New ee a Fan Fiction and Fan erie he Age elnternet )ALSO BY KAREN HELLEKSON The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (McFarland, 2001) Liprary OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the Internet : essays / edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. P. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7864-2640-9 softcover : 50# alkaline paper@S 1. Fan fiction —History and criticism. 2. Literature and the Internet. L. Hellekson, Karen, 1966- . II. Busse, Kristina, 1967~ PN3377.5.F33F36 2006 809.3—de22 2006014823 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2006 Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover photograph ©2006 Brand X Pictures. Manufactured in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mefarlandpub.comPreface This book was built on the meeting of two worlds, the fannish and the academic, and was also built on the collision of two different kinds of fan worlds and fan experiences. Kristina and Karen first met at the 2004 Inter- national Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, an academic conference that both science fiction academics and writers attend —itself a kind of world-colliding. Our shared scholarly interests, academic backgrounds, and investment in fan texts and fan media sources provided a common ground, but while working on this book, we discovered that although we were both active in fandom, whatever that term means, our activities took quite different forms. Both of us have PhDs in English, but whereas Kristina teaches, Karen does not. Both of us enjoy slash fan fiction: Karen writes it and runs a mailing list and a related fan archive, and Kristina reads and critiques it. Kristina is a fannish butterfly, lurking in every fandom and reading voraciously; Karen is a monofannish, selective reader. But since we've met, and especially since we've worked on this project together, we've changed too: Kristina has begun to engage with the texts more creatively; Karen has moved into the LiveJournal.com blogsphere and into other fan- doms. Our worlds have merged and we are both the richer for it. This meeting of worlds relies on an extension of experience through relationships and community, and this has become a central theme in this volume. When assembling papers for this volume, we were certain of one thing: we wanted to situate it at the intersection of the fannish community and academic discourses on fan culture. As a result, all the writers tend to be fans as well as academics; all are conscious of the difficulties surround- ing those positions and their interactions. We come from a variety of fan- doms and a variety of theoretical backgrounds, yet we all share an intersection of fannish and academic approaches and interests. Fandom as we find it now is quite different from the mostly zine-based, often hidden,