Would Historical Fiction be considered Historical Fanfic?

[Representing_Tromba]

As someone who's writing historical fiction. I'm about to loose myself in a dreadful spiral ?

I also write historical fiction. It is what it is.

 

[SarahsBuzzard]

Speaking from a simple business perspective, no.

I could write a gilded age Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in New England 1894 and sell it (and have). Because it deals with historical events and stuff in the public domain, I can sell it on KDP (and do).

I also wrote a Warhammer 40K fanfic. I couldn't sell that because it deals with a property that's owned by somebody else.

One involves using a setting that belongs to everyone. The other involves writing things as a "fan" of what somebody else own.

There's commonality in the approach to crafting the stories, sure. But the fact that you can profit off one and not the other is a pretty big difference.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Speaking from a simple business perspective, no.

I could write a gilded age Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in New England 1894 and sell it (and have). Because it deals with historical events and stuff in the public domain, I can sell it on KDP (and do).

So essentially August Derleth's "Solar Pons" stories?

 

[Representing_Tromba]

Speaking from a simple business perspective, no.

I could write a gilded age Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in New England 1894 and sell it (and have). Because it deals with historical events and stuff in the public domain, I can sell it on KDP (and do).

I also wrote a Warhammer 40K fanfic. I couldn't sell that because it deals with a property that's owned by somebody else.

One involves using a setting that belongs to everyone. The other involves writing things as a "fan" of what somebody else own.

There's commonality in the approach to crafting the stories, sure. But the fact that you can profit off one and not the other is a pretty big difference.

That more has to do with copyright laws and trademarks than whether something is fanfic. Though I see your point.

 

[SarahsBuzzard]

So essentially August Derleth's "Solar Pons" stories?

I'm actually not familiar with that particular work. I was more inspired by "Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon", which centers around a massive logging fire that took place in Minnesota 1894. It was written by a professor of history who works at a local university there. There's tons of historical Holmes pastiches out there but I'd recommend this one above all the others.

I'll drop a cheeky link to my own work in case anybody is curious. Hope that's ok with the forum rules. Not trying to do a shameless plug (already did the promotion via my socials when it came out). Just giving more context in case you're curious. I'd recommend The Red Demon over my own crack at the genre, honestly. Imo Larry Millet hit it out of the park with that one.

 

[laccoff_mawning]

If historical fiction involves real life people, I'm going to have to say it's a fanfiction.

If you think about it, the "fiction" part of fanfiction comes from the fact that you are writing fiction, not taking inspiration from a fiction. It is fan-fiction. It is fiction, made by/ derived by/ from a fan. Nothing in the definition requires the source material to be fictional.

Furthermore, the creation of such a story hinges about the same "what if..." questions that normal fanfictions often arise from.

If it's only real life events, without the direct existence of any real individual, we could perhaps argue that it's not a fanfiction, only heavily inspired. I don't have an argument on why I think that way, though.

With that kind of logic, I think the interesting extreme point is when authors include mythos. Like the use of the Greek or Norse gods. We generally wouldn't consider said stories to be fanfiction, even though they adopt characters from fictional sources.

I guess we could make the argument that we aren't actually interesting in taking specific characters (fictional or otherwise) called Aries, Hades, or Zeus, but rather, we are interesting in taking the general concepts that they represent, along with their names. Much like I could take the concepts of orcs, dwarves, and elves and still not have my resulting story be a fanfiction.

I guess the idea is that fanfiction needs to be derived from something specific, rather than something general?

 

[CharlesEBrown]

With historical persons you do run the risk of playing with myths and legends too.
For example, there was a person who spread apple seeds around the country and inspired the tale of Johnny Appleseed; there was also a real Johnny Tremaine, who suffered injuries from working with silver; the two were PROBABLY not the same person, but the legend merged them into one. A story about either one separately would likely be "just" historical fiction, but a story about the hybrid legend would be fan fiction.
Paul Bunyan was probably not based on any reality and is a straight-up folk-tale/legend and any stories involving him wound be fan fiction.
A story about George Washington could fall into any category, as there are legends around the man that are 100% true, legends that are based on truth but highly exaggerated, and outright fabrications out there.
A story about "King Arthur" would likely have to be fan-fiction, unless you go to the root documents like Bernard Cornwall or a few other authors did and do a mostly-realistic reimagining of the historical people who became part of the legend (Artorius Pandraeg was almost certainly a real person, and the bastard sun of King Uther Pendraeg, but the other details of his life are ... questionable at best; Myrddin (Merlin) was apparently the nickname of an actual Celtic bard, who likely died about 80 years before Artorius was born; Launcelot du Lac was probably a real person but greatly exaggerated; Mordreunt (Mordred) appears in at least one historical document - as the man who killed Arthur and died in the process, etc.). These tales can also fall into any category.