Snark's REAL First Law of Fanfic

[athelind]

I've realized that "Running the Asylum" is really Snark's Second Law of Fanfic. The first dates back thirty years:

"Star Trek novels exist because Paramount realized they weren't getting a cut of the fanzine market."

The previous entry has been adjusted accordingly.

On the other claw... is that just a specific example of the "Sufficiently Established Franchise" rule? It certainly set the stage for the incorporation of fan writers into the Official Canon.

On the gripping hand, it could be said that Star Trek fell prey to the Second Law in the second season of the original series, when they accepted a script from an unpublished college student who sent in a pile of unsolicited script submissions...

Comments

[scarfman]

In the words Archy the Cockroach wrote to me, yea, about ten years ago:

the hot ticket in science fiction 
publishing these days is the shared 
universe this is how it works a big 
name author creates a new world or 
tosses away one he s done milking 
and everyone else starts writing 
in it do you remember when this new 
trend took off question mark i do 
exclamation point it was at about 
the same time that the entire 
publishing industry learned that a 
paperback novel with leonard 
nimoy s pointed ears on the cover 
will sell a jillion copies

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Hey, at least David Gerrold wrote good fanfic. :) I always thought D.C. Fontana's stuff was even more fanficcier, if that's a viable term.

I mean, seriously. Pon farr?

-The Gneech