Lost Transmissions

by Desirina Boskovich

  Fanfic became an underground space where readers could bring themselves to light. So many characters were—and still are—cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical, and white. Plenty of readers are all of those things, but many are not. I, for example, identify as a femme gay trans guy. I am also white, able-bodied, and neurotypical, but failed to find many characters like me growing up.

  The only book in which I did was Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series. It blew my mind that her vampires were queer on the page—so many dog-eared scenes in my paper-backs—and yet it failed to make the impact Harry Potter did, despite Harry being straight and cisgender, because Anne Rice doesn’t allow people to write fanfic. Technically, it utilizes copyrighted material. An author could issue takedown notices to fanfic authors, but most choose to ignore it, assuming no money is being made from their intellectual property.

  Rice’s fans are forced to exchange fanfic through private means, write for themselves or not at all. So while the characters are canonically queer, there’s no means for fans to imagine themselves as queer vampires. To interrogate the world through her stories or reimagine her characters. To suggest that dandy Lestat de Lioncourt might experiment with his gender identity.

  When fans are allowed to experiment without constraints, however, magic happens. Take, for example, author thingswithwings’ Captain America fanfic “Known Associates.” Published in 2016, “Known Associates” is an approximately 300,000-word story about a queer Steve Rogers who identifies as a fairy and experiences bodily dysphoria once he becomes Captain America. Queer and trans people rarely see their experiences reflected authentically in mainstream fiction, which is why so many turn to fanfic. Thingswithwings utilized what Marvel didn’t—and maybe couldn’t: that while a souped-up muscle-body might be a fantasy for straight cis men, it could trigger gender dysphoria for a genderqueer person.

  It’s important to note that in 2018, “Known Associates,” in all its queer glory, broke a barrier between original fiction and fan fiction when it was selected for the Tiptree Long List, which recognizes writing that “encourag[es] the exploration and expansion of gender.” However, it’s not the first penetration of fandom into mainstream fiction. Cassandra Claire is famous for having written The Draco Trilogy, which helped shape the fandom characterization of Draco Malfoy, whose arc in the Harry Potter series left many readers unsatisfied. Claire, a BNF (“big name fan”), went on to write The Mortal Instruments, a YA urban fantasy series, as Cassandra Clare. Though she deleted her fanfic from the Internet, Clare set a precedent for writers moving between fan and original fiction.

  In 2013, Rainbow Rowell published Fangirl, a contemporary YA novel about a college freshman who is a BNF in a fandom similar to Harry Potter. Furthermore, in 2015, Rowell published Carry On, the novel-length fanfic the protagonist of Fangirl is working on, wherein Simon Snow, teen wizard and Chosen One, fights an evil magical force, while falling in love with Tyrannus “Baz” Basilton Grimm-Pitch, another teen wizard who is also a secret vampire and secret queer.

  While Fangirl is mainstream validation of how fanfic not only transforms original works, but also how readers and writers interact with their personal identities and the world at large, Carry On provides direct commentary on aspects of Harry Potter that Rowling didn’t dig as deeply into, such as the abuse Harry suffers at the hands of his caregivers and Dumbledore, as well as what it means to be a Chosen One. But beyond thematic exploration, Rowell queered the Harry and Draco analogue characters, as well as gender- and race-bent several secondary characters.

  Fiction, both fan and original, has always provided me a space to explore what it means to be a queer and trans person, through my protagonists’ stories. I was myself in fiction before I was myself in real life. And now I’m a grown-up writer, like so many of my peers. While I was getting to know the science-fiction and fantasy community of writers and publishing professionals, I hid my origin story. I was ashamed that I hadn’t read all the straight cisgender white authors that were named on convention panels and in essays as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Canon. My canon was comprised of queer fanfic. I’m not ashamed anymore.

  The Internet fan fiction generation is done with fanfic being treated like unoriginal, derivative work that’s cast off as porn. It is worthwhile for many personal reasons, but also because it’s taught a generation of emerging authors to experiment with stories. To write without worrying whether their plots are too tropey, their sex too gratuitous, their queers too unpalatable for the masses. To experience unabashed enthusiasm for characters. To bring all that to their original fiction and science fiction and fantasy at large.

  SYLAS K. BARRETT

  The Time of the Mellon Chronicles

  The Return of the King stars Orlando Bloom (left) as Legolas Greenleaf and Viggo Mortensen (right) as Aragorn. Despite his boyish charm, the immortal Legolas is actually ancient; his 87-year-old friend Aragorn is youthful in comparison. Photo credit: Moviestore Collection / Shutterstock.

  The fandom mailing list is likely as old as fandom itself. Letters and zines have always allowed fans around the world to build communities that shared the same passions. Once, physical mail was the only way large groups of fans could communicate with each other across such distances; but just as the Internet has greatly reduced the popularity of paper letters, it has also changed the way fans interact. Now, they share their thoughts on Twitter and Reddit, post drawings and photo manipulations on Tumblr or DeviantArt, and store their fan fiction on Websites like Archive Of Our Own.

  And yet there was a moment, a brief springtime of the Internet, in which people tried to use the web the way it had once used the postal service. This was the time of Yahoo mailing lists.

  This was the time of The Mellon Chronicles.

  In 2001, Peter Jackson’s blockbuster film The Fellowship of the Ring was released, inspiring both longtime Lord of the Rings fans and brand-new devotees. The LOTR fandom grew rapidly, obsessed with the beauty of New Zealand’s Middle-earth, the unprecedented CGI, and the new life breathed into the characters by truly spectacular actors. Actors like Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom, for example, who accidentally created one of the biggest crazes in the fandom: the bond between Aragorn and Legolas.

  The Aragorn/Legolas Friendship (or A/L Friendship) became one of, if not the most, favored category of fics, due to the way Bloom and Mortensen’s fondness for one another came through on-screen. One can hardly forget Legolas’s first line in the film—yes, it’s his second in the extended edition—as he tells off Boromir for disrespecting a “mere ranger.” (Sit down, Legolas, Aragorn replies in Elvish, looking annoyed.) This was the first of many moments they shared throughout the trilogy, leaning on each other, exchanging smiles and glances that led many viewers to conclude that they were old friends.

  Since Tolkien gave absolutely no background on Legolas—aside from him being the son of that mean old elf king from The Hobbit—fans had plenty of room for invention, and many chose to weave his story in with Aragorn’s. Through individual “fic rec” lists on webrings, fans had unprecedented access to works exploring this new relationship. (Navigated by “previous” and “next” buttons, webrings allowed sites to promote themselves by attaching to other similarly themed Websites linked to a central hub, a useful construct back before the Internet was quite so easily searchable.) One of the most popular of these tales was The Mellon Chronicles; a collection of thirty-four stories containing over one million words.

  In an interview on Vice Motherboard in 2016, the authors of The Mellon Chronicles, known by the pseudonyms Cassia and Siobhan, told the story of how it all started. They had collaborated before, having met via email while involved in the Star Wars fandom. Then, in 2002, Cassia wrote a short story called “Captive of Darkness” featuring a teenage Legolas being kidnapped by humans and eventually rescued by Elrond. Shortly after, using Cassia’s backstory for the elf, Siobhan wrote a story in which an adult Legolas helps a young man named Aragorn. Inspired by t
he shared world, the two began collaborating regularly, emailing back and forth about plots and ideas, sometimes writing their own stories set in the shared universe, sometimes coauthoring a single tale. As emphasis on the central theme of the stories, they used the Elvish word mellon, meaning “friend,” tying the chronicles together.

  Cassia and Siobhan were surprised to discover that a Yahoo Groups mailing list had automatically been set up for the Website where they hosted their stories. They were even more surprised when the group reached over 2,000 members. Some asked permission to set their own stories in the Mellon Chronicles universe, or to use Cassia and Siobhan’s original characters, essentially writing fan fiction of fan fiction. There was a CafePress page where one could buy mugs, T-shirts, and bumper stickers bearing the Mellon Chronicles leaf logo, or phrases like “Elf Girl” and “Ranger Girl.”

  Most of the stories in The Mellon Chronicles followed a format in which one character was injured or in peril (the series had a fondness for dark stories that included torture and abuse) and the other had to rescue him. This formula, known by fandom as Hurt/Comfort, allowed the authors to explore dynamics between characters and the structure of their relationships.

  And while they certainly weren’t the first or only fanfics to use the Hurt/Comfort trope as a springboard, the popularity of The Mellon Chronicles is often considered to have helped cement its use in the fan fiction community. Hurt/Comfort is also popular in romantic and slash fiction (the intimacy of caring for someone often serving as a lead-up to sexual intimacy), but Siobhan and Cassia never included romantic relationships in their stories and included a rule of “no slash or smut” in the mailing list. The Mellon Chronicles was considered, instead, to be a pillar of the Aragorn/Legolas Friendship community.

  In 2003, an offshoot of the Mellon Chronicles mailing list was founded; the aragorn-legolas RPG. In this group, fans of The Mellon Chronicles could participate in a written, round-robin style role-playing game, playing either as canonical characters or inventing originals—mostly either elves or rangers—who often shared the member’s username.

  My name was Ciryatúre, a sea elf from the Grey Havens, one of the people of Círdan.

  Although the series ended in 2005 and the accompanying fan conversations petered out, Siobhan and Cassia’s work remains in archives around the Internet, and is still beloved by fans. There is a YouTube channel that hosts story trailers and other videos inspired by the series, and a “Mellon Chronicles” tag on Tumblr. Many of Cassia’s early-aught photo manipulations can be found via image search, and there is still activity on the Yahoo group. And although the RPG is no longer running, its automatic moderator email still goes out periodically.

  I am still a member of the group, and although I have moved on to other fandoms and participated in new RPGs, I have never quite been able to bring myself to unsubscribe. The friendship of Aragorn and Legolas, the friendship of these other fans, will always be too important to me.

  And I am not alone. As of April 2018, there are still seventy-four others.

  An Interview with Hugh Howey

  Hugh Howey is the New York Times bestselling author of Wool, Sand, Beacon 23, and over a dozen other novels. His works have been translated into forty-plus languages, and TV adaptations of Wool and Sand are in the works at AMC and SyFy. Howey worked as a bookseller while penning most of his novels. His two life dreams have been to write a novel and to sail around the world. He currently lives on a catamaran in Fiji, where he’s continuing to write as he fulfills his dream of circumnavigating the globe.

  DB: Your mega-bestselling Silo series began as a self-published serial on Amazon, an innovative approach that allowed you to build a huge audience. (And yes, I still remember my brief moment of panic as I finished the first installment, a short story titled “Wool”; fortunately, there was more.) Can you talk about the way your work used a new publishing model to follow in the footsteps of other SF writers (and even non-SF writers) who utilized serialized storytelling?

  HH: The craziest thing about stumbling into success with Wool was later discovering that some of my heroes had done the same exact thing. Some of my favorite books growing up—Ender’s Game, Fahrenheit 451, I, Robot—began their lives as short stories before they grew into novels. The same happened for me with Wool. At the time, I was concentrating on writing full-length novels, and I’d published five books before I wrote Wool. This story was nagging at me for years, and I didn’t know when I’d find the time to fit it into my writing schedule, so I condensed it down and released the work as a novelette on Amazon.

  The beauty of Amazon’s platform, and the rise of e-books, is that the length of a story no longer took primacy over everything else. Short works of science fiction have had a long and important history, with countless magazines, anthologies, fanzines, and collections over the years. But now a short story could be purchased and consumed right alongside bestselling novels. On the same shelf. At any price. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It was a complete game-changer for all kinds of stories. Now you could publish hefty tomes that no publisher would risk printing, or box sets that the reader couldn’t possibly carry home if it were physical. In a way, the limitations were dropped and it all became about the author telling the audience a story.

  DB: Do you think publishing a story in shorter installments shapes the way you approach the narrative? Does audience reaction impact how you develop the story (much like it might on a television series)? Do you think about plot arcs differently?

  HH: Absolutely! I never thought Wool would grow into a novel, much less a bestselling series. I wrote a short work and moved on, but readers didn’t move on. They settled in and asked for more. They started a conversation. They asked questions. I dove back into the world I’d dreamt up and began telling more stories.

  I’ve seen complaints from some writers about listening to audience feedback, and I’ve never understood this. Storytelling has traditionally been a live event. It’s an oral tradition. You engage with the audience, feed off their energy, sense what’s working and what isn’t, and the story transforms over time and with the retelling. Dickens got this. He honed his craft with feedback from his readers. That doesn’t mean you simply give readers what they think they want—it means you are in tune to their response to your work. It’s like playing a concert as a musician. I think the modern concept of an author is akin to an artist making music in a booth, alone and without contact or input. I see it more like playing a guitar for friends and family, and then on a street corner with a hat, and then in small venues, and hopefully one day on the big stage. It should be vibrant, alive, and in the streets.

  DB: You’ve talked about your theory that dystopian and postapocalyptic stories such as the Silo series are part of a much, much older tradition of Survival Stories—which may actually have been the first stories, stories with a purpose. Can you expand on that a little?

  HH: We are storytelling animals, it’s a central part of what we do. We gossip, joke, regale, thrill, terrify, all with the power of story. There are theories about why this is a universal trait, and how it helped us survive as a species, and most of these theories center around the bonding aspect of storytelling and the use of story as a warning device and learning tool. We tell kids if they wander into the forest, a witch might eat them. We tell stories of how the world got here and what our place in it is. Most world religions are simply us telling these ever-evolving origin stories of our existence.

  As long as we look back, we see survival stories. They are probably the oldest stories there are. Stories of the hunt, of being cut off from the tribe, of being lost in the woods. These survival stories are about losing touch with our tribe and civilization. They challenge us to imagine how we might survive such travails, and also to warn us against getting lost in the first place.

  The first survival stories were lost-in-the-woods stories. Makes sense, right? These people lived on the edge of a wilderness. It was a dangerous place. Wander off, and bad thin
gs might happen. When we pushed out to sea, we began telling deserted island stories. Again, we are cut off and must somehow survive. Again, we are playing out an ever present dread of losing our mates, our tools, our homes. The Odyssey is the grandest story in this tradition.

  Westerns are survival stories, told about a new wilderness where the law was still unsettled, the land dangerous, the stakes high. Always pushing out on the edge. Until there was no more edge to push to. And then we looked skyward.

  The Martian is a deserted island story. And every disaster flick is an attempt to find an edge where none exists. Now that we’ve covered the Earth and pushed into the heavens, the only way to tell survival stories is to tear everything back down. These stories are not new; they are a continuation of all that’s come before. But now, to find the wilderness in which to get lost, we have to imagine civilization has crumbled. When people ask me why postapocalyptic stories are suddenly huge, I explain that these have been the oldest and most important stories we’ve ever told. When they ask when the fad will die, I tell them never.

  DB: What Survival Stories influenced you most? Particularly those outside the science-fiction canon?

  HH: Gulliver’s Travels (though I often argue that this is one of the earliest works of science fiction), The Tempest, and The Count of Monte Cristo are a few of my favorite from fiction. But the ones that really drive me crazy and that I return to over and over are the true stories (and the root of our storytelling tradition): Callahan’s Adrift, Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, Shackleton’s South. I find these stories vastly compelling. This is why literature exists, I would argue. We wouldn’t have books without this human need. When writers in other fields look down on survival stories, I find them to be like those who dismiss our ancestors.