Back when I was in college, I would read and write fan fiction (fanfics) about different books and animes. Within the community of fanfics, there are two related but very distinct classes of fanfics that were derived from two different source materials: crossovers and fusions.
Crossovers are fanfics in which the two worlds and characters are merged together in a relatively straightforward way. For example, if one is trying to write a crossover between Game of Thrones and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it could be that all of Westeros is actually the Korean peninsula, and Melisandre is actually the pseudonym for Chinese woman Yu Meili who is the refugee daughter of Yu Ji, the sorcerer who was killed by Sun Ce. She arrives in Storm’s End, aiming to ingratiate herself to Stannis, with the goal of unifying Westeros to raise an army against the Eastern Wu Kingdom for revenge.
Fusions are fanfics that make more changes to original storyline and setting to deeply integrate elements of another story. In a fusion of Game of Thrones and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, for example, it could be that the main character Zhao Yun is the bastard son of Cao Cao, and sent to the north to help Gongsun Zan stave off the Northern barbarians. His mother was actually a princess of the Han dynasty, and fell in love with Cao Cao during the period when Cao Cao went to try to assassinate Dong Zhuo with the Seven Star Sword. Cao Cao’s other legitimate sons like Cao Ang, Cao Pi, Cao Zhang, and Chao Zhi each have different talents and closeness to Zhao Yun.
A well-written fusion fanfic should make the reader feel elements of nostalgia to each of the source materials, but feel so new and refreshing that it essentially is a new story that pays homage to each of the original stories. There shouldn’t be any feeling of dissonance, because in a good fusion fanfic the author can and should take the liberty to change the story and setting to revise the discordant elements. Among the fanfic community, it was well-known that George RR Martin hated fanfics because he viewed it as laziness on the part of the writer to not create their own world setting, but it was argued by some (including me) that fusions are so different from the source material that it doesn’t really violate copyright or intellectual property of the original authors.
In interdisciplinary science, there are likewise two very different classes of interdisciplinary research. There are the shallow AI wrappers to traditional sciences that are like the crossover fanfics, and there are the re-imaginations of traditional sciences with the concepts and methods of AI deeply integrated that are the new worlds of fusion fanfics.
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