Getting Paid to Write Fanfiction is Awesome...

A Touch of Fever

(A Warehouse 13 novel)

by Greg Cox
p 2012
  

I don’t usually offer this piece of information about myself so readily, but if you know me well then you well know my love of fanfiction. I’ve been a casual writer of it for over a decade and a reader even longer than that. I lead with this only because I think my familiarity with this aspect of fandom often guides how I regard novelizations of movies and TV shows. As it goes, I don’t read too many of them because, to put it bluntly, they’re mostly overlong, timid, boring fanfiction. And why would I pay $6.99 for something I can get a thousand other versions of for free on the Internet?

A Touch of Fever, the first sanctioned novel for SyFy’s original show, “Warehouse 13,” is one such novel. The show chronicles the capers of a team of secret service agents turned really secret agents, tasked with capturing the world’s mystical artifacts that release chaos into the world when they fall into the wrong hands. 

The show is usually quirky-fun, with the occasional apocalypse-heavy moment, all tied up in a nice steampunk package. The characters are delightful and personable, definitely a group you’d want to know in real life, and I’m pleased to say that the author, Greg Cox, does a respectable job of recreating them for this romp.

I won’t go into too much detail about the show, and thankfully the novel doesn’t either. Having to read the entire history of the Warehouse as it has already been detailed on the show would be helpful to new readers but tiresome to fans (and really, who would pick up this book if not a longtime fan?). As it was, I think the book already referenced too many random episodes with no plausible context leading up to the reference. It was almost as if Cox was trying really hard to prove that he was a fan and reacted by inserting as much canon material as he could. Or perhaps this was a way to entice new fans to catch up on the show? Either way, it took me out of the action and made this book a lot longer than it needed to be.

And speaking of things that dragged on, let’s take a minute to discuss the ridiculously long, ridiculously inconsequential B-story smack dab in the middle of the book. The A-story in A Touch of Fever centered on retrieving Clara Barton’s gloves, one of which healed while the other caused mass outbreaks of typhoid fever. People drop like flies in the wake of the villain with the infectious glove, and the stakes are upped when Pete becomes infected. Except, directly following this advancement, the story inexplicably indulges in a 100-page side adventure about Claudia tending to a wily artifact that causes a Rube-Goldberg chain reaction of chaos, completely unconnected to and bearing no impact on the A-story. As much as I love me some Claudia and Artie banter, I could have done without this entire B-story. I’d have much rather seen them both out in the field, helping their dying teammate. I suppose Cox wanted them planted in the Warehouse so it could be a character in this novelization. There’s no doubt the Warehouse itself carries a strong presence in the show. Still, there are other ways to do that than to take away from the main action.

That said, I do think Cox captured the essence of these characters well. They certainly feel like old friends and I was able to picture most of the dialogue in my head as spoken by the characters, but this points to the dilemma official novelizations always present: there is no boldness in the storytelling. Firstly, the authors commissioned to do novelizations do this for a living—that is, they write these types of stories for a wide variety of TV shows, which probably means they are not the biggest fans ever of this particularly fandom, they are just the first writer to agree to take it on because it is a paying job. Secondly, since novelizations must exist within canon but not be dramatic enough to change the canon, the author is severely limited to the range of emotions they can access. You can’t have your characters fall in love or leave or get themselves killed because they are not your characters. You’re just borrowing them. Fanfiction writers can get away with whatever they want because no one is paying them to follow the story and everyone knows it has no bearing on the show. For this, the writer can take chances and alter the characters ‘forever’ if they so choose.

You just don’t get that option in official novelizations. You can craft a crazy adventure, but you must make sure everything is back to normal by the end and that no one will ever need to reference it in the future, because probably 95% of show viewers will never pick this book up. And if no one changes and nothing big happens... then why invest time and money in reading 300 pages of it?

I don’t know... perhaps I shouldn’t knock novelizations. I still own a nice collection of them myself, if only on impulse (and the sheer curiosity of knowing what it is people who own the rights are willing to allow to be published under their show’s name) Furthermore, if ever there was a profession I’d be well-suited for it’s probably writing about TV shows. I love manipulating my favorite fictional characters and I am familiar with a disturbingly large variety of fictional universes... I’d love this job, but I would always feel like I would never had the freedom to be a true writer unless it was with a world entirely of my creation.