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the David on practically every corner. For centuries, the way to become a Florentine sculptor has been to copy Michelangelo, to learn from the master. Not just the great Florentine sculptors, either -- great or terrible, they all start with the master; it can be the start of a lifelong passion, or a mere fling. The copy can be art, or it can be crap -- the best way to find out which kind you\'ve got inside you is to try. 
 
Science fiction has the incredible good fortune to have attracted huge, social groups of fan-fiction writers. Many pros got their start with fanfic (and many of them still work at it in secret), and many fanfic writers are happy to scratch their itch by working only with others\' universes, for the sheer joy of it. Some fanfic is great -- there\'s plenty of Buffy fanfic that trumps the official, licensed tie-in novels -- and some is purely dreadful. 
 
Two things are sure about all fanfic, though: first, that people who write and read fanfic are already avid readers of writers whose work they\'re paying homage to; and second, that the people who write and read fanfic derive fantastic satisfaction from their labors. This is great news for writers. 
 
Great because fans who are so bought into your fiction that they\'ll make it their own are fans forever, fans who\'ll evangelize your work to their friends, fans who\'ll seek out your work however you publish it. 
 
Great because fans who use your work therapeutically, to work out their own creative urges, are fans who have a damned good reason to stick with the field, to keep on reading even as our numbers dwindle. Even when the fandom revolves around movies or TV shows, fanfic is itself a literary pursuit, something undertaken in the world of words. The fanfic habit is a literary habit. 
 
In Japan, comic book fanfic writers publish fanfic manga called dojinshi -- some of these titles dwarf the circulation of the work they pay tribute to, and many of them are sold commercially. Japanese comic publishers know a good thing when they see it, and these fanficcers get left alone by the commercial giants they attach themselves to. 
 
And yet for all this, there are many writers who hate fanfic. Some argue that fans have no business appropriating their characters and situations, that it\'s disrespectful to imagine your precious fictional people into sexual scenarios, or to retell their stories from a different point of view, or to snatch a victorious happy ending from the tragic defeat the writer ended her book with. 
 
Other writers insist that fans who take without asking -- or against the writer\'s wishes -- are part of an \"entitlement culture\" that has decided that it has the moral right to lift scenarios and characters without permission, that this is part of our larger postmodern moral crisis that is making the world a worse place. 
 
Some writers dismiss all fanfic as bad art and therefore unworthy of appropriation. Some call it copyright infringement or trademark infringement, and every now and again, some loony will actually threaten to sue his readers for having had the gall to tell his stories to each other. 
 
I\'m frankly flabbergasted by these attitudes. Culture is a lot older than art -- that is, we have had social storytelling for a lot longer than we\'ve had a notional class of artistes whose creativity is privileged and elevated to the numinous, far above the everyday creativity of a kid who knows that she can paint and draw, tell a story and sing a song, sculpt and invent a game. 
 
To call this a moral failing -- and a new moral failing at that! -- is to turn your back on millions of years of human history. It\'s no failing that we internalize the stories we love, that we rework them to suit our minds better. The Pygmalion story didn\'t start with Shaw or the Greeks, nor did it end with My Fair Lady. Pygmalion is at least thousands of years old -- think of Moses passing for the Pharaoh\'s son! -- and has
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