One reviewer wondered if my novella, A Symposium in Space could be considered fanfic. Yes, it’s inspired by The Symposium by Plato. The characters’s names are similiar to the speakers in The Symposium; Phaedra, Pausania, Sokrat, Alkibiadea, Aristophania, and Eryximachia. The symposium attended is more of a dinner party and gathering as in Plato’s work than an actual symposium; taking place in a matriarchal intergalactic democracy; an inverse of Ancient Athens.
What if Agathea, unlike Agathon was engaged in a rarefied form of vampiric behavior? What if she could feed on the feelings of love of her guests if they put them into speeches? What if she offered each speaker a dinner reflecting those words?
What if Alkibiadea put into action what Alcibiades professed about Socrates; chasing her elderly philosopher across the galaxy in a gesture of love?
When I wrote A Symposium in Space, I was chocked full of ideas like these. Even the name of the used spaceship seller was an anagram of Meletus, who spoke out against Socrates during Plato’s Apology.
Fannish thoughts sped my writing while I worked. Fannish thoughts are never far from my mind.
For a long time, I tried to hide this. I never dared to write anything I’d call fanfic as I struggled to become a published author. It wasn’t until I found Archive of Our Own I dared to post any actual fanfic of my own. (If my sales for A Symposium in Space were anything like my kudos for How Many Ninja Are In Love with You?, I’d be a much more successful writer, but that’s another story. :)) Fannish ideas, however, often take on life of their own. Ideas of bringing Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella together in a curious love triangle resulted in Fairest. A woman finding out she was the clone of another character in a popular comic made me start thinking about a clone living with her original self; all the trouble which might brew between them as well as how they might bond. I found myself considering a series of clones with varying relationships and rights to their original self in a decadent intergalactic future.
Fannish ideas have become fanfics. Sometimes they’ve taken in a life of their own, becoming original stories.
How about you, dear reader? Ever have a fannish idea which sparked an original story in you?