Originally posted to CriticalEdge. Multiple posts edited together and slightly edited for clarity.

I think it's worth saying that there's a lot of science that isn't driven by "produce reproducible results". A lot of it is "produce a useful and cool way of thinking about stuff". Memetics and huge chunks of physics, mathematics, and genetics fall into this category. I mean, there's no real value to a Dyson's sphere (at this point in history...) beyond "hey, check out this really awesome concept..."

Memetics is odd in that it blends into the arts in a way that most sciences do not; it has relatives in rhetoric (and also in the poetic), and also relatives in genetics and cognitive psychology.

There's a lot of debate about whether [memetics] is a science [at all]. Its roots can be found as far back as Aristotle's _Rhetoric_: his discussion of enthymemes is highly relevant to modern memetics (which actually came out of genetic theory via Richard Dawkins, see "The Selfish Gene" by same) and to the canon/fanon discussions that arise with fanfiction.

To excerpt something I wrote in July 2000 on the Sentinel discussion list Prospect-L:

--- We have "fanon", which tells us why our readers are likely to believe. This delves into the realm of rhetoric; fanon is the set of memes that make up the fan culture of The Sentinel. (Fanon is memetic but not enthymemetic: the audience does not need to be persuaded to apply the ideas they already hold to the case at hand; they will do so without any persuasion. True enthymemetic structures require argument. More on this later.) When writing, the writer must be aware of this culture and of its rules. ---

[Memetics tells us why we stand on the shoulders of giants. It's true that these giants may or may not want to be stood upon.] The issue is partly that you don't necessarily know on whose shoulders you are standing.

F'rinstance, I've run into a lot of TPM fans who call Palpatine "Bob". Most of them have either *no* idea or an incorrect idea about where that started (it is not Sith Academy, as many people believe; it was a one-liner smartass answer I made that a lot of people started using in discussion *before* it ended up in any fiction anywhere).

The *only* reason that is traceable is because you can look at the list archive for Master & Apprentice and find my original answer. (If you are a member of M-A, it's here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/master_apprentice/message/4608) But a lot of ideas come out of IRC chats or unarchived email or are something someone saw in a story that they can't remember. There's a Highlander slash story I remember only by one line; it's not alone.

[About what happens when an author uses an idea from someone else's story:] You're assuming that there's something wrong about seeing a good idea and applying it differently.

I've argued before in numerous forums that I believe that fiction is a form of argument, and therefore a rhetorical art, which requires credibility of the author in order to function. One of the ways that authors *get* credibility in the first place is by showing their knowledge of the culture within which they are writing. Fanon is a part of that knowledge; fanon expressed in fiction allows readers to place an author rhetorically. (I admit that a lot of times fanon allows me to place the author in the trash bin. I am singularly unfond of fanon; I hate it and I hate even more when I accidentally generate it. As an example of memetics in action, however, it is surpassed only by urban legends.)

Fanon has its place; most notably, it makes life easy for the parodist and the satirist. Surely that is worthwhile...

..says the satirist and parodist. Maybe I'm not the best person to talk.

[I believe] that writers need to be aware of whether they're using [fanon] or violating it, because if they're violating something that a lot of their readers *believe to be true* then they need to be aware that they need to *address* that belief in some way (usually by arguing from canon sources for a different point of view).

Given my ravenous snarling dislike of fanon, I'm generally *happier* when people violate it. But I don't think violation with impunity is the way to go. "Impunity" means "exemption from punishment or loss", and I think that if writers violate fanon without backing it up, they're going to get "punished" by the reactions of readers.

If you're dealing with a widespread belief system (not just "an idiot with an opinion" but "six hundred idiots with the *same* opinion"), and you're going to challenge that, you are going to *have* to back it up or people aren't going to buy into what you're writing. Particularly if it's something that's deeply entrenched.

Granted, there are bits of fanon that can be disregarded without much consequence at all, often simply by not mentioning them (that bit of Sentinel fanon about Blair's Corvair being a junkheap, for example; just don't mention it and viola!).

But suppose you're dealing with a fan community which widely believes that Duncan MacLeod is, say, a prig. (Why there are some people who believe *that* one I don't know, but some people do. Assume, for the purposes of this rather silly example that 70% of the Highlander fanfiction readers you are trying to reach believe Duncan is a prig.) If you just go and have him be non-priggish, _no matter what canon says_, you're going to get a lot of "I don't buy that" from your readership. If, however, you have him be non-priggish _and back it up with canonical events_, you're probably going to get a lot of people to buy the characterization, at least for the course of the story.

The thing is that people do *not* see canon the same way, and you can't rely on your readers remembering certain canon events that you're using in your characterization. Bringing them into the text gives your story support--and frankly, it's hard for me to imagine that people don't *want* to support their stories with that kind of information. I mean, if you're not going to use the canon you have (either to violate it in an AU or to support your plot/characterization/whatever), why the *hell* are you writing fanfiction at all?

(Incidentally, you can also tell certain things about writers by what they do and don't use from canon. For instance, you can read "Me and a Gun" and tell that I wrote it before seeing the several episodes where Blair handles guns and the two where he shoots at human beings. This was the story that made me swear not to write fanfiction before seeing all relevant canon.)