A Brief, 2,770-Year History Of Fan Fiction

There are those who believe that all fiction is fan fiction. Because the earliest stories written down were actually reinterpretations of oral tales told around campfires, then, on some level, when Homer created The Odyssey, that was his fanfic of quasi-historical mythological tales that had been heard by millions of people for hundreds of years. Finding an origin point where fan fiction (aka fanfic) and true, “original” fiction are spiritually different is perhaps impossible. And, if we were to pop back in time in the TARDIS or Doc’s DeLorean and bring Shakespeare to the present, he would have no idea what you were even talking about. Great stories almost naturally provoke audiences to want to create more great stories. Or as Michael Chabon put it in his 2008 book Maps and Legends: “All novels are sequels; all influence is bliss.”

That said, today most people know the difference between fanfic and, well, not fanfic. But how? Philosophically, there may be no real difference, but in reality, there is. And the key to that delineation, which creates a difference, requires a very brief history lesson.

Fanfic of Ancient Times, From Homer to the Brothers Grimm (the Sixth Century BCE to the 1800s)

In the middle of the sixth century BCE, the poet Homer formalized the now-familiar tale of The Odyssey, which was not his original concept, but rather his take on oral tales that came from much older tales that preceded him by about 450 to 600 years. For a modernish reference, this would be like somebody doing fanfic of the 1953 James Bond novel Casino Royale in the year 2403, in a type of medium we can’t even yet imagine. (Perhaps telepathic stories that are delivered via a cream you rub on your face?)

But the thing with The Odyssey is Homer’s version has jumped media over the centuries; and its first medium was that of the oral tradition, or spoken “rhapsodies.” Experts on folktales and fairy tales will note that many such foundational stories like The Odyssey are mnemonic, and as Gail de Vos and Anna E. Altmann state in their book New Tales for Old, the ancient storyteller “improves with the driftwood of stock themes and phrases, original in the momentary linking of them.” In other words, the concepts of the characters or the themes are out there in the ether, so storytellers (we might call them enthusiastic fans today) commonly would draw upon these ideas to form “new” stories. Anyone who knows even the tiniest bit about George Lucas’ process for creating the original Star Wars is aware of Joseph Campbell’s notion of the monomyth, which suggests that various concepts recur in stories, which Campbell largely attributed to psychological reasons of the Jungian variety.

But even if we don’t believe in the reason for the existence of the monomyth, the idea that themes that are attractive to the imagination tend to show up over and over again throughout time is, generally, demonstrably true. And more to the point, the writer’s urge to create something from something, rather than something from nothing, is very old.

Case in point: William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, circa roughly 1599, was an early example of the original RPF, or Real Person Fanfic. Caesar was a real historical figure who died in 44 BCE, but in Shakespeare’s version he had clock towers (there were no clock towers in 44 BCE in ancient Rome) and was also haunted by legit, real ghosts. In short, Shakespeare took huge liberties throughout his plays with history, geography, and fantasy, and yes, borrowed more than a few existing myths and legends to make his stories work. Today, both Shakespeare and Homer would be utterly baffled if a movie studio or book publisher issued them cease-and-desist letters for using copyrighted IP in any of their new works, because, let’s face it, if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing plays about the Avengers or the boys on Heated Rivalry.

So, what changed? Part of the big shift is, again, connected to the medium. You’ve heard of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, not because Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm invented those stories, but because they got those stories published in book format in 1812. This very well may be one of the most influential forms of fanfic ever, since the Grimm versions became the default versions of these stories for countless generations, which eclipsed memory and relevance of those versions. (Correlatively, lots of fanfic-ish things can, and do, end up eclipsing the thing they were based on. If we think of Star Wars as George Lucas’ fanfic of Flash Gordon, we know which one is more famous. Ditto Bill Finger and Bob Kane ripping off the Shadow for the creation of Batman.)

But, broadly speaking, even though it’s arguable that the Grimms co-opted stories created by the people and turned those into their own creative provenance, they didn’t own those fairy tales. At least not legally. That didn’t happen until later.

Fanfic Evolves: Sherlock Holmes, copyright laws, and Star Trek zines (1890s to 1980s)

Copyright laws, in a sense, effectively created fan fiction, since fan fiction for profit exists, often, in opposition to copyright. The beginning of copyright law in regard to published works coalesced over time, but after 1930, the modern age of how we think about fictional characters, legally, began to take hold. Crucially, the invention of fan fiction is connected to one thing: penniless publishing.

If someone is making a profit off of a derivative work, and the original is copyrighted, then you’ve usually got a violation. If you’re not making a profit, and you’re distributing your fanfic, freely, you’re (usually) in the clear. But how did we get there?

In 1891, Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie published a short story (anonymously) called “My Evening With Sherlock Holmes,” which was a parody of the great detective, who was created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had only just debuted in 1887 in A Study in Scarlet. Barrie and Doyle were buddies, but had they not been, could Doyle have sued Barrie or the magazine that published the story? Likely not. Although copyright law existed in the U.K. since the Copyright Act of 1842, early laws in both the U.S. and the U.K. mostly protected direct rip-offs of characters, rather than plot. The 1930s case, Nichols v. Universal Pictures, established that you couldn’t really own plots, but that developed or “delineated” characters could be protected by copyright law, while stock characters could not.

Meanwhile, the 1909 Copyright Act in the States gave authors exclusive rights over adaptations of their works, which meant that theatrical versions of books were less loosey-goosey than before; this is where our time-traveling Shakespeare probably would have gotten into the most trouble. Finally, in 1976, the Copyright Act was overhauled, which helped establish concepts like “fair use” and the notion of the legal status of derivative works. This is a bit reductive, but it was at this point that the question of profitability came into play.

Following Sherlock Holmes fanfic, of all varieties and legalities, the biggest explosion and arguably largest influence on modern fanfic came from the Star Trek franchise. In 1967, the zine Spockanalia #1 was created by Sherna Comerford and Devra Langsam in celebration of the original Star Trek, which, at the time, was still airing new episodes. This contained fiction, poems, and articles about Spock and Star Trek, which went on to spawn countless other Trek fanzines, which, in turn, created all sorts of fanfic concepts including the very notion of “slash” fiction and the trope of “the Mary Sue.”

Before FanFiction.net and Archive of Our Own — because the internet didn’t exist in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s — Star Trek fanfic became the most visible example of what we know and think of fanfic today. And, in another predictive development, many Star Trek fanfic writers, from Della Van Hise to Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath, all later went on to pen and publish fully authorized Star Trek novels, which didn’t fully exist yet when the fanzines first began.

Harry Potter and the Internet (2000s)

With the dawn of the internet, fanfic quickly went from what seems to have been a very long infancy (hundreds of years?) to the format we’re more familiar with today. In short, the best and most effective medium for fanfic turned out not to be zines made by hand (as beautiful as those are) but websites in which anyone could write and upload their fic. This suddenly meant all sorts of fandoms, from Star Trek to Batman, had a new outlet for their stories.

But the newest fandom proved to be the most prolific. By the early 2000s, Harry Potter fan fiction was everywhere online, and suddenly all sorts of new slash fiction, of the more wizarding variety, proliferated. For a time, as the films became a huge franchise for Warner Bros., the specter of legal action threatened various websites hosting Potter fanfic. “During these early years of online fandom, copyright holders were extremely protective,” historian Mattias Boström writes in his 2016 book From Holmes to Sherlock. “Warner Bros., which thought the fans were stealing its property rather than celebrating ... used to send cease-and-desist letters.”

As Boström points out, and as many remember, “entire web communities risked being deleted if the wrong material ended up there.” But after 2008, following a legal shake-up with Steve Vander Ark’s nonfiction guide, The Harry Potter Lexicon, fair use, not-for-profit Potter fan fiction continued, fairly unfettered.

From Fic to Bestseller (2011 to 2020s)

In modern times, perhaps the most curious fanfic phenomenon is a transformative one. As some might know, author E.L. James blew up in 2011 with her originally self-published online book Fifty Shades of Grey, which, oddly enough, began as Twilight fanfic. When you think about Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight being inspired by various vampire stories that came before, the hall of mirrors of fan-ish inspiration becomes dizzying, and even more interesting, since Fifty Shades of Grey doesn’t have any vampires in it. (Just sadists!)

The success of the Fifty Shades novels was so great that in 2012, various Random House employees, regardless of their connection to the book, each received a $5,000 bonus. This means that various folk in the publishing industry benefited from something that began as Twilight fanfic online. And that was before the film adaptation with Dakota Johnson.

In terms of massive amounts of money being made in publishing or in Hollywood, Fifty Shades might be the pinnacle of fanfic triumph. But this year’s The Love Hypothesis is in a similar fanfic–to–mainstream book–to–popular movie pipeline. Ali Hazelwood’s concept began as a kind of fanfic about the Star Wars characters Rey and Kylo Ren and now has very much become its own thing.

Of course, Hazelwood and James don’t need to be aware of the long history of fan fiction that helped their success along, but from Homer to Star Trek writers and beyond, fanfic today doesn’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but ordinary people who are, well, fans.