I’m rereading Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, and thinking about it this time around in relation to my experience as a reader, as influenced by structural/contextual factors. Namely:
- The breaking of conventional writing wisdom.
The book is written largely in second person, which was unexpected and jarring for me upon first read. In addition, the book dates itself very explicitly by referencing contemporary memes — which, given the transitory nature of memes, becomes an even more extreme version of books that date themselves through the mention of specific technologies or brands (usually longer-lived than memes). As a writer, I’ve been warned against both of these practices by teachers, writing group friends, and writing craft resources alike.
I’m still not sure how I as a reader feel about the memes. They’re used effectively for humor, and they do give Harrow a certain surreal quality, a “did she really just write that?!” quality. In relation to the second-person POV, I likely would’ve given up reading if not for two factors: the fact that I greatly enjoyed the previous book in the series and therefore had some trust in the author already, and the fact that I was listening to it on audiobook — a stellar performance by Moira Quirk. These observations seem important in the context of AI/algorithmic writing, which can sometimes produce results that are “interesting” but not particularly enjoyable or compelling. Firstly, I will need to tread carefully around the potential use of conceptually interesting but strongly unconventional/unfamiliar structures, as readers will not have any reason to give me the benefit of the doubt. However, such content could be counterbalanced by the inclusion of a particularly strong element that taps into human connection, empathy, familiarity, or immersion — much like the best audiobook performances.
- Muir’s fanfiction background, which I was not aware of until very recently.
I’ve been thinking about fanfic as both a form of reader response to a text, and an instance when emotion plays a particularly strong role in the response; you have to feel strongly about a book to put in the effort to write fanfic, and many fics are written in response to particularly emotionally compelling or distressing elements of the original work. Even when this is not the case, it is certainly another form of reader engagement with the text that creates new meaning. Often, this new meaning is created in concert with other fans, because longer works of fanfic are posted serially, giving readers time to interact with each other and often with the writer during the course of the storytelling itself.
In addition, there’s a sense in which fanfic provides some emotional distance for the author even as it engages with particularly emotional elements from the original work: Because the emotional core of the characters has been created by someone else, and because there’s room for a wide range of fic from absolutely ridiculous to incredibly serious, authors can (if they choose) protect themselves from the level of emotional exposure that is often assumed or demanded in original work. In a way, the source material and its author (though not actively) serve as a mediating mechanism between the fic author and their audience, just as much as the fic author serves as mediating mechanism between original author/work and fic readers.
This makes me wonder what it means for work to be mediated by a human for other humans, versus by a machine/algorithm for humans. In a way, the latter could be construed as relinquishing control over our imagined futures, as we discussed in Narratives of Digital Capitalism last week — allowing an algorithm to predict and steer our content consumption and behavior. However, this assumption is complicated somewhat by the fact that fanfic is so much about imagining alternate “realities” within fictional works (literally, often, alternate universes or AUs). Often, these alternate realities are even responding to contemporary events or looking to the future in the real world, e.g., Harry Potter fanfic that divorces itself from the problematic and abusive behavior of J.K. Rowling. In a way, fanfic — given its often serialized nature — can respond to contemporary developments and look toward each new iteratively imagined future in a way that original fiction cannot because original work is “one and done” (except maybe for series, but even series come in much larger pieces, and with much less flexibility given the long timelines of the publishing industry).
So what does this mean for fanfic as a means of interacting with fiction? Can there be such a thing as compelling machine-written fanfic, or does the lack of intent and emotion still make it impossible? Is there a particularly “AI” or “machine” way that we could consider responding to original fiction — a sort of fanfic that centers AI concerns/needs/ways of constructing knowledge — and what does it look like? (Or, again, is the question irrelevant because a machine without consciousness does not have concerns as such? Although this way of looking at it immediately feels reductive…)
And, finally, what does all of this mean (if anything) for works like Harrow the Ninth that have fanfic somewhere in their origin story, as well as works that are particularly fertile grounds for fanfic? It seems that there’s a slightly different contract between reader and writer within the fanfic context, including different expectations for interaction, as well as for structural aspects of the work itself (e.g., expected tropes, writing style, character dynamics and how they’re constructed in relation to original characters, and fanfic genres that don’t correspond to genres in original fiction). And this becomes particularly interesting given that fanfic is necessarily, at least to some extent, technologically mediated, as it is primarily disseminated online. Do these different reader-writer contracts and technological contexts provide room for different forms of algorithmically mediated writing or reading?
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