Popular Culture Review Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2010 | Page 57

Girls Go Slash/Boys Go Bang 53 should be accorded to different sources. Will Brooker (2002), for example, has drawn our attention to the debates that take place within Star Wars fandom over issues such as whether or not the original or the remastered versions of the original Trilogy should be considered as canonical as well as the status within the canon of a variety of spin-off media such as TV shows, novelisations, radio adaptations or computer games. More recently, Lance Parkin (2007) has outlined similar debates within Doctor Who fandom, highlighting, in particular, the difficulties in articulating a central canon within a fictional universe that has been created over several decades by dozens of different authors and producers. Within W40K fandom, material produced by Games Workshop or one of its subsidiaries is seen to possess canonical authority, with material sanctioned, but not produced directly by Games Workshop seen as having significantly less, if any, authority. At the absolute apex of canonicity, then, are the Official W40K rulebook, the individual rulebook supplements produced for each army (or ‘Codexes’ as they are known) and any articles published within the company’s official monthly magazine, White Dwarf. All this material is produced in-house by staff members within its design studio. Elements of this material have changed over time, with each subsequent revision superseding its predecessor. Carrying slightly less canonical authority are books and other material produced by Games Workshop’s subsidiaries, Forge World and the Black Library. The latter, Games Workshop’s publishing division produces novels set within the W40K universe that ‘flesh out’ the canonical material found within codexes and the official rule book, such as the series of (currently) eight novels that narrate the story of the great schism within the Imperium of Man 10,000 years prior to the events of the 41st Millennia that provides one of the central leitmotifs of the universe. As these, however, are typically written by freelance authors, including, on occasion, fan-authors who have won competitions, rather than being produced in-house by Games Workshop, they are often seen as possessing less canonical authority, particularly if their content is believed to contradict ‘higher level’ source material. At the opposite end of the scale, one finds material produced by other companies under licence from Games Workshop, such as roleplaying games, comics and graphic novels, and computer games. While much of the content of this material clearly stems from the ‘higher level’ material, it is typically seen as non-canonical because it is not produced by Games Workshop itself and often contains elements that contradict this material.4 In spite of all this material, however, the W40K universe is still nevertheless a largely underdeveloped one, containing numerous areas that have not been explored in any of the canonical sources. Indeed, this indeterminacy is itself one of the W40K universe’s central tropes; that much of its history is, as one fan-author put it, “simply unknown or forgotten or deliberately covered up” (‘Richard’). As will be explored in the next section, W40K fanfiction authors typically eschew elaborating on existing characters and those parts of the canon that have been explored within official sources. Instead, they set their stories