What the hell?! :D
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be amused or shocked.
What is that, even? People look at classics and think: "Hey, this needs some more sex in it"? Really?

Okay. It's fine to write fan fiction but can they stop... publishing it as books? Especially when it seems to be some cheap porn stuff?
Well, if this is anything like 50 shades of grey it's shit. (No, I haven't read it and I'm not planning to, but read reviews and excerpts.)

They are doing a whole list of classic stories. Pitiful is the word that leaps to mind. You haven't heard of Fifty Shades of Grey? Lucky you! I certainly am not going to pay good money to line that woman's pocket for a book that glamourises an abusive relationship. Basically a Twilight for adults SDM mummy porn book. Treats her readers like idiots, which sadly, most of them probably are. End of rant!

lol@ what is 50 shades. Sorry, but even I know about it & I don't listen/watch/read about books.

This type of book has been done before, but yes a huge bandwagon leap here. And for me, a giant groan. In case anyone is living under a rock, I don't like fan fic because it takes one person's work (their ideas, characters and meanings) and 'rapes' it, letting the fan fic writer take some kind of credit for the brilliance that was there before they started. They don't have respect for the original piece, they they change it, they mock its very soul & then call that art??!! It's like playing dress ups; if they were any god they'd write their own stories, build their own characters. But no, they are lazy & take the easy way (like many things these days) and use someone else's creations.
These books, esp if promoted online in these Sherlock forums, will give a new burst of "fan ficcers" the urge to pillage through more of the canon. Just more rubbish for me to scroll past, delete or ignore.

Most books written based on classics end up being crap. I read Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, and it was the most ridiculous thing ever. I also read Death Comes To Pemberley by P D James, a respected writer, and it was pretty average. The only time I have come across a book using another author's characters that actually worked was The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which told the story of the first Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

hepzibah wrote:

.... I read Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, and it was the most ridiculous thing ever. .......

Good God...Pride & Prejudice & Zombies...you have to be kidding me...

Davina wrote:

...You haven't heard of Fifty Shades of Grey? Lucky you! I certainly am not going to pay good money to line that woman's pocket for a book that glamourises an abusive relationship. Basically a Twilight for adults SDM mummy porn book. Treats her readers like idiots, which sadly, most of them probably are. End of rant!

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More from Amanda

Davina wrote:

The Radio Times along with several other newspapers have reported that A Study in Scarlet along with other classic novels are being given erotic rewrites by a 'specialist' publisher. In ASiS Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson have an affair (how original).

The idea of their having a sexual relationship is not original, but I find the idea that someone would do this version of ASiS for the mainstream book market to be original, for sure. It shows how far we've come in our attitudes about gay relationships, IMO. I mean, that there's a mainstream audience out there, people who will plunk down good money to read it.

The author of the new version (I am struggling here not to use inverted commas liberally scattered) is quoted as saying writing it was, 'One week of writing bliss.'
My observations...
I am astonished that she could have taken a whole week writing it. Of course there are many, many masterpieces of fiction that have been written in a week.

Why, do you think a week is a long time or a short time? As a writer of homoerotic fan fiction in the past (admittedly, original works, not slash versions of existing stories), I often spent several weeks getting things written up, through the beta process, and out there. It can be done in a day or two or three, but not usually. Writing is *work*.

Let us not leave anything to the imagination of the reader because we all know most readers are STUPID.

In that case, if we were only allowed to use our own imaginations to get John and Sherlock together, what would be the need for all that fabulous slash fan fic out there, in this and 100s of other fandoms?  It doesn't make us stupid that we want to see someone's take on what they think the S/J relationship would look like.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comments? I dunno.

Let us hitch our coat tails to Fifty Shades of Grey which is adult fan fic anyway.

Are Sherlock and John in FSoG?  I hadn't heard that. (joke, that's a joke)

I read S/J slash because it's S/J.; they're the two I want to "see" together.  I don't do bondage or D/s or pain or anything kinky like Irene Adler was into; I just don't go there. So I would never compare FSoG to what I like to read my fictional men doing together. And I have zero interest in reading anything M/F-- boring, tedious, dull, ordinary (IMO again). It takes all kinds of boats to float all kinds of interests, for sure.

My daughter's observation on 50 Shades of Grey for what it is worth. Frankenstein was written by Mary Shelley when she was 18 years old so why can a grown woman not produce something better than this Twightlight porn for adults with no critical faculties etc. etc.

Not every fictional work is aimed at every fictional reader. Which is why your average bookstore has 1000s of titles, just in the fiction department, although probably a very small gay fiction section. It's easy enough to pick and choose what I want and leave the rest in the dung heap, even if all the mass market dung beetles are currently crawling all over said dung heap and having a party! (don't you like my metaphors?  lolololol)

Just my two cents, marked down from five, apropos of nothing.

Speaking firstly as a fanfic writer who publishes on the Internet and secondly as a writer of articles published in professional education journals and books... 

I say, more power to a writer who can make the jump from fanfiction to "real" publishing.  Nowadays, it's so extremely hard to get published in the mainstream that anyone who can deserves whatever success accrues from that.  If someone doesn't like a book, then don't read it.  Fifty Shades of Grey, which I've heard lots about but haven't read, obviously won't appeal to everyone but neither will Man Booker- or Pulitzer Prize-winning books.  If something like Fifty Shades helps the publishing industry be profitable, then I think it's all good.

As for fanfic writers being lazy because they appropriate already-established characters instead of creating their own, I have a different viewpoint: I see writing such stories as a tribute to the original characters, and a way of making those characters live again.  Granted, the fanfiction I write is based on a TV show of forty years ago and is no longer in production, but all the writers in that fandom whom I know (and I know a lot of them, some even in RL) are very serious about being true to the characters and setting of the original work.  We see writing fanfiction as a way of keeping the show alive, not as plagiarizing the work of others because we can't be bothered to write something original.  And even though I was a published author long before I ever began writing fanfiction, I have learned more about writing since I started my fanfic "career."

Lastly, while some people may be turned off by the idea of an erotic Study in Scarlet rewrite, there's always the possibility that someone reading that version will become curious about the original and seek out ACD's works.  Then, maybe, that person will become a fan and read the canon.  It seems to me that that is not so dissimilar from what's happened with the BBC's Sherlock and Sherlock Holmes as written by ACD.  Certainly, it was only after watching the TV show that I became interested in reading the canon.  If the TV show never existed, how many of us would be reading those stories now?

Each to their own I guess.
I don't like fanfics at all. The original characters & meanings are 'lost' so often that I have never read one I liked and mostly I don't bother finishing reading them , I discard it as 'what are they on about?'

I like what I like BECAUSE the writer depicted them in certain way. What some see as 'a tribute' to the original, I see as changing what I liked to something that someone else prefers. It would have to be a damned good writer to sway me from those thoughts.

And honestly in regards to Sherlock Holmes, the amount of garbage I have seen labelled as 'fanfic' is just immature dribble from people who don't understand the original to start with. Harsh words maybe, but it explains exactly what I think of it.