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crack_van2004-02-02 02:33 pm
executrix.livejournal.com) wrote in crack_van2004-02-02 02:33 pm
Between Life and Death by Loulou Harris (PG-13)
Fandom:BLAKES7
Pairing: Various implied pairings of canon characters, and original characters
Author on LJ: ?
Author Website:?
Why this must be read:
You are a lover, admirer, or simply a person bemused by meta-fiction, the post-modern, and the phenomenon of fandom, so you click on the first part of this novel-length medi(meta?) tation. You find that it is written in the second person, present tense, by a fan inspired to apply the method of Italo Calvino’s “If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller” to Blakes7 fandom. (It’s also rather Ulysses-ish in terms of reprising the major fanfic genres in a series of interpolated stories, whose titles create a kind of acrostic.)
OK, out of pastiche mode and into review. This is simply one of the damnedest things you’ll ever read about the experience of being a fan--from First Contact with fandom, first club membership, first zine, first play seen because your favorite actor from the show appears in it…(There’s a wonderful cameo appearance by an unnamed B7 actor…no names, no pack drill.)…first con, first visit to a zine library, first kerfuffle about possible movie…
The over-arching narrative is a Story Quest--you, the reader, are constantly frustrated in your attempts to find out what happens in several incomplete fanfics embedded within the text. The first one, also called “Between Life and Death”, is an AU account of the Andromedan War in which Blake and Avon end up in a labyrinth on an alien spaceship…where they encounter infinite regresses in The House of Infinite Chambers and things are, of course, not what they seem…You lose your printout before you can finish reading the story…and it has disappeared from the Website, although somehow it morphs into “Blake Beset by Adversaries”, by someone else entirely--this time Dev Tarrant’s pre-TWB account of the Freedom Party and factional rifts within the Cause.
Within the quest, You meet two more fans, the siblings Jonathan and Jemima (your first face-to-face encounter with other B7 fans) before a performance of a new play which “includes among its cast your favourite star from Blake’s Seven” [sic]. Jemima is a devout but single-minded fan who will only read certain kinds of fics--the ones that seem to her to be close enough to canon to be assimilated into canon--and only after they’ve been “refereed” by her friend Garda, whose loyalties and agenda are very much in doubt.
But Jemima’s own stories, according to Jonathan, are constructions upon the precisely laid foundations of what we can refer to as the “Jem universe”, [and] are hailed by some as architecture of the most satisfying kind, decried by others as unlawful and heterodoxical irrelevancies. […] He makes the whole business appear as complex and surreal as some creation of Kafka’s, wherein a simple error might lead to righteous anger, wounded pride, ostracization. You feel yourself becoming drawn, bemused yet almost grudgingly into this world.
You go to Bath to visit Jemima, but the journey is more complex than you expected. You meet the enigmatic (of course) Garda, who is employed as Jemima’s private Blakes7 librarian, who has recently been forced to expel “Between Life and Death” from the house because it’s a slash story. Garda also works in a university’s Cultural Studies or, as she calls it, Cultural Vacuum department and is working on an article that gains Obscurity Points by referring to B7, which nobody remembers, instead of Star Trek, which everybody does. (Her article--including a minutely detailed and deadpan accurate conrep--appears in Part 11.)
You find this incredible; you have always perceived both characters as extremely heterosexual and the idea that an entire subgenre exists to explore the idea of any homoeroticism between them seems to you to be highly inappropriate. Garda continues. […]The tension between Avon and Blake is an erotic tension; it arises from the deeply ambiguous nature of their relationship. It is a classic homoerotic relationship, like Julius Caesar and Brutus, David and Jonathan, Kirk and Spock![…]Put like this it does indeed seem as though there are aspects of these characters’ relationships which you have not fully considered..
The Approved Zine List can include some het, but only Avon/Cally, Avon/Soolin, Avon/Anna, or Avon/Servalan--AU only. Tarrant can have Servalan, Dayna and of course, Zeeona but never Cally or Soolin. Vila can have no one but Kerrill unless the crew are under some sort of intoxicating influence in which case he can anyone who is available. Blake can be paired with either Cally or Jenna but only for confused one night stands. I don’t know why she likes Blake to be so confused about sex; perhaps she really does secretly believe in slash.
But then the world of B7 fandom is stirred by the news of an impending film version…and Jemima is so disturbed by the possible impact on her personal canon that she heads off to California to confront the scriptwriter, and You and Jonathan go after her.
From the screenwriter’s diary (which also contains his dire PGP plotlines for the proposed film) as he debates casting suggestions such as David Duchovny and Alan Rickman, and Ralph Fiennes: If we want him played like first or second season Avon then we have to get someone who can bring out that heroic element whilst still retaining the cynical wit. Or maybe we want the angst-ridden Avon of the third series? He could never vocalize those feelings so we’d have to get someone who can say it all with The Look.
The scene shifts to a con, where various fen (including the very real BNF Pat Fenech, name-checked and quoted) debate the Nature and Purpose of Fanfic, and exactly what Avon was up to anyway…as explored by the next interpolation, “On a Lonely World Isolated by Indifference,” Avon’s PGP Death Row memoirs.
In any case, is it not the case that in the world of Blake’s Seven the very notion of an ending is itself uncanonical? For the majority of the series, all endings are temporary or else, entirely deceptive; there are only minor truces, transient resolutions, each leading onto a new beginning in the very next episode. Perhaps that is why the finale jars so and why so many fan writers have been unable to accept it as a genuine ending.
NOTE: If you want to explore the Aquitar Files archive there are only a few live links on the home page; to link to the rest of the stories, you have to scroll down and click where it says “access to Contents Page.” Aquitar is a mineral (an isotope of Plotdeviceum). A few throw-away lines in canon say that both Blake and Avon worked at the Aquitar Project, which failed to develop teleport technology for the Federation. Fanonically, this is often used as a peg for the premise that they knew each other then, often Biblically.
Between Life and Death (This is Part 1 of 14, with links to the next part at the end of each one; the URL is the same except that the last part is bld.2.html or whatever. )
Author’s Note
Pairing: Various implied pairings of canon characters, and original characters
Author on LJ: ?
Author Website:?
Why this must be read:
You are a lover, admirer, or simply a person bemused by meta-fiction, the post-modern, and the phenomenon of fandom, so you click on the first part of this novel-length medi(meta?) tation. You find that it is written in the second person, present tense, by a fan inspired to apply the method of Italo Calvino’s “If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller” to Blakes7 fandom. (It’s also rather Ulysses-ish in terms of reprising the major fanfic genres in a series of interpolated stories, whose titles create a kind of acrostic.)
OK, out of pastiche mode and into review. This is simply one of the damnedest things you’ll ever read about the experience of being a fan--from First Contact with fandom, first club membership, first zine, first play seen because your favorite actor from the show appears in it…(There’s a wonderful cameo appearance by an unnamed B7 actor…no names, no pack drill.)…first con, first visit to a zine library, first kerfuffle about possible movie…
The over-arching narrative is a Story Quest--you, the reader, are constantly frustrated in your attempts to find out what happens in several incomplete fanfics embedded within the text. The first one, also called “Between Life and Death”, is an AU account of the Andromedan War in which Blake and Avon end up in a labyrinth on an alien spaceship…where they encounter infinite regresses in The House of Infinite Chambers and things are, of course, not what they seem…You lose your printout before you can finish reading the story…and it has disappeared from the Website, although somehow it morphs into “Blake Beset by Adversaries”, by someone else entirely--this time Dev Tarrant’s pre-TWB account of the Freedom Party and factional rifts within the Cause.
Within the quest, You meet two more fans, the siblings Jonathan and Jemima (your first face-to-face encounter with other B7 fans) before a performance of a new play which “includes among its cast your favourite star from Blake’s Seven” [sic]. Jemima is a devout but single-minded fan who will only read certain kinds of fics--the ones that seem to her to be close enough to canon to be assimilated into canon--and only after they’ve been “refereed” by her friend Garda, whose loyalties and agenda are very much in doubt.
But Jemima’s own stories, according to Jonathan, are constructions upon the precisely laid foundations of what we can refer to as the “Jem universe”, [and] are hailed by some as architecture of the most satisfying kind, decried by others as unlawful and heterodoxical irrelevancies. […] He makes the whole business appear as complex and surreal as some creation of Kafka’s, wherein a simple error might lead to righteous anger, wounded pride, ostracization. You feel yourself becoming drawn, bemused yet almost grudgingly into this world.
You go to Bath to visit Jemima, but the journey is more complex than you expected. You meet the enigmatic (of course) Garda, who is employed as Jemima’s private Blakes7 librarian, who has recently been forced to expel “Between Life and Death” from the house because it’s a slash story. Garda also works in a university’s Cultural Studies or, as she calls it, Cultural Vacuum department and is working on an article that gains Obscurity Points by referring to B7, which nobody remembers, instead of Star Trek, which everybody does. (Her article--including a minutely detailed and deadpan accurate conrep--appears in Part 11.)
You find this incredible; you have always perceived both characters as extremely heterosexual and the idea that an entire subgenre exists to explore the idea of any homoeroticism between them seems to you to be highly inappropriate. Garda continues. […]The tension between Avon and Blake is an erotic tension; it arises from the deeply ambiguous nature of their relationship. It is a classic homoerotic relationship, like Julius Caesar and Brutus, David and Jonathan, Kirk and Spock![…]Put like this it does indeed seem as though there are aspects of these characters’ relationships which you have not fully considered..
The Approved Zine List can include some het, but only Avon/Cally, Avon/Soolin, Avon/Anna, or Avon/Servalan--AU only. Tarrant can have Servalan, Dayna and of course, Zeeona but never Cally or Soolin. Vila can have no one but Kerrill unless the crew are under some sort of intoxicating influence in which case he can anyone who is available. Blake can be paired with either Cally or Jenna but only for confused one night stands. I don’t know why she likes Blake to be so confused about sex; perhaps she really does secretly believe in slash.
But then the world of B7 fandom is stirred by the news of an impending film version…and Jemima is so disturbed by the possible impact on her personal canon that she heads off to California to confront the scriptwriter, and You and Jonathan go after her.
From the screenwriter’s diary (which also contains his dire PGP plotlines for the proposed film) as he debates casting suggestions such as David Duchovny and Alan Rickman, and Ralph Fiennes: If we want him played like first or second season Avon then we have to get someone who can bring out that heroic element whilst still retaining the cynical wit. Or maybe we want the angst-ridden Avon of the third series? He could never vocalize those feelings so we’d have to get someone who can say it all with The Look.
The scene shifts to a con, where various fen (including the very real BNF Pat Fenech, name-checked and quoted) debate the Nature and Purpose of Fanfic, and exactly what Avon was up to anyway…as explored by the next interpolation, “On a Lonely World Isolated by Indifference,” Avon’s PGP Death Row memoirs.
In any case, is it not the case that in the world of Blake’s Seven the very notion of an ending is itself uncanonical? For the majority of the series, all endings are temporary or else, entirely deceptive; there are only minor truces, transient resolutions, each leading onto a new beginning in the very next episode. Perhaps that is why the finale jars so and why so many fan writers have been unable to accept it as a genuine ending.
NOTE: If you want to explore the Aquitar Files archive there are only a few live links on the home page; to link to the rest of the stories, you have to scroll down and click where it says “access to Contents Page.” Aquitar is a mineral (an isotope of Plotdeviceum). A few throw-away lines in canon say that both Blake and Avon worked at the Aquitar Project, which failed to develop teleport technology for the Federation. Fanonically, this is often used as a peg for the premise that they knew each other then, often Biblically.
Between Life and Death (This is Part 1 of 14, with links to the next part at the end of each one; the URL is the same except that the last part is bld.2.html or whatever. )
Author’s Note
Very funny review!
I have been toying with the idea of putting my fanfic on LJ. I'll not be writing anymore but if people are still interested...I had quite a few stories in print zines, which never made it online. And Reba and I stopped doing anything to Aquitar Files a long time ago. (I lost the only copy of the fancy version on a laptop whose harddrive went zap...)
Anywho, I'm enjoying working through some of these recs. Thanks!
Re: Very funny review!
PLEASE put your stories on LJ, we have some New Souls for the Faith, and many fans have hung on for years or decades and would dance in the streets to have more of the great old zine stories available online.