Isabel Allende is a geek

I recently reread, in preparation for the big Spielberg/Cruise adaptation, H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, and for the hell of it, I also reread 1975’s Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds, a delectable bit of fan fiction by Manly W. Wellman and Wade Wellman. As you might deduce from the title, the book purports to set the record straight, so many of us having been misled by that troublemaker Wells, about what really happened during the Martian invasion, and how the world’s foremost consulting detective was instrumental in saving the world.

Geeks didn’t invent fan fiction, probably (though I can’t think of an example from literature before the rise of the geek that might qualify as fanfic). But from the lowliest, most atrociously written example of Kirk/Spock "slash" to the rows upon rows of Star Trek and Star Wars novels that crowd out other SF at your local Borders, fanfic is, like it or not, one of geekdom’s great contributions to world literature.

That’s not a bad thing. We Xers may have been the first generation of kids to be plopped in front of the tube from infanthood and left to fend for ourselves, but fanfic is proof positive that we are no mere passive consumers of pop culture -- we’re active participants in interpreting it. Technology has made it easy for us to take it further than ever before, as with fan films. (Attention: The folks who brought us the hilarious "Troops" have a new Star Wars fan film for our geeky pleasure: I.M.P.S Relentless, "an epic documentary... of the best damn job in the galaxy.")

But that’s not the proper measure of the influence fanfic has had on the wider culture. This is: A fan film won the Oscar for Best Picture a few years back. And one of the grandest names writing literary fiction today, Isabel Allende, has a new book out. It’s called Zorro, and it’s fan fiction. It might be prettied up some, but let’s call it what it is.

Who knew? Isabel Allende is a geek.