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By Chris Meadows

uf-title This series, “Paleo E-books,” looks at groups who were writing Internet literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s—well before most people had any idea what an “e-book” was.

Prior “Paleo E-books” columns cover:

In this entry I will be looking at fan-written fiction, or “fanfic”—and in particular one of the more famous early Internet fanfic series: Undocumented Features.

Today, there is nothing unusual about Internet fanfic; it’s just one of those things that people do on the Internet. It’s gotten so you can barely research Harry Potter without coming across a dozen “Harry + Luna” (or even “Harry + Draco”!) fanfics.

But in the early 1990s, Internet fan fiction was rare enough that those few people writing it became fairly well-known in their fandom communities. There are a number of reasons for this—there was no World Wide Web yet, and the Internet was completely unheard of outside of colleges and big businesses, so there were fewer people to write or read it.

To those familiar with how the Internet grew, it should come as no surprise that some of the first fanfic to appear was based on Japanese animation, or animé. If anything, it should be surprising that it took as long as it did to happen.

Anime and the Internet

The history of animé fandom and the Internet in the ‘80s and ‘90s parallel each other. Both began primarily on college campuses—students passing around grainy nth-generation unsubtitled and fansubbed VHS tapes of Japanese animation; students accessing the Internet (text-based e-mail, Usenet, and Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)) via amber or green-screened terminals. There was a rec.arts.anime Usenet newsgroup at least as early as 1988 (which is as far back as Google Groups records of it go).

In the 1990s, as the Internet spread to more and more institutions and Gopher and WAIS gave way to the World Wide Web, still more people were exposed to animé—and the college students who had been early to catch the bug started founding animé subtitling and dubbing businesses to broaden its availability. And in December 1990 to January 1991, a student named Ryan Mathews posted a Dirty Pair fanfic called “Big Bang” to rec.arts.anime.

Although it may not have been the first animé fanfic on the Internet (Mathews himself notes that you could find other, earlier fanfics if you poked around on FTP sites), it was the first to receive the visibility of a Usenet posting. And it inspired more, both by Mathews himself and by others—including me.

Undocumented Features

Late in 1991, a trio of students at the Worcester (pronounced “wooster”) Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts kicked off what became one of the best-known animé fanfic series, not to mention shared universes. Ben “Gryphon” Hutchins, Brian “MegaZone” Bikowicz (who would later legally change his name to “MegaZone”), and Rob “ReRob” Mandeville wrote a story called “Undocumented Features”.

It was originally intended as a private joke, set on the campus of WPI and starring the three of them and their campus friends, as well as Kei and Yuri from the Dirty Pair animé. The trio had not particularly planned to show it to anybody outside their circle of friends—but all of the friends to whom they did show it were unanimous in their insistence that Gryphon, MegaZone, and ReRob should post it to the Internet. And so they did. Gryphon writes:

When we put the story on r.a.a. (no hierarchy yet!), everybody wanted to know what happened next. The response to the story that came to our mailboxes from the readers of rec.arts.anime was astonishing. We thought we’d told a pretty good joke—most of the people who wrote to us (and they numbered in their hundreds!) thought we had begun a pretty good story.

And so over the following years they wrote three more “core” stories, and they and others of their friends wrote a number of short stories and other tie-ins—creating an epic saga that spanned hundreds of years of history. UF became so popular that it reached a point that few other animé fanfics ever did: it spawned its own fanfic imitators. Some of them (myself included) were brought on board to write stories set within the UF continuity; others were disavowed.

gryr_m
L-R: Ben “Gryphon” Hutchins, me
(circa 1995)

A Shared Universe

Thanks to the participation of the original trio, their friends, and the fanfic imitators, Undocumented Features grew into a shared, collaborative writing circle called Eyrie Productions—though this one was considerably less free-form than the other groups I’ve covered in this series of columns. Everything had to be cleared through Gryphon, who was the one with the overall vision for the universe. (I remember spending evenings in IRC chat arguing endlessly with Gryphon over the most trivial things. Those were the days.)

The Undocumented Features universe is a little hard to describe. It is not technically a “crossover,” since crossover stories generally don’t change the backstory of the participants. Undocumented Features liberally borrowed characters, mecha, and vehicles from practically every animé and science-fiction property the authors had ever seen, throwing them together into a single universe without much concern for the original backstories.

It’s easy to see the appeal of such a broadly-inclusive fanfic mega-universe: no matter what series you liked, if Gryphon didn’t object and you could come up with some way to tie it in, you could work with a bunch of other creative animé fans to create something exciting together. It was a way to be a part of the very thing you were writing fanfic of—the next best thing to working on the original animé yourself.

One strong element running through Undocumented Features is self-insertion—all or most of the authors wrote stories featuring a version of themselves as one of the main characters. However, these author-characters were not portrayed as the sort of ultra-competent wish-fulfillment characters (or “Mary Sues”) who haunt poorly-written fanfic, but as flawed human beings who made mistakes, argued with their friends, and often had bad things happen to them.

As for the quality of the writing…well, every writer tends to cringe when looking back at his own early work, and I am no exception. It is hard for me now to read the UF stuff I wrote then. But on the other hand, I feel like the other writers’ stuff still holds up well even now—especially the “core” work by Gryphon, MegaZone, and ReRob. It may be a little silly here and there, but it’s supposed to be—it started out as a joke, after all. Certainly, the presence of a “gatekeeper” in the form of Gryphon served to keep the quality consistent—people couldn’t just write anything and throw it out there.

Although I long since lost interest in writing in it (my last, half-finished UF tale is mouldering somewhere on some long-forgotten floppy disk) and have largely lost touch with the other participants, I gather that the Undocumented Features universe (and other fanfic universes that the Eyrie Productions crew has spun off) continues to be written to this day—a bit slower than in the “good old days” but still producing new works every now and then.

However, unlike the other groups I’ve covered, Eyrie is not looking for new writers for the UF universe. As a disclaimer on the UF page notes, Gryphon doesn’t have the time or resources to screen new submissions to make sure they fit established continuity, or bring new writers up to speed—the universe is too big already. So participation in the stories is by invitation only (though the Eyrie Productions website does include discussion forums that are open to all).

The archives of all completed Eyrie Productions works, UF and otherwise, are hosted on the Eyrie Productions website. Most of the stories from the old days are still in their original hard-wrapped ASCII text form (which will have to be unwrapped before they can be converted to e-book formats); some stories are in more-easily-converted HTML.

Some of the ASCII stories will require more special attention for conversion. A convention that some authors used was to feature “end titles” or soundtracked action sequences like movies, divided into two columns—the actual credits or text in one column, and the lyrics of the song that would be playing in the other. (I was informed by one reader who was blind and used speech-synthesis software that this made things a bit harder to “read” for her. Oops.)

Other Fanfic

Of course, Undocumented Features was far from the only animé fanfic to come out of the early 1990s. Ryan Mathews and his writing partner Larry Mann would create several more Dirty Pair and other animé fanfics, such as “Experiment 101-E”. Another well-known early fanfic writer is Stephen “Twoflower” Gagne, whose name was synonymous with quality in animé fanfic circles. And, of course, I wrote a few things myself.

The burgeoning quantity of animé fanfic led to the formation of a separate rec.arts.anime newsgroup, rec.arts.anime.stories (later renamed rec.arts.anime.creative), when rec.arts.anime split into several newsgroups in the mid-90s. Other fanfic groups followed (in fact, searching on “fanfic” or “creative” turns up quite a number of Usenet groups across a number of genres and TV series), and websites to archive it such as fanfic.net.

Entire books could be written about how fanfic grew as the Internet expanded from college students only to the general public, and that’s really not the purpose of this column. Suffice it to say that, when looking at the electronic fiction that came before the “e-book,” fanfic (especially animé fanfic) made up a pretty significant chunk.

 
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