Cory Doctorow

This creator appreciates fanworks, but hasn't promised to be cool about fans making money.

Cory Efram Doctorow, who writes under the name Cory Doctorow, created Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the Little Brother Universe series, Makers, and Pirate Cinema. Doctorow considers it a privilege have fans who are engaged enough to be making fanworks, and has released some of his books under non-commercial Creative Commons licenses.

Statements

2007

Science fiction has the incredible good fortune to have attracted huge, social groups of fan-fiction writers. Many pros got their start with fanfic (and many of them still work at it in secret), and many fan-fic writers are happy to scratch their itch by working only with others' universes, for the sheer joy of it. Some fanfic is great — there's plenty of Buffy fanfic that trumps the official, licensed tie-in novels — and some is purely dreadful.

Two things are sure about all fanfic, though: first, that people who write and read fanfic are already avid readers of writers whose work they're paying homage to; and second, that the people who write and read fanfic derive fantastic satisfaction from their labors. This is great news for writers.

Great because fans who are so bought into your fiction that they'll make it their own are fans forever, fans who'll evangelize your work to their friends, fans who'll seek out your work however you publish it.

Great because fans who use your work therapeutically, to work out their own creative urges, are fans who have a damned good reason to stick with the field, to keep on reading even as our numbers dwindle. Even when the fandom revolves around movies or TV shows, fanfic is itself a literary pursuit, something undertaken in the world of words. The fanfic habit is a literary habit.

In Japan, comic book fanfic writers publish fanfic manga called dojinshi — some of these titles dwarf the circulation of the work they pay tribute to, and many of them are sold commercially. Japanese comic publishers know a good thing when they see it, and these fanficcers get left alone by the commercial giants they attach themselves to.

And yet for all this, there are many writers who hate fanfic. ... I'm frankly flabbergasted by these attitudes. Culture is a lot older than art — that is, we have had social storytelling for a lot longer than we've had a notional class of artistes whose creativity is privileged and elevated to the numinous, far above the everyday creativity of a kid who knows that she can paint and draw, tell a story and sing a song, sculpt and invent a game.

To call this a moral failing — and a new moral failing at that! — is to turn your back on millions of years of human history. It's no failing that we internalize the stories we love, that we rework them to suit our minds better. The Pygmalion story didn't start with Shaw or the Greeks, nor did it end with My Fair Lady. Pygmalion is at least thousands of years old — think of Moses passing for the pharaoh's son! — and has been reworked in a billion bedtime stories, novels, D&D games, movies, fanfic stories, songs, and legends.

Each person who retold Pygmalion did something both original — no two tellings are just alike — and derivative, for there are no new ideas under the sun. Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. That's why writers don't really get excited when they're approached by people with great ideas for novels. We've all got more ideas than we can use — what we lack is the cohesive whole.

Much fanfic — the stuff written for personal consumption or for a small social group — isn't bad art. It's just not art. It's not written to make a contribution to the aesthetic development of humanity. It's created to satisfy the deeply human need to play with the stories that constitute our world. There's nothing trivial about telling stories with your friends — even if the stories themselves are trivial. The act of telling stories to one another is practically sacred — and it's unquestionably profound. What's more, lots of retellings are art: witness Pat Murphy's wonderful There and Back Again (Tolkien) and Geoff Ryman's brilliant World Fantasy Award-winning Was (L. Frank Baum).

The question of respect is, perhaps, a little thornier. ... Writers sometimes speak of their characters running away from them, taking on a life of their own. They say that these characters — drawn from real people in our lives and mixed up with our own imagination — are autonomous pieces of themselves. It's a short leap from there to mystical nonsense about protecting our notional, fictional children from grubby fans who'd set them to screwing each other or bowing and scraping before some thinly veiled version of the fanfic writer herself.

There's something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It's unsurprising that when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the task. But that's exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to interpret that character's actions through his own lens.

Writers can't ask readers not to interpret their work. You can't enjoy a novel that you haven't interpreted — unless you model the author's characters in your head, you can't care about what they do and why they do it. And once readers model a character, it's only natural that readers will take pleasure in imagining what that character might do offstage, to noodle around with it. This isn't disrespect: it's active reading.

Our field is incredibly privileged to have such an active fanfic writing practice. Let's stop treating them like thieves and start treating them like honored guests at a table that we laid just for them.

Statement sources

2007—https://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/05/cory-doctorow-in-praise-of-fanfic.html

Works

• "Craphound" (1998)
• "The Super Man and the Bugout" (1998)
• "Return to Pleasure Island" (2000)
• "0wnz0red" (2002)
• "Truncat" (2002)
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
• A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2003)
• Eastern Standard Tribe (2004)
• Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005)
• "I, Row-Boat" (2006)
• Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (2007)
• "Scroogled" (2007)
• Little Brother (2008)
• "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away" (2008)
• "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" (2008)
• "True names" (2008)
• Makers (2009)
• With a Little Help (2009)
• "Chicken Little" (2009)
• For the Win (2010)
• "There's a great big beautiful tomorrow / Now is the best time of your life" (2010)
• The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (2011)
• "Clockwork Fagin" (2011)
• "Another Time, Another Place" (2011)
• The Rapture of the Nerds (2012)
• Pirate Cinema (2012)
• Homeland (2013)
• "Lawful interception" (2013)
• In Real Life (2014)
• "The Man Who Sold The Moon" (2014)
• "Car Wars" (2016)
• Walkaway (2017)
• "Party Discipline" (2017)
• Radicalized (2019)
• Attack Surface (2020)
• Poesy the Monster Slayer (2020)
• The Lost Cause (2023)
• Red Team Blues (2023)
• The Bezzle (2024)