Published author writes novel-length Narnia fanfic

The world of fanfic is fascinating. Well, I’m fascinated by it. Over at places like Archive of Our Own, fans the world over are unwilling to let their favorite stories end at the last episode, or page, or what have you. They take the characters from Game of Thrones or Star Wars or whatever and write new stories for them — sometimes they’re continuations of the original stories, sometimes they fill in gaps in the middle, and sometimes they take place in side universes, but they’re always borne of passion and commitment.

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And yes, sometimes they include a lot of sex between characters you wouldn’t think would have sex, but if you’re interested in more of that I direct you to Google.

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The fic at issue here isn’t one of those. Francis Spufford, a British author behind award-winning books like the 2016 novel Golden Hill, wrote a novel-length fanfic set in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia universe: The Stone Table. He originally set about the project after his daughter requested he write something that she would actually be interested in reading, but there was a personal motive, too. “I was a deeply, passionately Narnia-loving child myself,” Spufford told The Guardian, “and I’d always wanted there to be one more novel. Not that I had a specific gap in mind, I just wanted to stay in Narnia a little longer.”

The Stone Table is set between The Magician’s Nephew, chronologically the first book in the series, and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the one everyone knows. “That was the only gap I thought was large enough for someone to do some impertinent fiddling,” Spufford said. “[It] explains why there are four empty thrones in the castle of Cair Paravel, and where the Stone Table came from.”

What’s interesting here is that Spufford is writing fanfic, but I get the idea that he doesn’t know that a vibrant fanfic community already exists, or if he does, he’s not terribly familiar with it. For one thing, he hasn’t published his book on any of the fanfic sites, although he did print up a few copies for friends and one of them put the first two chapters online as a kind of teaser. “If you’re going to play with someone else’s toys, then you need to be very clear that they are someone else’s toys,” Spufford said. “You need to be clear that you’re not profiting by it, that it’s a homage that doesn’t tread on the toes of the real books.”

That said, Spufford has reached out to the Lewis estate to see if they’d be okay with him publishing another Narnia book. So far, no response. All the same, his friend writer Adam Roberts thinks The Stone Table will get published one way or another, either with the blessing of the Lewis estate or when The Chronicles of Narnia enters the public domain in 2034.

Anybody who reads or writes fanfic want to comment on this? Is this the kind of story that belongs on a fanfic site, or does Spufford have the right idea trying to publish it officially?

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h/t The Wertzone