Fiction in Fictional Universes

[robinturner]

After reading kphoebe's amusing post about the kind of novels superheroes would write, I thought that Judge Dredd would write a novel about an old, friendly neighborhood policemam called Dixon of Dock Green. But, as older, British readers will know, Dixon of Dock Green was a real TV series. Wouldn't someone in Megacity One with a penchant for old TV programmes stand up and denounce Dredd for plagiarism?

For that matter, why in Star Trek IV does no one say "Hey, there's Captain Kirk! And Spock! And Uhuru!" (Thanks to rodneyorpheus for pointing that one out many years ago.) There's a sensible rule in fictional universes that no work of fiction relating to the characters can exist in that universe, though normally it doesn't need to be invoked except n cases like Star Trek, which can only exist in a univere where the Star Trek series never existed.

At one extreme, you have something like The Lord of the Rings, in which no actual work of fiction exists, but there are plenty of fictional works of fiction, or at least of legend (and interestingly, one of those is the story of the characters themselves, a device used in a more tongue-in-cheek way in Xena). At the other, we have the kind of novels about ordinary people doing ordinary things which win Booker prizes; here there's no need for the "no fiction" rule because no one would think about writing a book about such dull characters.

In between, you have various heroic universes: the Marvel Universe, the DC Universe, the Buffyverse and so on. Here you have to be careful because of crossover potential. If Bruce Wayne grew up reading Superman comics, then in later life, he can't meet Clark Kent. That, perhaps, is why the episode in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where they meet Dracula can only be played for laughs.

When I started this post, I was sure it was going to lead somewhere interesting, but I seem to have lost the thread. Feel free to continue the argument.

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

I once rather twisted that rule round on itself in a short piece of fanfic entitled Alice's Mirror, in which a fictional character (the gentleman in my icon, to be precise) gets to meet someone who has been writing fanfic about him.

I suspect I had just been re-reading Gödel, Escher, Bach again at the time.

[vret.livejournal.com]

Have you read ianmcdonald's Ares Express? The heroine knows that she is the central character of a book, and is therefore able to get out of sticky situations by doing absurdly dangerous things because she must survive until the end of the story.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Ah, but she'd look pretty silly if it turned out the author was writing Shakespearian tragedy, where only the minor characters survive.

[vret.livejournal.com]

I think she knew her author better than that. Anyway, if it were tragedy she would have been built ready for a fall, but the envelope went down first, requiring her to work her way back up.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Oops. I'm at the age when etymology starts interfering with memory.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I've seen all the episodes several times. I never went to any conventions, learned Klingon or owned a pair of pointy ears, but I played the RPG and had a copy of Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned From Star Trek, so I was almost a Trekkie. So yes, I ought never to get any of the characters names wrong.

It's just occurred to me that the reason I got Uhura's name wrong was that I had just installed the latest version of Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com). "Ubuntu" not only has the same vowels as "uhuru" (which of course is where her name comes from) but is also a word from an African language. OK, that doesn't say a lot, given that "perro" and "yellow" have (almost) the same vowels and are both from European languages, but also "ubuntu" and "uhuru" have meanings which are kind of associated ("humanity" and "freedom"). So anyway, probably when I was writing that post, the word "uhuru" was already in the back of my mind.