Fanfic? What's fanfic?
The Guardian yesterday had a brief and accidentally hilarious article about the highly respected literary writer Francis Spufford who has written an ‘unauthorised’ Narnia novel and is most upset that C S Lewis’s estate isn't begging him to publish it.
The total lack of context was quite startling. As far as everyone concerned with the article seemed to be aware, he must be the first person ever to write such a thing and of course it ought to make him lots of money because his (also white male middle-aged) friends thought it was really really good. So much so that they were happy to award it somewhat premature canon status as "a sensitive and brilliant addition to the Narnia corpus". There was bafflement about why the Lewis estate was utterly uninterested but not the slightest recognition that they no doubt get sent unauthorised Narnia novels at least twice a week and they aren't talent spotting literary agents.
I'm sure many of us have been tempted to print out 75 hard copies of our favourite pride and joy fanfic and hand them out to our family and friends, but most of us have just about enough self awareness not to tell the Guardian about it. Anyway many of the comments are fun.
The total lack of context was quite startling. As far as everyone concerned with the article seemed to be aware, he must be the first person ever to write such a thing and of course it ought to make him lots of money because his (also white male middle-aged) friends thought it was really really good. So much so that they were happy to award it somewhat premature canon status as "a sensitive and brilliant addition to the Narnia corpus". There was bafflement about why the Lewis estate was utterly uninterested but not the slightest recognition that they no doubt get sent unauthorised Narnia novels at least twice a week and they aren't talent spotting literary agents.
I'm sure many of us have been tempted to print out 75 hard copies of our favourite pride and joy fanfic and hand them out to our family and friends, but most of us have just about enough self awareness not to tell the Guardian about it. Anyway many of the comments are fun.