Everyone expresses their fandom in different ways. As a lifelong fan myself, I try to enforce a no fan-shaming zone wherever I go. Want to stay up all night reading fanfic until you drowsily drop your phone on your face? Great! Want to learn to speak a fictional language from your favorite fantasy book series? Sounds fun! Want to stalk your celebrity crush online all day from work? I’m not your boss!
There are so many books now about fandoms and fan culture that I know my own book, Ship It, is just one flavor from the buffet line of fan-related literature.
So here are some of my favorites:
Grace and the Fever by Zan Romanoff
Real Person Fiction (RPF) / Bandfic
Grace and the Fever follows teenager Grace, who is deep in the fandom for boyband Fever Dream, which has long been deemed uncool by her nonfandom (read: civilian) friends. In a fantasy-like coincidence, Grace accidentally meets the lead singer one day and gets swept up in his world of celebrity and backstage drama, all while trying to reconcile her current unbelievable level of access to her favorite band with her inner fangirl who is freaking the hell out.
Beautifully written, Grace and the Fever brilliantly weaves together the RPF self-insert fantasy of suddenly finding yourself friends with the people you’ve been fanning over for years with the real-world truths of how hard it is being in the spotlight. Like Almost Famous for the boyband set, it’s a fun and emotional peek behind the curtain of music celebrity. It’s also generous about fandom while still being clear-eyed about the ways fans can overreach or cross the line. Romanoff is clearly working from a personal and intimate knowledge of fandom, which makes it an authentic and loving portrait of the community.
Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
Pining / Enemies-to-Lovers
This is a meta pick because Carry On is not technically a book about fandom; it’s a fantasy novel about two teen wizards who hate each other and then fall in love. But the book is so shaped by fanfiction that every word is steeped in a deep understanding of fandom and the ways fandom chooses to love. Carry On is the companion novel to Fangirl (also great!), which is about Cath, a college student who writes gay fanfic about her favorite novel series-turned-movie-franchise. Carry On brings Cath’s fanfiction to life. What’s so wonderful about Carry On is that Rowell fully embraces the fanfic tropes that make fic so addictive. (Enemies-to-lovers? Yes! Mutual pining? Oh hell yes!) If you’ve never read fic before, Carry On is a great intro to why it’s so much fun to read.
Dear Rachel Maddow by Adrienne Kisner
Angst / Pining
Told in a series of unsent email drafts from lesbian teenager Brynn to her hero Rachel Maddow, this book captures how turbulent teen years can be, and how having a celebrity to look up to can be emotionally grounding, even if you never speak to them directly. Brynn admires Maddow’s activism and outspokenness, even as she tries to resist taking up the mantle against injustice in her own school. But eventually, Brynn realizes she must take charge and find the activist spirit within herself. It’s a story about how loving a celebrity can actually make you a better person. After all, no one wants to disappoint their hero. Sweet and empowering, and effortlessly very queer, Dear Rachel Maddow will make you want to use your voice for good.
The Wicked and the Divine by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie
Self-insert / RPF
Laura Wilson is just a fangirl, but not of a band or a movie or a TV show. She’s a fan of The Pantheon: the group of twelve Gods who appear every 90 years for just two years and then die out. But when The Pantheon appears and Laura has the opportunity to meet them, her expectations are much different than the reality. This comic takes fandom to a cosmic level, yet it still feels approachable and relatable to modern fans—Laura has posters hung in her room of her favorite Gods, and she memorizes all the info she can about them before they arrive. The Wicked and the Divine is self-insert fanfic mixed with ancient mythology, and it works on both levels.
Queens of Geek by Jen Wilde
Pining
Queens of Geek is told in two perspectives by two different kinds of fans over the course of one big convention. There’s such a wide diversity of fanning happening in this book—cosplaying and fanfic and roleplaying and vlogging—that just about every fan will find themselves somewhere in the story. Bonus points here also for the rainbow of diversity, from racial diversity to mental health discussions to representations of all kinds of queer sexualities. Queens of Geek is a fun, funny romp through the fannish shenanigans of a convention.
Britta Lundin is a TV writer, novelist, and comic book writer. Her young adult novel about loving a TV show more than anything else, Ship It, comes out May 1 from Freeform Books. She also currently writes on the show Riverdale on the CW. A longtime fanfiction reader and writer, she can track her life milestones by what she was shipping at the time. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, she now lives with her wife and their lime tree in Los Angeles.
Will have to check these out.
As a book fan who had wish fullfiment happen, it should be fun to see other takes on the experience.
“Bimbos of the Death Sun” is about a murder at a con (Rubicon, I think) but it’s really about fandom in the 80’s. Very funny if you went to a con back then, though it hasn’t aged well.
“How Much For Just the Planet?” by John Ford is about, well, clumsy Vulcans, amateur theatricals, and Star Trek Fandom. Among many other things.
WHAT MAD UNIVERSE by Fredric Brown may have been the first of these.
Jo Walton’s Among Others is a great love letter to fandom and finding community in addition to being a fantasy novel.
Richard Purtill also did a con murder novel. There’s also Murder at Pennsic.
Bob Proehl’s A Hundred Thousand Worlds. The former star of a cult tv series (now over) travels across the country with her young son, stopping at various comic cons along the way.
Diana Wynne Jones set a story at a British Science Fiction Convention – “Deep Secret” published by Gollancz in 1997. It’s first in Magids series
If I can recommend one. Fallen Angels – Niven, Pournell & Flynn. It’s about Science Fiction fandom saving the lives of two astronauts in a world where ‘big science’ has been outlawed.
Geekerella stole my heart!
It is anthropologically interesting that the author talks about fans of bands and tv shows, along with comic cons and shipping (which we used to call slash). There’s one obligatory mention of books in the intro but no book fandom in the stories listed.
Yet allmost all the comments, including this one, are from old-school fans of books. Of course, Tor IS a publisher.
Also, another shout-out for Diana Wynne Jones.
@10 The Rainbow Rowell books are about a book fandom!
It’s a little offbeat, but We’ll Always Have Parrots by Donna Andrews takes place at a convention for a fantasy TV show. The main character’s not a fan, per se, her boyfriend’s one of the actors, but she gets it. Lots of different ways of doing fandom are represented, and it’s a very funny book.
What is the name of the book where someone has to figure out who the real alien is at a science fiction convention? I keep meaning to read it and the title keeps slipping my mind.