Fans will save literature!! (maybe) (sort of)

[delphipsmith]

Just ran across this piece by Lev Grossman (The Magicians) about fanfic, which he calls "the cultural equivalent of dark matter" LOL! The full article is worth a read -- it's long, detailed, and on the whole pretty accurate (and non-derogatory) about fan culture. As a bonus, it specifically identifies the first K/S fic, which I hadn't known before ("A Fragment Out of Time," 1974, in a Star Trek zine called Grup).

Most of all I'm hugely amused by this:

Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.

Yesss! I always knew we were saviors of literature, guardians of the cultural flame!!