The Giant Nerds Of Sumatra

摘要

Long before Lostpedia and in-character Mad Men tweets; long before Kirk made out with Spock in a turbolift, courtesy of some devotee's overheated imagination; long before the words slash and drabble came to signify genres of, ahem, literature, there was Sherlock Holmes. Scarcely had Arthur Conan Doyle begun publishing his tales of the deductive detective when an avid fan base sprang up, the first of a new breed of followers. These early Sherlockians weren't content simply to read the books. They wanted to enter the world Conan Doyle had created, puppeteer his characters, and design their own mysteries for Holmes to solve. In short, they wanted to play, and, with Xbox still a few years off, they ended up doing the next best thing: They wrote stories. Lots of them. It was the dawn of fandom as we now know it-zealous, fractious, hydra-headed, and participatory. Of course, these 19th-century proto-nerds didn't use the phrase fan fiction. The term wouldn't enter the lexicon until the mid-'60s, around the publication of the earliest fanfic journal, the Star Trek-themed Spockanalia.