Subject: *Casually walks dog*
Author:
Posted on: 2019-10-02 18:59:00 UTC

That is a good point. And you're right: Those old SF scenes didn't really have so much fanfic as Trek did. Probably because there was less on a pure lore level to be invested in in a lot of those settings. If I'm writing, it's trivial to borrow from Asimov without dragging the US Robotics Corporation along for the ride. So... people didn't. At least, not often, as far as I can tell.

Trek, Tolkien, the Sci-fi/Fantasy wave of that era changed that. There were a lot more settings that you could get invested in as places, and a lot more characters you might want to write about. And yeah, that was definitely around the time it tends to be widespread. Before that, it tended to have smaller circulation, sometimes only between authors (like, real, published authors, writing fanfic of each other's works. This happend. I think. I forget the source).

>Usenet fanfic communities in the... well, it doesn't actually specify, probably the early '90s?

Aaah, and now we arrive firmly in my wheelhouse. And you're probably dead on, actually (well, you would be... you probably lived a little of it). The mid-90s was when the Usenet hit its peak (although it was still well active into the 2000s—which we shouldn't forget, seeing as we were founded in the 2000s by self-acknowleged alt.fan.pratchett readers). Specifically, Usenet hit it big after September of 1993, when AOL and CompuServe users (and all the rest of the Common People who didn't work for large computing companies or inhabit universities) were given network access—or as the old-timers call it, "The September that Never Ended," which some may cite as the dawn of users complaining about a bunch newbies ruining everything, but that discounts all the TENEX/TWENEX/ITS/et al. users who were probably complaining about all the usenet users when they were the newbies.

Sorry, pointless digression. Anyways...

What's really fascinating is the state of "online" fandom pre-1993. Because it wasn't a uniform thing. If you were a Mere Mortal in the 80s, what you had (if you were lucky) was an IBM PC or an Apple II or a Commodore 64 and a slow modem. That was your lot. And what you could do was call other (often beefier) microcomputers sitting on people's desks somewhere in your vicinity (long distance? Oof, that'd be expensive...). These are BBSes, or Bulletin Board Systems. And they played host to their own strange cultures and quirky characters. Some of them even wrote fanfiction, although zines were probably more popular. Jason Scott's textfiles.com is a repository of files from these systems and this period.

But if you were one of the Chosen Few, and could dial into a university (or maybe even went to one...), you might have Usenet access, with all the powers (the ability to talk to people across the nation) and responsibilities (if you didn't toe the line local or remote administrators would disable your ability to post...) thereof. If you want to find out about the fan scene of the era here... oh man do you have a goldmine of text. Henry Spencer and others recorded over a decade of usenet posts back in the day and Google grabbed the lot of it. A simple search of Google Groups can grab you usenet content going back decades. Of course, these archives are messy and incomplete... so it's faaar from perfect. But it's better than some have.

But the reeeaally lucky ones were they ones who had internet access. Or... well, ARPAnet, probably. Either because they were at a university or similar... or because they could dial into MIT or similar (MIT's AI Laboratory would let literally anybody log into their computers and use them for free... which would lead to a lot of people spinning up MUD servers that MIT people would have to kill before they did Real Work). These users not only could probably access usenet, they had access to real-time communication–Real-time chat with other users (and by the end of the 80s, IRC, essentially as it is today), and other interesting distractions.

And by "other interesting distractions," I mean MUDs. Multi-User-Dungeons. Effectively, text-based MMOs, frequently with user-generated content. By the mid-80s, some of these had trickled down to the compute-poor BBS users, they'd really take off in the early-to-mid 90s (well, inasmuch as something like this could ever take off, even in those days), with several offered by services like AOL in addition to those hosted on the broader internet (usually on University computers, without the administration's knowledge or consent).

MUDs live on to this day, with several dedicated to roleplaying in prominent or not-so-prominent fandoms, such as RedwallMUCK. Indeed, fandom-based-roleplaying servers (or fandom-inspired sections of larger MUDs) were prominent from the start. As were MUDs dedicated to the furry fandom. Those are still popular as well.

And of course, having just finished talking about Masterharper of Pern sort of kind of, I can't leave Pern out when talking about MUDs. Because Pern is actually kind of a big deal in MUDs. Why? Because Pern fans couldn't write fanfic. But they could roleplay. Which they took full advantage of. PernMUSH was founded in 1991 and (after several careful negotiations with McCaffrey) only closed down more than 20 years later—unfortunately, I don't think they left any database dumps behind, so we can't even see the empty weyrs.

What is the relevance of any of this? Oh, there isn't any. I just wanted an excuse to ramble about internet history for a bit and the fandom connection was too good to pass up.

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