Simon accepts his assigned role with good grace, but he’s completely unable to control his magic. In Carry On, Simon Snow is the “worst chosen one who’s ever been chosen”. Earlier this year, Rowell tried to simplify the twisted paths people were creating between her books, telling Time, “I don’t think it’s fan fiction, I think it’s more like canon!” People called it fan fiction about fan fiction (more than a few “fanception” jokes went around), which isn’t quite right: when an author borrows her own characters for another original work, it certainly isn’t fan fiction it’s just fiction. The response was electric – and also somewhat confusing. Last year, Rowell announced that her next book, Carry On, would have its roots in a previous one, with the magical hero of her stories-within-a-story, Simon Snow, set at a fully-fleshed out Watford School of Magicks. Fan fiction is a way for Cath to retreat from her real-life problems and her struggles with original writing, but it’s also integral to her growth, both as a writer and a young woman. The Simon Snow books are clearly core texts in Cath’s world fan fiction is her way of talking back to them, just as millions of Potter fans were talking back to JK Rowling’s texts in real time.
CARRY ON RAINBOW ROWELL MPREG FANFICTION SERIES
These books circumstantially resemble the Harry Potter series – the Wiki entry that opens the book foregrounds this, describing hundreds of millions of copies sold and boycotts by Christian groups – but they touch on all sorts of fantasy themes and texts.
She has found comfort in her obsessions with a fictional canon: the world constructed in her beloved Simon Snow books, a series of eight children’s novels by British author Gemma T Leslie. But few of those mainstream portrayals of fanfic and the communities built around it have been as knowing – or as sympathetic – as Fangirl.įor Fangirl’s alienated protagonist, Cath, fan fiction has always been a mode of survival. The internet exposed and expanded the reach of fan fiction, and recent commercial successes – 50 Shades of Grey chief among them – have encouraged media scrutiny into the practice. And it’s never helped that overwhelmingly, the writers of fan fiction are female. Moral objections – to this day, plenty of authors and their readers assert that it’s “wrong” to borrow others’ characters, even if most of it’s for fun rather than profit – have kept fan fiction underground, too.
Fan fiction-like reimaginings have been a key critical and novelistic tool in the 20th century, in books like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which famously constructs a backstory for the character of Mrs Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, or Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, which reinvents The Tempest from a postcolonial perspective.īut for years fan fiction has been relegated to the shadows, in part because copyright infringement concerns limit the means of publication. Every novel, play or poem about a real-life historical figure does this in some way, from King Lear to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.
Fan fiction-like practices, filling in the gaps, or shifting the perspective of a story, or using fiction to engage critically with a text, are embedded in literary tradition. Is it fan fiction? A novel? Or some meta-commentary on both?įangirl was published in a growing spotlight on fan fiction and other transformative works. Now her fifth novel Carry On is set to push the format even further. The first, Eleanor & Park, a teenage love story set in Omaha, Nebraska in the mid-1980s, is arguably the better-known of the two, rising quickly on the bestseller list partly due to word-of-mouth from booksellers, librarians and the YA literature community.īut for my money it’s the second of Rowell’s books that year, Fangirl, that’s her true achievement: it’s arguably the first-ever novel about fan fiction to see mainstream success. Rainbow Rowell has been much-acclaimed: in 2013 she published two books that were named among the best young-adult novels of the year by the New York Times.