By AMY HARMON

         In TV this summer, as it does every long, trying season of reruns, time is
         standing still. Impatient channel surfing doesn't help. Glimpses of fall premieres
         are only
         maddening. Months will go by before fans know what happens in the lives --
         and deaths -- of characters in their favorite prime-time dramas.

         But on the Internet, where nothing ever stands still, prime time's cliffhangers
         have long since been resolved in an emerging electronic genre known as "fan
         fiction" that
         has spawned hundreds of Web sites and Internet discussion groups.

         In this season of their recurring discontent, fans of TV shows from the
         critically acclaimed drama "E.R." to the campy "Xena: Warrior Princess" have
         already moved
         on, coloring cyberspace with back stories, subplots and character arcs that
         veer gleefully astray from their creators' more predictable plans.

         Unfettered by formula or the strictures of internal consistency, fan fiction
         traces its roots to the photocopied pamphlets passed around in the 1970s by
         the notoriously
         cultish "Star Trek" devotees at conventions and through the mail.

         But the recent outpouring of digitized fan scribbling -- one "X-Files" Web
         archive has accumulated 6,000 stories in its 18 months of existence -- seems
         to signal the
         genesis of a cultural movement with a much broader appeal.

         "There are more fans out there now," said Betsy Vera, a secretary in Ann
         Arbor, Mich., who began reading fanzines in the early 1980s but now collects
         addresses
         for fan-fiction Web sites and e-mail lists -- about 800 so far, which she has
         helpfully organized by subject matter.

         "You're getting a lot of the people who wouldn't be caught dead near a
         convention," Ms. Vera said. "It's different if you do it on the Web."

         As much a template for communication as it is a creative outlet for excess
         enthusiasm, online fan fiction is a new testament to TV's role as a common
         language in a
         society becoming both more global and more fragmented. It also reflects the
         power of the Internet as a grass-roots publishing platform, making every
         viewer a
         potential contributor.

         The mixture of the two, some media theorists say, may presage an
         information-age return to the folk tradition of participatory storytelling, which
         in earlier times gave
         rise to the "Iliad" and the legend of King Arthur. Or at least it may make
         watching TV more fun.

         "If you go back, the key stories we told ourselves were stories that were
         important to everyone and belonged to everyone," said Henry Jenkins,director
         of media
         studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Fan fiction is a way of
         the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths
         are owned
         by corporations instead of owned by the folk."

         Conceiving new plot twists for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" may not have quite
         the same effect on Western culture as, say, inserting a "wine dark sea"
         flourish into an
         epic poem. But for Jill Kirby, "good fanfic is just as good as any episode of the
         TV show, and often better."

         Ms. Kirby, 30, is a bank manager in Chicago who administers one of three Web
         sites devoted to fiction about "Buffy," which features a teen-age girl battling
         the
         forces of darkness. Fans have written more than 100 stories based on the
         show, a 10-to-1 ratio to the number of episodes that have been broadcast.

         Special Agent Fox Mulder of "The X-Files," an apparent suicide at the end
         of last season, is variously dead, alive or an alien hybrid, depending on which
         Web site
         you visit.

         Dr. Daniel Nyland of "Chicago Hope" stands accused of negligence as the new
         TV season approaches.

         But on the Web, he has had his good name restored -- with the aid of
         Monica, a character from a different series, "Touched by an Angel."

         So far, the fan-fiction phenomenon has unfolded with the forbearance of the
         television industry. While several studios have threatened to press charges
         against people
         who set up Web fan-club sites that use pirated pictures and trademarked
         logos, the networks have allowed fiction sites to proliferate in peace.

         "As long as somebody's not out there trying to make money with it, I don't
         think anybody wants to shut them down," said a spokesman for 20th Century
         Fox, which
         produces "The X-Files."

         "The thing that scares all of us is that NBC is going to call us up and say
         'Cease and desist,"' said a writer in New York City who asked to be identified
         only by her
         nom de Net, Kitt Montague.

         Ms. Montague taught herself a Web-programming language so she could
         publish her five novel-length stories based on the police drama "Law and
         Order" on her
         home page earlier this year.

         One popular 10-part story brings Ben Stone, a character who left the show in
         1994, face to face with his replacement, Jack McCoy: "He was about Ben's
         age,
         perhaps a year or two older, lean, with a rakish head of salty gray hair and
         heavy eyebrows, but he was handsome in the way some large birds are:
         stately and
         angular."

         Standard fan-fiction form nods to copyright law by acknowledging up front
         that others own the characters. But several television producers, worried
         about their own
         potential liabilities, said they avoided reading fan fiction -- in the same way
         they ignore unsolicited scripts -- so that an amateur writer could not later
         contend that a
         story was stolen.

         The professionals who do acknowledge sneaking an occasional online peek
         evince a faint hostility toward the Internet scribes.

         "I've seen some fan fiction from certain female Internet users that seems to
         be elaborate fantasies involving them and one of the characters," said Rene
         Balcer,
         executive producer and head writer for "Law and Order."

         The vast majority of fan-fiction writers are women, and most are younger
         than 40. Ken Topolsky, executive producer of "Party of Five," likes to get fan
         feedback in
         Internet chat rooms but draws the line at listening to story ideas. "If they
         want to write an episode," Topolsky said, "what they should do is write an
         episode, request
         a release and send it in."

         But for most fan writers, a long-shot hope of creating a script for actual
         broadcast is not the point. "I can tell you what drives me to write it --
         absolutely guaranteed
         audience," said Nina Smith, 36, of Yonkers, N.Y. "I've got a mailbox with well
         over 200 pieces of fan mail."

         Ms. Smith, an unpublished author of three novels, has made a name for
         herself in one of fan fiction's more difficult genres: the crossover, in which
         some or all of TV
         land exists n one surreal place.

         Plucking characters from "The X-Files," "E.R." and Chicago Hope," Ms. Smith
         devised a crime, set in Chicago, that was medical in nature with paranormal
         overtones. The widely circulated result, "A Dark Smear in the Sky," has even
         been translated into French by appreciative readers. Its sequel, "Black Sail,"
         has also
         won acclaim.

         "Most people think of television as mindless consumption, and I like the fact
         that there are people turning around and using it as a springboard for all sorts
         of personal
         creativity," Ms. Smith said.

         It is in crossovers and other fan-generated genres like "slash" -- in which the
         sexual orientation of all the main characters has been switched (the police
         officers from
         "Starsky & Hutch" are a favorite topic here, as are Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock
         from "Star Trek") -- that fan fiction begins to depart markedly from its source
         material.

         The creative chaos has given rise to terms like "canon" to distinguish events
         that were actually portrayed on TV, as opposed to those that transpire only
         within the
         alternate universe of electronic fan fiction.

         "If you read enough," posted one reader to a fan-fiction discussion group,
         "they blend."

         Consider the case of Sheryl Martin, a security guard in Toronto. She created
         a character named Jackie St. George who accompanies the FBI agents Mulder
         and
         Scully in her "X-Files" fiction.

         "I get e-mail saying, 'Which show was she on?"' Ms. Martin said of Jackie,
         about whom she has written some 200 stories. "That to me is the ultimate
         flattery."

         Well, maybe the ultimate flattery was the man who fell in love with the online
         Jackie St. George but settled for becoming engaged to the real-life Ms.
         Martin.
 

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