Fan Fiction and Harry Potter

There was a fascinating piece of news published a week or so ago. I stumbled onto it in a link to a site called "Stuff" or, more properly, stuff.co.nz, which means, according to my understanding of these things, that the site is registered in New Zealand.

The gist of the story is that a Harry Potter fan, George Lippert by name, wrote a story involving Harry Potter that takes up after the end of the final book in J.K. Rowling's massively successful seven book Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and then posted his story on his own website.

Now, there's a long underground tradition of what is referred to as "Fan Fiction." Essentially, fans of a given book or movie or TV series use the characters and settings from their favorite, or favorites if they're feeling extra-frisky, and write original adventure stories that fall outside the established (read "published" or "broadcast") canon. In these stories, almost anything can happen from romances to marriages, from wild adventures to cross-species mating. I first heard of this sort of thing in association with the original Star Trek TV series back in the 1960s and I think that may even be where a lot of the ideas for this sort of thing originated since there don't seem to be too many examples that pre-date that time.

The trick with all of this, of course, is that the various media franchises from which these fan writers "borrow" the characters and settings are owned by large media entities who have shown, on occasion, a tendency to be highly litigious in order to protect the value of the properties they control. In a lot of cases, these corporations may be aware of the existence of these unauthorized stories and simply turn a blind eye as long as they don't see the fan writers doing anything ambitious like printing and selling copies of their stories. Think of it as some dirty little secrets that aren't really secret and probably aren't all that dirty either.

The interesting news part, though, is that J.K. Rowling herself has taken a public position and said that she won't be suing anybody who writes Harry Potter stories as long as they don't sell them and as long as they make it clear that Rowling is not herself personally involved in the stories. That's more than a bit of a leap past the point of turning a blind eye and strikes me as, if not revolutionary, at least generous-hearted and benign. From all I've seen over the years, that doesn't surprise me about her but I do tend to wonder what her publishers and her movie production company think about her decisions to say in public what they've only really ever allowed "under the table," so to speak. The photo that leads this story is from that "Stuff" story link and I can't help but think that the smirk in her expression is the result of feeling the power she now has to make large entities smile and do what she wants–and more power to her.

- John

Master of Space War

Space wars are the foundation stones of science fiction, but contemporary media have given them some stiff competition through movies, television, and, especially, video games. Why would anyone want to read about a gunner on a space cruiser when he can be the gunner of a space cruiser? The kick of gaming is intoxicating, and any science fiction writer who's able to hold onto readers in the teeth of that kind of competition must have very special narrative powers. Enter William C. Dietz, whose novels blaze with colorful characters, evil aliens, and nonstop action.

E-Reads has published two of Dietz's early novels, Freehold and Prison Planet, and we're happy to tell you that more are on the way. Look for Bodyguard, Mars Prime, Matrix Man, Steelheart and Where the Ships Die in the coming months.

Meanwhile, we'd like to treat you to the first chapter of his just-published Berkley "Legion of the Damned" novel When All Seems Lost about which Publishers Weekly says, "This adrenaline-fueled Clancyesque adventure is Dietz in top form."

- Richard Curtis

The Castle Perilous Series by John DeChancie

Fashions come and go. That's their nature. It happens with clothing styles, with cars--and with a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being subject to the whims of fashion. Like, for instance, books.

In the 1980's and 1990's in the SF/Fantasy publishing business, one of the major flavors of the decades was humorous fantasy. Terry Pratchett may have started the whole thing with his still-very-popular Discworld series but he was not alone in his success. Craig Shaw Gardner wrote a series about a magically-challenged wizard whose spells were apt to produce unexpected, and often painful, results. Another series that was quite popular around about the same time was the Castle Perilous series of novels by John DeChancie. They were quite a bit different from his early novels about truckers in space (more to come on those in another entry sometime soon) but they caught the public imagination and he wrote eight of them before the reading public's taste changed (as it always seem to do eventually) and the books fell out of publishing favor and out of print. Which, of course, provided exactly the sort of opportunity that E-Reads was conceived to exploit. All eight titles in the series are now available once again as ebooks and most are also available as print titles with the last couple just about to become available.

Castle Perilous is a world (or worlds, or possibly universe or universes) out of time. There are 40,000 rooms and each one is an entryway to a different place in space and time. Open a door and step from a stone corridor into a jungle, a desert, an island or, if you're particularly unlucky, as so many of the visitors to the Castle seem to be, into a battlefield or someplace even more hostile and dangerous. Think Marx Brothers with really scary special effects and live ammunition. And sometimes it also resembles the famous Hotel California, where you can check out but you can never leave.

Maybe that last paragraph was a bit too scary itself. The essence of the Castle Perilous series, although it occasionally shows a darker edge, is hilarious contretemps and massive misunderstandings, spiced with wild and unpredictable adventure and, as the stage directions sometimes read, hilarity ensues.

Just because humor isn't the current flavor of the decade, that doesn't mean that we don't all need a laugh now and then (In my opinion, we need laughs as often as possible, to help us deal with the way life keeps surprising us and not always in pleasant ways.) and John DeChancie delivers them consistently, entertainingly and with a style all his own. These books probably aren't quite old enough to be referred to as classics yet but they are destined to be recognized as such as they age. In the meantime, give them a try, then help us figure out why some people didn't find them as witty as anything in the genre. It beats us, since they still make us laugh a lot!