I have ever met. Once, during a memorable night of
experimental substance abuse, Jen calmed me down
by explaining slowly, patiently, over the course of five
hours, the entire plot of the ’90s space epic Babylon 5,
why it was the most structurally ambitious TV drama of
the decade, and why we would all make it off the planet
to the exodus ships someday.
Our shared vice, though, was Harry Potter. Harry Pot-
ter fandom was where a generation of young writers cut
their teeth. On sites like FanFiction.net and LiveJournal,
Draco and Harry got to make out, Sirius wasn’t dead,
and Hermione wasn’t white. Warner Bros., the studio
behind the movies, tried to crack down on all the fan
fiction, bombarding fansites with threatening cease-
and-desist letters; it took entertainment giants a long
time to realize that fandoms actually generate enthusi-
asm (and therefore revenue). For the most part, nobody
was trying to make money off J. K. Rowling’s intellectual
property. It wasn’t about fixing or correcting the Harry
Potter universe but adding to it, having fun. The media
theorist Henry Jenkins, a great champion of fans, none-
theless describes them as “poachers” on the property of
established authors—except we weren’t stealing, only
borrowing. We broke into Rowling’s garden, but only
so we could play there with our friends. Fan fiction was
and remains an act of love for the original work, as well
as a longing for everything it isn’t.
That sort of excitable nonsense didn’t figure in the
official Oxford syllabus, which made an implicit dis-
tinction between cheap mass-market storytelling and
real literature—literature that was important enough to
include in the official canon of great works. The writers
we studied were all white, overwhelmingly male, and
mostly dead. We were free to focus on women writers
if we chose. We were also warned by older classmates
that if we did, Oxford examiners would take this as a
sign we weren’t serious.
Women’s stories, just like women’s lives, have long
been assumed to be less serious. We’d already learned
that in fandom. In fact, one of the reasons fan fiction
is so sneered at is that a major part of it has always
been women, often young women, writing sexy sto-
ries about men. It was mostly women who wrote those
schlocky homoerotic romances between Captain Kirk
and Mr. Spock, two tortured souls trapped in elabo-
rately contrived situations where they had to have sex
or die. These stories were painstakingly carbon-copied
and sold at conventions, and the reason they mattered
was that, even at the height of the so-called sexual rev-
olution, there was little room within popular culture for
women to imagine a kind of eroticism outside the sto-
ries we were told about ourselves. In her seminal 1985
essay “Pornography by Women, for Women, With Love,”
Joanna Russ, author of the sci-fi novel The Female Man,
suggests that if young women wanted to fantasize about
an erotic relationship of true equality, it might have to
be between two men, in space.Trek fandom in the 1960s and ’70s, decades before the
launch of those janky, sputtering fanfic websites I pulled
up in the back room. I was drawn, like so many others,
to writers who added subversive or outlandish plots
and romantic pairings to traditional published works,
where they were rarely on offer. In Buffy fandom, one
of my favorites, I met other people who wanted to read
about women making out and fighting vampires—all
shared for free, for the silly joy of it.
The story about what the internet has done to my
generation casts us as innocents corrupted by the great
sucking surveillance machine—a mass of drooling rage-
bots desensitized by porn, recruited into hate mobs,
mashing out content for the maw of Instagram. And
that’s a true story. It’s just not the only story. Along the
sidelines, in the margins, without a great deal of fan-
fare, another sort of narrative was gathering momen-
tum, beginning to alter the entire trajectory of cultural
production.
BEAT TWO
SUMMER 2006
A late-night café in Oxford, England, reeking of sugar
and pheromones. Six or seven teenage students with
the premature myopia of those who have spent most of
their childhood reading on screens are meeting for the
first time in what we, at the time, being terribly edgy,
referred to as “meatspace.” This is the first session of
the Fan Fiction and Folklore student society.
The books and stories you read about the University
of Oxford tend to describe the entitlement oozing from
every ancient balustrade, the smug young toffs in tail-
coats smashing up restaurants and paying their way out
of jail as they prepare to sober up and run the country.
And those stories are true, all of them—they just aren’t
the only stories. There were also lots of shy, nerdy young
people from less refined backgrounds who had clung
to the idea that if we were very clever and worked very
hard, we could go to a fantasy world where people cared
about books and nobody dumped orange juice in our
backpacks. We had survived our childhoods and made
it to wizarding school—they were, in fact, still filming the
Harry Potter movies at Oxford when we studied there—
but we still didn’t fit in. Except with each other.
There were all sorts of reasons for that. Some of us
were working-class, most of us were queer, almost all of
us were twitchy weirdos emerging from the special neu-
rosis of lonely intelligent children everywhere, namely
that we thought far too much and far too little of our-
selves at the same time. And we were all fans. There
was Alex, who introduced me to Firefly, prog rock, and
heartbreak. There was Liz, who introduced me to Tori
Amos, George Eliot, and intellectual rigor, and Jen, Liz’s
instant soul mate and one of the most brilliant writers