Re: Finding new (to you) SFF to read

On 11/22/2024 3:51 PM, Tony Nance wrote:
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Also thanks for the info about Worm (below). I'm not big on fanfiction, but I fully expect to give Worm itself a try some time.

Much depends on how we define "fanfiction". Authors writing sequels to works by other authors goes way back. In the 19th century, Jules Verne wrote a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket_ and a sequel to Johann David Wyss's _The Swiss Family Robinson_. In the 1930s, H. P. Lovecraft opened the Cthulhu Cycle to his friends and correspondents and the resulting universe has been going strong ever since. L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter and others revived Robert E. Howard's Conan years after Howard's death and turned it into a major franchise in the 1950s-1980s. Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Superman, Batman, Spiderman and other popular characters have been done by hundreds (if not thousands) of professional authors. Etc.
On the crossover side -- crossovers are the bread and butter of fanfiction -- Jules Verne's _The Mysterious Island_ (1875) was a crossover between two of his better known novels. _The Petrified Planet_ (1952) was explicitly designed as a playground for multiple authors. So was, a quarter century later, _Thieves' World_, whose success encouraged other "shared worlds" which took off in the 1980s. DC's _Zatanna's Search_ was a crossover series in 1964-1967. Marvel's semi-regular crossover series started in 1984 with _Secret Wars_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Wars).
If we limit "fanfiction" to amateur works, then it was the Star Trek fandom that popularized it in the early 1970s. When the term "Mary Sue" was coined in 1973 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue), it was to describe what was already a well known phenomenon. By the early 1990s crossover fanfics were common on Usenet -- see _The Universal Science Fiction Parody_ (http://www.eyrie.net/derek/JuraiNet/USFP/index.html), explicitly a parody of "vs" debates and crossover fics. When Usenet became widely available via AOL and then via the internet in 1993-1994, fanfics began spreading online. Some years later, in the 2000s and 2010s, high speed internet made it easier to access all kinds of media -- anime, books, comics, games, etc -- which created further incentives for writing and reading fanfiction.
Re: fanfic's quality, I can handle indifferently (sometimes even poorly) written stories as long as they contain elements that I am interested in. After all, almost all magazine science fiction published prior to the first Golden Age (1939-1942) was objectively poorly written, but it contained elements that attracted a certain type of reader and, eventually, led to much bigger and better things.
The Worm fandom is somewhat unusual compared to other fandoms, perhaps because most canon characters vary from "deeply flawed" to "makes Dr. Josef Mengele vomit" for reasons that become clear later on. It attracts both fanfic authors who want to make everything better (like the author of _Taylor Varga_ mentioned earlier) and authors who want to write depressed, flawed, messed up, etc characters.