Fan fiction is an historical term for certain forms of [[storytelling]] during the [[Industrial-Copyright Era]]. The term was first used within [[early fandom]] to describe not-for-profit storytelling within fandom, but in the late 20th century came to refer specifically to stories told in violation of the era's [[commercial censorship]] laws, under which a commercially and legally recognized "owner" could impose legal penalties on tellers of "derivative" stories.
Subsequent to the international abolition of commercial censorship following the [[Chiyoda Convention of 2023]], the term became one of largely historical significance. Analytic and [[computational literary theory]] does not support a distinction between "fan" storytelling and "original" storytelling in works published before or after the Industrial-Copyright Era.[1][2][3]
While pre-analytic literary theorists had by and large discarded the concept of "originality" as a poor model of the process of story creation, [[Leonard's Theorem]] showed that the classification of authors or works into "original" and "fan" was an artifact of the censorship regime rather than of the creative process itself. The bimodal distributions of βcha and φplot arose from intermediate values being subject to legal penalty.
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." —T. S. Eliot, early industrial-era author
"In gist, 'original' stories are just 'fan' stories with the names changed." — E. Mitchell Leonard, analytic literary theorist
Nice! I really hope the pendulum doesn't swing that far, though.
Speculation is important for forecasting; it's also fun. Speculation is usually conveyed in two forms: in the form of an argument, or encapsulated in fiction; each has their advantages, but both tend to be time-consuming. Presenting speculation in the form of an argument involves researching relevant background and formulating logical arguments. Presenting speculation in the form of fiction requires world-building and storytelling skills, but it can quickly give the reader an impression of the "big picture" implications of the speculation; this can be more effective at establishing the "emotional plausibility" of the speculation.
I suggest a storytelling medium which can combine attributes of both arguments and fiction, but requires less work than either. That is the "wikipedia article from the future." Fiction written by inexperienced sci-fi writers tends to generate into a speculative encyclopedia anyways--why not just admit that you want to write an encyclopedia in the first place? Post your "Wikipedia articles from the future" below.