History of Fanfiction
Where does the history of fanfiction begin? Given its definition as a work derivative of another work, it can be quite confusing to find a starting place for fanfiction. Is Dante's Divine Comedy fanfiction? What about the Iliad? Many literary works can be defined as fanfiction going back to the very beginnings of literature, but for our purposes, let's begin when fanfiction was first recognized as "fan" "fiction"...
To boldly go where no fan has gone before!
1967: "Spockanalia" is Published
"Spockanalia" was a fanzine created for the series Star Trek, published in 1967 and edited by Devra Michele Langsam and Sherna Comerford. It was originally intended to be a one-shot collection of poems, fanfiction, art, and other fanworks, but the first issue proved to be so popular that four more issues were created. While fanfiction had been circulated in fanzines since the 1930's, "Spockanalia" gained a following so large it drew the attention of Star Trek's showrunners. "Spockanalia" now stands as one of the first notable examples of fanfiction, both written and edited by women -- setting a trend for the years to follow.
1974: First Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Appears in a Zine
While Diane Merchant's fanfiction "A Fragment Out of Time" was not the first Star Trek fanfiction to feature an explicitly sexual relationship between the characters Kirk and Spock, it is noteworthy for being the first to appear in a fanzine, bringing the pairing to a wider audience. The pairing, labeled "Kirk/Spock" or often simply "K/S" establishes a precedent of homosexual character pairings in fanfiction, with explicit sexual pairings being denoted by the "slash."
1970s-1990s: Fan Culture Develops
Fan culture grew along with the rise in pop culture; science-fiction television shows like Doctor Who and The X-Files are the subject of many fanzines and fan sites. With the internet becoming more readily accessible, fanfiction finds its niche online, proliferating on personal blogs and small websites made to host a few authors' works within a single fandom. Working within the same community formed by the women writing Star Trek fanfiction twenty years prior, a new generation of female fanfic writers are creating slash pairings of Star Trek:The Next Generation characters.
1998:FanFiction.net Launches
FanFiction.net is launched on October 15, 1998. Developed by designer Xing Li, who worked on other fansites including one for The X-Files, FanFiction.net premieres as a site to host fanworks from all fandoms. The site begins as a paid service, but later transitions to a free site with ads. FanFiction.net sets the standard for tagging works by genre and users on the site create notable terms like "lemon" and "rarepair" to further describe the content of their fanfiction in a limited synopsis. The site gains immense popularity with the release of the Harry Potter series, hosting over 840,000 works for Harry Potter today.
References
https://archive.org/details/SpockanaliaV1