Meta rec
Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to point you towards the most insane meta post ever known to man.
Last year at I-Con, during a panel on the future of science fiction as a genre, there was one old-timer on the panel (who’d shown himself the previous year to be the most bitter man alive; the result of decades of reading slush, I suspect) who lamented at length the loss of the dialog in the genre.
You see, back in the day, when science fiction was mostly in magazines, you could see the dialog between stories; how ideas would propogate, how authors would be inspired and antagonized by each other, how they would write directly in response to each other, and how they would respond to their fans, whose letters were printed at the back of the magazines. But now, cries the old timer, everyone’s writing in a bubble! It’s horrible!
One of the other panelists, an established sf author, tried to point out that there still was a dialog, but it was severely slowed down by the fact that sf is mostly in book form now, which take years to produce rather than months, and it’s a much larger genre, making it more difficult to see the threads between authors.
All this to say: at the time I realized that that sort of dialog goes on all the time in fanfic. You can see ideas propogate between stories. And icarus has done the impossible: track these intertextual connections. Not only is her post a list of the most influential stories in SGA fandom in the last year, but she also analyses what this shows about trends in the fandom this year as opposed to the previous year, even going so far as to try to link this trends to events in canon and in the real world.
I weep to think how much time went into this post. As someone in the fandom, I find it’s fairly accurate for my experience as well, and it’s nice to take a step back and look at the fandom over all. The only flaws are ones that she cops too: most of the stories are by a few key players. This means that when she talks about fandom trends over all, she’s really talking about the trends of these few prolific writers as their interests in the fandom change. Trying to take in what all the hundreds of lesser known writers are putting out would be nigh on impossible, but I think would show that there’s been far less change in subject matter of fic than I think she’s implying. Specifically when she states that the fandom has gotten more serious. 2006, after all, is the year the story The Wheel, Atlantis, Wars and So On was written.
This probably isn’t interesting at all for someone not in SGA slash fandom, but it’s a pretty fascinating post if you’ve got some time to kill.
I once tried to do a similar thing, just trying to track the history of beanie baby fic in SGA fandom and found even that to be a deceptively difficult task.
Last year at I-Con, during a panel on the future of science fiction as a genre, there was one old-timer on the panel (who’d shown himself the previous year to be the most bitter man alive; the result of decades of reading slush, I suspect) who lamented at length the loss of the dialog in the genre.
You see, back in the day, when science fiction was mostly in magazines, you could see the dialog between stories; how ideas would propogate, how authors would be inspired and antagonized by each other, how they would write directly in response to each other, and how they would respond to their fans, whose letters were printed at the back of the magazines. But now, cries the old timer, everyone’s writing in a bubble! It’s horrible!
One of the other panelists, an established sf author, tried to point out that there still was a dialog, but it was severely slowed down by the fact that sf is mostly in book form now, which take years to produce rather than months, and it’s a much larger genre, making it more difficult to see the threads between authors.
All this to say: at the time I realized that that sort of dialog goes on all the time in fanfic. You can see ideas propogate between stories. And icarus has done the impossible: track these intertextual connections. Not only is her post a list of the most influential stories in SGA fandom in the last year, but she also analyses what this shows about trends in the fandom this year as opposed to the previous year, even going so far as to try to link this trends to events in canon and in the real world.
I weep to think how much time went into this post. As someone in the fandom, I find it’s fairly accurate for my experience as well, and it’s nice to take a step back and look at the fandom over all. The only flaws are ones that she cops too: most of the stories are by a few key players. This means that when she talks about fandom trends over all, she’s really talking about the trends of these few prolific writers as their interests in the fandom change. Trying to take in what all the hundreds of lesser known writers are putting out would be nigh on impossible, but I think would show that there’s been far less change in subject matter of fic than I think she’s implying. Specifically when she states that the fandom has gotten more serious. 2006, after all, is the year the story The Wheel, Atlantis, Wars and So On was written.
This probably isn’t interesting at all for someone not in SGA slash fandom, but it’s a pretty fascinating post if you’ve got some time to kill.
I once tried to do a similar thing, just trying to track the history of beanie baby fic in SGA fandom and found even that to be a deceptively difficult task.