neadods | RPF - the Professional Book Side (Reply)

geezer_fen have all been discussing RPF - that's fic, not slash in specific - this week, so it's on my mind. Especially since the book I'm reviewing is RPF - and more F than I expected it to be, and that aspect is overwhelming me in response particularly to lasst week's discussions.

So, for a minute I'd like to talk about professional RPF, although I'm not sure I have a coherent thesis.

In the professional stuff I tend to draw the same lines as I do for fanfic. I intensely dislike people taken out of their own context - I flat-out refuse to review the Jane Austen or Louisa May Alcott mysteries, for example. Those horrify me on three counts, two of which go well above and beyond my opinions of fanfic:

1) The author is using a real person well out of context for their own purposes.
2) Worse, the author is doing so for personal profit, which I consider unspeakable.
3) And possibly worst of all, the author is riding the coattails of a much, much better author.

I have yet to see an imitator of Alcott or Austen who can come near the power of the orginal, either in power of the writing or in staying power in publishing. It's obscene to me to see someone whose book will disappear without a trace within a year trying to hitch their career to someone who has lasted for centuries. Work on your own craft and don't try to steal someone else's reputation! The only living author who could equal Austen is probably Susanna Clark, and she wisely stuck to her own work.

And yet... I did review a Edgar Allen Poe mystery, despite objections 2 & 3 above. Poe wrote such stories, it didn't seem to me to be so disrespectful to imagine he might want to write one, if handled properly. That the author completely reimagined him into "Eddie the Accountant" and wrote such eyeball-bleedingly bad prose that I slammed the book here as well as on Reviewing the Evidence is a different matter. Why would anyone center a series on someone they so obviously have contempt for?

The book I'm reviewing is slightly younger - so much so that the author specifically said he was waiting for everyone involved to die. I'm still making up my mind about that...