, Internetty term for this, such as san-fan-fiction (sanctioned fan fiction), but there’s really no need for that. There already exists a perfectly good term for it, a very old term: bad writing.
Except the term “fanfiction” does not refer to low quality, and it’s an insult to fan writers to suggest it does. Sturgeon’s Law applies. There’s some really great fanfiction out there, just like there’s a ton of bad professional fiction out there. There are some excellent professional authors who got their start writing fanfiction.
Using “fanfiction” to mean “bad fiction” is as much a misuse of the term as using it to mean “professional fiction written by fans,” albeit a far more mean-spirited one. The term has a specific industry definition, which is fiction based on existing intellectual property but written without authorization or payment from the legal owners of the IP. If it’s licensed, contracted, and paid for, it is not fanfiction, regardless of its quality. Nobody needs to invent a new term, they just need to learn what the existing term actually means.
Well yes, it’s meant as an insult. Quite intenionally, because it’s a criticism of some of the low quality writing that gets published.
Does accuracy in terminology matter to those hurling insults?
Basic decency and fairness should matter. What matters is not using an insult so recklessly that you demonize the people doing good work along with the people doing bad work. It is nonsensical to say an entire category is bad. If quality were determined by category, it would be easy to achieve consistent quality, but obviously it is not. There are more bad, cheap hamburgers in the world than there are delicious gourmet hamburgers, but that doesn’t mean the good ones don’t exist. It means that quality deserves to be acknowledged where you find it.
Thank you for pointing this out. I don’t read a lot of fanfic, but I’ve occasionally come off the end of a work absolutely livid that I can’t nominate the writer for a Hugo or Nebula.
The idea that all fanfic is badly written really needs to go away. It sounds just as silly as people saying all historical romance is bodice-ripping nonsense, or that all fantasy is just a bad rehash of Tolkien. It flattens things to the point of meaninglessness.
Those aren’t not fans, probably, unless someone is cynically doing it for the money and adulation and possibly the sex.
This may be irrelevant but I recently became aware of a 21st century series production of “Looney Tunes Cartoons”, which I haven’t sat to watch throughout but I am delighted that it exists, manic present-day animations with the appearance and plotting and music quality of Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig vehicles since their careers began, but presumably without, for instance, blackface. A work of love, or it appears so. Now, alas, the title. :-)
As I said to the other responder, the definition of fanfiction is not about whether the creator is a fan, but about whether it’s done purely out of fandom as a hobby, or done professionally under contract. I’ve been a Star Trek fan nearly all my life, but I only ever wrote two or three fanfic stories (which I showed to at most a couple of friends, if that) whereas I’ve written dozens of professional, licensed works of Star Trek tie-in fiction. My level of fandom is the same either way, but what makes one fanfic and the other not is whether I was contracted and paid for the work. One is a hobby, the other is a job.
Yeah, that’s it. Have the paperback on the shelf at home, but haven’t pulled it down in a decade or so.
I just reread Asimov’s Mysteries and as long as one likes the genre (Ellery Queen/Nero Wolfe-style mysteries), they stood up reasonably well. Now I should track down my copy of QED to see how Queen stands up.
I’m trying Ellery Queen- starting with The Roman Hat Mystery, and not being thrilled so far. I still love Nero Wolfe. (More accurately, I love Archie Goodwin and Wolfe comes along for the ride)
Queen gets better, it’s been a while, but I recall Cat of Many Tails and Double, Double as being better ones.
Yeah, the motive for the murders in the Roman Hat Mystery is pretty unacceptable nowadays. Wolfe generally stands up. There are a few racist remarks, surprisingly by Archie, in the first book or two, but mostly there’s nothing a modern reader would put the book down at.
Two words: Comfort Food
It’s hard to justify deploring a reader who likes a book that you, or your English professor, or the Washington Post book reviewer, thinks is substandard dreck. We all need to be allowed some small eccentricities in taste. And a special dispensation for books enjoyed at a younger age that maybe would not have been loved as much if read later in life.
And the reverse also. A reader can certainly deplore the book that you, the professor, and the high-brow reviewer all think is literary perfection. I have my own list of DNFs on books that have been widely praised by reviewers and even singled out by award juries. And it’s not a short list, and even includes some lesser known cult favorites.
But a reader may be legitimately criticized if all they read is the same type of dreck, whether we’re talking about grimdark slaughterfests or period romances full of blushing and stammering and excruciating details of clothing. Or, for that matter, the elegant, epiphany-laden, lambent, limpid, luminous, lapidary, literary novels with their jewel-like prose, nonsense plots, and numb-brained viewpoint characters. Readers should at least make an effort to read different types of fiction, from different eras, and at least some poetry and nonfiction.
Just think of what Kurt would have had to say if he had lived long enough to behold Twitter in all its glory!
;-)
Is it appropriate to mention here that many of the classic SF novels and stories are, by today’s standards, unpublishably bad?
And thirty years from now, assuming our insane world leaders haven’t nuked us all, many of the highly praised SF novels of the past few years will be regarded as unpublishably bad too. O tempora, o mores!
After all, how many people now read old Nobel prize-winning books, or old National Book Award winners, or Booker prize winners of yore. Works that are the zenith of literature in their day soon suffer a loss of prestige, or are outright forgotten. Alas, lowly genre SF is not, and will never be, an exception.
A lot of that, I think, is less that works fall out of fashion than that “good books by people who are alive” trump “great books by people who are dead.” Not absolutely but frequently.
Have you read any Asimov lately? As compared to Clarke written at the same time?
Which do you think stands up better?
Clarke is so much better.
Growing up as an Analog reader in the 60s, I have always had a soft spot for those stories where clever and plucky humans fend off alien invaders, making you wonder how the dumb aliens developed the space flight they needed to invade in the first place.
Pandora’s planet and so on? Right on!
Particularly since 2016, I’ve been much more in favor of books with Happy Endings. Even if the characters are tissue thin. Even if each book is set in the same geographical area and re-cycles character names. And tropes. Really, I just need to get myself out of my head for a couple of hours so I can feel slightly less oppressed by the increasingly ugly reality we inhabit.
It can be quite charming to watch the layer of zeerust grow thicker upon a story with each revisit. Corollary: it can be smugly satisfying to revisit and laugh at, say, future empires with late-1940s-American attitudes towards tobacco and gender roles.
Mashing up old story ideas in a clever or unexpected way is a good way to attract both fans and critics. A subset of those critics often seem to be bothered less by the quality of the story’s execution than by its fans’ insufficient acknowledgement of the prior art.
Hal Clement? Try Robert Forward! I bought one after another because I value the man’s Crazy Ideas Department, above all the missing , ummm.. character, dialogue, mood…
Nope. I read all kinds of stuff when I was a tween. Everything from Doc Savage to Doc Smith. I loved the experience of reading them. I don’t love the books. Not any more. I remember when I was a bit older buying some paperbacks at the local bookstore / record store / head shop and the clerk said “You like SF! Here, take this one it’s free.” It was a Laser book. I read it all the way through, because it was so bad, it was amazing in its own way. But it was not worth what I paid for it. I’m not going to read it again. The books that I want to go back and re-read are the ones where I get more out of it every time.
This puts me in mind of when I was younger and read Watchmen for the first time and it just tired me out. I could see it was “a masterpiece” but I had a hard time connecting to it at that age. As I’ve gotten older I understand its themes more and so get more out o fit. So a bit of a reverse of the question, but a book being worthy can also make it difficult to find a way in.
I think that “bad” books will often be easier to engage with, particularly if using a book to relax or escape from the world because they usually ask less of me and leave me space to project things into the book. And it’s a bit like theatre. You know that it’s artificial and acceptance of that isn’t necessarily a failure of the artform, because naturalism isn’t the only way to tell a story and is often a limiting factor when a work commits to it. As long as there are some rules and consistency in the work, then a work can stand and often it is style that wins out for me!
In his essay “Good Bad Books” (1945), George Orwell writes about how books like this have been so well-loved that they stay in print and are continued to be read and enjoyed long after much “serious” fiction of the same time period had been forgotten by all but experts.
Is that the same essay where he discusses Good Bad Poets? Rudyard Kipling featured conspicuously in that number, as I recall.
There are definitely several video games I’ve enjoyed that are objectively bad in terms of story, characters, and/or overall cohesion and direction–many of them are still very fun or interesting though, and I’ve liked them a lot. Books are similar sometimes. Was it good? No. Would I recommend it? Probably not, outside of specific circumstances. But did I like it? Yes.
On a similar note, I’ve had to set aside books with perfectly good stories and capable writing because something about the way the author wrote irked me, often through no fault of their own.
I’m currently reading the Scarlet Pimpernel series by Baroness Orczy, and I adore them. Her take on the French Revolution is deeply inaccurate, some of the books were clearly hastily written just to make a living, and there’s a lot of unfortunate classism, rigid old gender roles, and some antisemitism and racism to be found. These are FLAWED books. But my god the romance and the adventure and the atomosphere and the emotions! I am hooked!
And as a literature person, trying to understand why and how these books are flawed is almost more interesting than trying to understand why a masterpiece is as good as it is. For aspiring writers, analyzing a bad book is a great exercise.
I read a fair bit of dreck I guess. As long as a book takes me out of the real world, and doesn’t actively commit sins against English, I can usually stand one read. For me the measure of a book is not whether it is worth reading but whether it is worth re-reading. So for example I revisit most of Pratchett and Bujold every few years, not to mention stuff ranging from the Count of Monte Cristo to To Kill a Mockingbird.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I probably reread a lot of dreck too :) But then I don’t read to impress others so, what the hey!)
The Suck Fairy can’t visit every bookcase in the world, and works that the SF, whose initials I just noticed, has claimed as their own, were loved by someone once. They may be loved by someone still.
I like Star Trek book “Debtor’s Planet” (24th century) a lot for characters, except that a bad note for me is that an important humanoid female alien character is raped, between scenes, and the reaction to that doesn’t work for me. A big point of the whole story is that aliens are aliens, and the point made here is that bad guys are bad guys, but in this case, my way to make better sense of it is to read it as the character being raped again in that scene. To read it as repeating an act that has taken place before. I don’t think the author intended that, and if it was encoded, I didn’t see a hint. But I don’t see another way for that crime not to dominate the story following it, and it doesn’t.
The only reason I actively call a book bad is if it is racist, homophobic, ablist, etc. All other matters are simply taste and time period and there is no “right way” to tell a story. But if a book propagates harmful negative stereotypes, makes it seem like SA is okay or things like that, I think calling it bad is justified because it is sending out harmful messages.
Rip-roaring adventure. I’m reminded of the A.E. (Doc) Smith “Lensman” and “Skylark” stuff. Hardly great literature, not much charaterization and full of handwavium, but damn; they were FUN to read!
I will forgive a lot from an author whose voice is “right” to me. Obviously, I make no attempt at speaking for anyone but myself …
“Sometimes, readers want to read about someone like them who is presented positively. If a book offers that, other criteria don’t matter as much.”
Back in the early 90’s, I was ecstatic to find a small gay lit section. I still have a lot of the books. I recognized even then that many of them were poorly written, but I bought whatever I could find. Books that had people like me, that had relatable characters, that didn’t have love interests with “breasts breasting breastily” (maybe the lesbian ones did but I wasn’t buying them). Many of them were crap, a lot of them just mediocre at best, but they weren’t the stories about sad queers, that were acceptable as -literature-. They were the things I wanted to read, like SF, Fantasy and Mystery.
Thankfully over the last 20 odd years it has improved. But sometimes you just want something relaxing and comforting, and (at least now, generally) well written.
While in high school, I couldn’t finish The Lord of the Rings. I got into The Two Towers and drifted away from it. However, I absolutely devoured another fantasy book in the summer between grades 9 and 10: The Sword of Shannara.
I loved the art plates that accompanied the book, but I think the initial draw was something really simply and silly: the protagonist wizard shared my first name (with “on” added at the end). Back in school others put down the book as a “ripoff of Lord of the Rings“. I didn’t care, I enjoyed it immensely.
I’ve recently thought about reading it again, but I’m scared a re-read would ruin my childhood memories.