Kevin Kelly has a must-read essay online today which relates to the current Harry Potter leakmania (see Cory’s previous posts, below). Snip:
Might the hive mind of fanfiction predict the plot of the seventh Harry Potter?
We’ll know in 2 days. At least four books (see below) aggregate the predictions for the final episode in the Potter series. Anticipating the course of beloved stories has a long tradtion. Novels were the new media of the eighteenth century. Readers loved the innovation they offered: complex characters depicted so vividly that they seemed to live beyond the story’s pages. These full-bodied characters could be carried along serial episodes, or even lifted into other dramas and other media. This persistent life made reading novels hugely popular but it also tempted readers to transport these characters into their own stories. As soon as novels appeared, fans began writing their own alternative endings. Sequels to two of the first novels ever published, Robinson Crusoe, and Don Quixote, were issued by their authors primarily to preempt fan-written versions. Today we call that fan fiction. The universe of this derived work is very large; more than 10 million fanfic stories have been penned so far. Any popular fiction series you can name, from Jane Austen to Star Wars, will have thousands of extended stories written by avid fans.
Every new medium since the novel has engendered further fan fiction, and nothing has done more to boost the involvement of the audience with fictional characters than the internet. In two days the largest book phenomenon of the year, perhaps of the decade, culminates as millions of people dive into the seventh and final Harry Potter book. Preceding them is a small army of intense Harry Potter enthusiasts on the internet who have already laid out in great detail their predictions of exactly what will happen in book seven. For years they have been scrutinizing the dark corners and subtexts of the first six books with a diligence that any professor of literature would be proud of, and have rendered their analysis as speculative story plots.
Previously on BoingBoing: