There's a piece of legal advice that's given to almost every author and would-be author in science fiction and fantasy – don't read fanfics of your own work!If you do, so the story goes, and you happen to either use the ideas there, or it's just kinda similar to something you were already working on, you could be opening yourself up to serious consequences!What kind of consequences?Y'know, bad ones! You might get sued! Or you might have to scrap the whole book! It totally happened to a friend of my cousin, she had to literally eat a whole book manuscript and the fan owns her house now and she lives in a refrigerator box under a bridge and writes three-volume fantasy trilogies for spare change on the streets!I kid, but these days the advice is totally divorced from its original context.And even if it wasn't, most people get the context wrong. The original story is badly misremembered, despite it being well within living memory. Even the people who were there misrepresent what happened, or don't remember anymore.So let's look at the advice, the actual incident and its context, and the howling storm of uncertainty that still surrounds fanfic's legal status today.