(1) DANGER WILL ROBINSON! “’Lost in Space’ robot saved from Valley Village fire” reports Daily News.
TV and movie props that included a robot reportedly from TV’s “Lost in Space” were saved from destruction late Wednesday in Valley Village due to the efforts of Los Angeles firefighters.
The LAFD responded about 11:30 p.m. to a garage fire in the 5100 block of Whitsett Avenue. Firefighters attacked the blaze, which was electrical in nature, a fire department spokesman told a photographer at the scene.
The home belongs to a prop designer and special effects artist who was out of town at the time, according to a caretaker who woke to the smell of smoke.
(2) JOCULARITY. Two Easter hams are heard from.
Congrats @MidAmeriCon2 for being the first Worldcon in YEARS not to release a Hugo nominee list on Easter Saturday, ie Publicity Dead Zone.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) March 27, 2016
https://twitter.com/KameronHurley/status/714163475350691841
(3) HEARSAY. Mark Evanier’s friend has convinced him this weekend’s blockbuster is “Not the World’s Finest” – as he explains at News From ME.
I don’t have a whole lot of interest in seeing the new Batman Vs. Superman movie, a film which has achieved something I didn’t think was possible. It actually caused my dear friend Leonard Maltin to use the word “sucks” in his review. Even Rob Schneider never managed that and lord, how he tried.
(4) PARAGRAPH FROM A FUTURE TRIP REPORT. GUFF delegate Jukka Halme outlined how he spent the day.
Sunday at Contact 2016 has been a small whirlwind. Moderated my first panel (Through New Eyes), which went really well. Chatted way too long at the Fan Fund table with the Usual Suspects. Bought books. Just a few. Waited ages for my Pad Thai at the hotel restaurant, that was brimming with people and not too many employees, Presented a Ditmar, with a little bit of Bob Silverberg routine (VERY little) to Galactic Suburbia. Held an auction for fan funds, which went smashingly well. And missed the bar, since this is a dry state and while it is apparently OK to sell alcohol during Easter Sunday, places either close up really early, or everybody had left the bar.
(5) AN AUTHOR’S USE OF NAVAJO CULTURE. “Utah author features Navajo characters, history in new science fiction thriller” in Deseret News.
After serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, Robison Wells, who lives in Holladay, fell in love with both the area and the people he served. When he wrote his newest book, “Dark Energy” (HarperTeen, $17.99, ages 13 and up), which features several Native American characters and is scheduled to be released March 29, he worried about portraying them in the correct way.
“I wanted to show respect for the culture,” he said. “I didn’t want to appropriate their culture or their traditions.”
He sent his manuscript out to a lot of Navajo readers to get their reactions and tried to adjust his book accordingly. He knew writing a story centering on Native American characters and history would be a difficult and controversial thing to do, but he felt that it was such a compelling story that he had to tell it.
(6) ADDRESS FOR HAMNER CONDOLENCES. Anyone wishing to send a letter or card to the family may do so at the address below.
Jane Hamner
P.O. Box 220038
Newhall, CA 91322
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born March 27, 1963 — Quentin Tarantino
(8) TODAY’S BLOOD-PRESSURE BOOSTER. Jason Sanford says “The Retro Hugo Awards must be fixed”.
If any particular Worldcon wants to give out Retro Hugos, then e-book and/or online anthologies of eligible authors and stories must be made available to those nominating for the awards. And that must include works which are not in the public domain. Yes, it would take time to do this but I imagine most publishers and/or author estates would be willing to make the stories available for members at no cost.
But even if voters have access to stories from decades ago, it’s still unlikely that as many people will take part in the Retro Hugo nominating process as takes part in nominating for the regular Hugos. This, unfortunately, leaves the Retro Hugos open to missing important works and to being gamed.
To fix this here’s my next suggestion: Use a combination of juries and regular Worldcon members to nominate works for the Retro Hugos.
I know juries seem like the ultimate insider power play, but when you’re dealing with stories published 75 or 100 years ago it can be useful to have experts in that genre time period also nominating stories. Perhaps the jury could nominate two of the five works in each category, and Worldcon members could nominate three of five. This also seems like a sensible way to make sure the nominated stories are truly the best that year has to offer.
(9) CAN MUSK AFFORD A MARTIAN ODYSSEY? “Neil deGrasse Tyson to Elon Musk: SpaceX Is ‘Delusional’ About Mars”. A writer at The Motley Fool explains Tyson’s reasons.
In less than 10 years from now, SpaceX may or may not beat NASA in the race to Mars. Astrophysicist, Hayden Planetarium director, and host of the National Geographic Channel’s StarTalk Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is placing his bet on “not.”
“The delusion is thinking that SpaceX is going to lead the space frontier. That’s just not going to happen…” Tyson said in an interview with The Verge. Tyson laid out his arguments for why fans of a solo SpaceX trip to Mars suffer from a “delusion.” According to Tyson, there are three main reasons SpaceX cannot go to Mars on its own.
Reason 1: Cost
“So if you’re going to bring in investors or venture capitalists and say, ‘Hey, I have an idea, I want to put the first humans on Mars.’ They’ll ask, ‘How much will it cost?’ You say, ‘A lot,'” Tyson said in the interview.
Tyson says it’s “very expensive” to go to Mars. How expensive? Some estimate $30 billion, but a bill of $160 billion isn’t out of the question, and critics in Congress charge that the total cost could reach $500 billion….
(10) CAT GOT YOUR TONGUE? Camestros Felapton is away traveling for a month. During their absence, Timothy the Talking Cat has taken over the blog, and has been busy posting such literary gems as “Timothy retells Dune”.
…Now there was this posh elitist liberal progressive family called the Artyfarties. They like super sucked at making money. The dad was a real wimp and the mum was in some sort of feminist cult. The son looked like the crazy guy in Agents of Shield but younger and more wimpy. The kid Artyfarties thought he was so much smarter than everybody but was a big wimp.
Now Boss Harkonen took pity on the Artyfarties. Big mistake! But he had a kind heart and he hated to see the Artyfarties suck so badly at businessing. So Boss Harkonen says to Dad Artyfarties: “You can run this planet for me. It is the only place you get Old Spice Magic which makes people young and makes spaceships run. It’s a classic monopoly, you can’t go wrong. Just don’t screw it up!” ….
(11) MEASURING SUCTION. Which is worse? Timothy the Cat’s retelling, or David Lynch’s? It’s close. Here’s Jonathan K. Dick’s evaluation of the movie at A.V Club, “Dune can’t capture the novel’s incalculable brilliance”.
So what the hell is wrong with Lynch’s Dune? Before the collective “everything” echoes through the internet, it’s important to understand that the phrase itself “Lynch’s Dune” should already throw up the kind of red flags usually reserved for impending, air-raid level danger. Four years removed from his time behind the chair as director for the spirit-lifting biopic The Elephant Man and its eight Academy Award nominations, Lynch received the go-ahead from producer Raffaella De Laurentiis to direct the film adaption of Dune. This after 20 years, no less than 10 directors, producers, screenwriters, scripts, and general filmmaking anxiety that included the likes of Ridley Scott, Rudy Wurlitzer, Robert Greenhut, and of course the brilliantly documented attempt by Alejandro Jodorowsky.
(12) FIRST SEASON FLINTSONES COSPLAY? The Traveler from Galactic Journey amusingly interprets cosplay at this weekend’s WonderCon in terms of what fans knew in 1961 — “[March 27, 1961] What A Wonder! (WonderCon)”.
These are generally smallish affairs compared to their business-oriented cousins, with attendance running into the hundreds. But for the fan who normally has a local community of just a half-dozen fellows (and perhaps many more as pen pals), going to a convention is like a pilgrimage to Mecca. One meets people with completely different experiences, different perspectives. There is the opportunity to get news from far and wide on exciting new projects, both fan and professional. And the carousing is second to none, both in the heights of enthusiasm and creativity.
Take a look at my newly developed roll of shots from “WonderCon”, a sizeable affair held last weekend in Los Angeles. These are some dedicated fans, some fabulous costumes, and some terrific times!
First off, a few attendees who came in street clothes: …
(13) MILESTONES ABOVE THE SKY. Motherboard advises that “‘In Space We Trust’ is a Beautiful History of Exploration”
In the timeline (which for all its beauty will entirely monopolize your CPU usage) you navigate the history of space as a young cosmonaut. The timeline begins with the October 4, 1957 launch of Sputnik and takes the user through all the major space milestones: first spacecraft, journeys to other planets, landings on celestial bodies.
Each milestone is accompanied by a series of stunning animations, a brief description of the event and a link to a Wikipedia page on the topic in case you want to read more. Your journey is orchestrated with an ethereal soundtrack that is overlaid with sounds from space like cosmonauts on a radio or rocket engines igniting.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, and Will R. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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That’s rather elegant!
Sadly, that’s not a viable solution when the rights owners are simply unknown. I’d like there to be a legal framework that addresses this issue. It used to be that copyright renewal was an affirmative process, and I think we should return to it.
I appreciate that the Copyright Law of 1976 clarified copyright with the Fair Use provisions, but the orphaned work problem is vexing.
Thank you, by the way, for joining the discussion! European laws are distinct from American ones, and it makes for interesting contrasts.
Um, the Internet Archive is extremely careful about copyrights! However, the fact is that the rules for copyrights have changed over the years. Until the late eighties, in the US, copyright was not automatic, and if you didn’t assert it when you published, you’d lose it. That how, for example, Night of the Living Dead (1968) ended up in the public domain. But beyond that, up until the seventies (again in the US), an initial copyright claim had to be renewed after 28 years or it would be lost. This is almost certainly what happened to those old copies of Galaxy and If.
There are really two problems with Lynch’s Dune. One is that you simply can’t do that story in two hours. Sure, you could select a few subplots and focus on those, but a huge part of the attraction of Dune the novel is that all those subplots work together to create a whole that’s greater than the sum of the pieces. If you cut enough to get a coherent two-hour film onto the screen, you’re left with a much less interesting story.
The other is Lynch’s inability to avoid injecting his own weirdness’ into the story. I admit to liking what he did with the Guild Navigators, and it was a good example of the right way to do it – put the weird visual out there, but keep the story moving without dwelling excessively on those visuals. But the injection of shit like the word of death simply added more stuff without in any way improving or condensing the story.
The skiffy channel version of Dune had its problems, but on the whole they did a much better job than Lynch when it came to simple execution. They managed to make the whole thing with Dr. Yueh come completely out of left field, but if you saw their DVD release, it’s clear this was a case of bad cutting to make a broadcast length rather than simple stupidity. The additional length on the DVD version made the story more coherent, not to mention even closer to Herbert’s original. Sadly, their version suffers badly by poorly executed special effects and a grossly inferior cast to Lynch’s.
The good news in all of this is that Dune is much more doable today. Effects are cheaper, and you’re not going to have to break much in the way of new ground technologically. In the hands of HBO or AMC, it could probably get the right level of funding and attract talent good enough to do it justice. The bad news is that if the Skiffy channel still has the rights, history argues they’re likely to screw the pooch again. But we can always hope.
@Jack LInt:
I’ve been considering dropping my Prime membership. My to be read/viewed/whatevered pile is tall enough that until I got the Prime membership I’d batch stuff up and leave it in the cart. If something came out that I had to have now or if the size of the batch approached $50, I’d order $25 worth and get free shipping. But if they’re raising the general level to $49, Prime might still be worth the cost. Maybe.
But beyond that, up until the seventies (again in the US), an initial copyright claim had to be renewed after 28 years or it would be lost. This is almost certainly what happened to those old copies of Galaxy and If.
Any work still in copyright as of 1976 (i.e. any work that had been published after 1948 for works still in their first term of protection), had its duration extended by 47 years by the 1976 Copyright Act, and then had their term extended to life of the author plus 70 years (or 95 years after publication for corporately produced work) in 1998 by the Copyright Term Extension Act.
If and Galaxy were first published in 1950 and 1952, respectively. They should still be in copyright.
You can do it and not infringe on copyright provided you do so within the prescriptions of Fair Use. Moreover, the recipe analogy is not analogous: as F&SF no longer owns the rights to the stories on its pages, their “presentation” is essentially a blank page.
The same is true of a recipe: A recipe is not subject to copyright. But the way it is presented on the page, right down to elements such as font choice, decisions made with respect to page numbering, heading, whether to use multi-column formats and so on, are. The same holds true for F&SF. The don’t own the text, but they own how the text is presented.
It could be argued, and not spuriously, that a scanned copy is a substantially transformed presentation from the original printed (yellowed, crumbling) format.
That is a spurious claim in copyright. To be a transformative work, the transformation has to have some element of original authorship. Scanning a book is not an act or authorship.
It absolutely is. It’s one of the factors of Fair Use (i.e. to what extent does the distribution affect the revenue of the owner–not a whole lot of if the work is truly orphaned). Copyright is not an unrestricted right.
It is not unrestricted. That’s why 17 U.S.C. 107 exists. But the test isn’t how it affects the revenue of the owner of the work, but rather how it affects the potential market for or value of the work. Publishing a work in toto is virtually always going to be seen as being too damaging to the potential market for the work for a use to be considered to fall into the safe harbor of section 107.
*steeples fingers* Eeeexcellent…
No, no, you’re quite correct! Spray that stuff on the field and everything dies. Fertilizer can “burn” plants, particularly when the nitrogen content is too high.
I’m not entirely sure why there isn’t a system for diluting feedlot/hog waste lagoons, but I suspect it’s simply too toxic a slurry–dump it in a stream and the fish turn up with hideous lesions, so it may not be cost effective to turn it into anything worthwhile.
Thaaaat being said, sewage lagoons are the best for birdwatchers, because all that waste is a food source for tiny little organisms which feed slightly larger organisms which mean that shorebirds appear en masse and then predators. I’ve watch a peregrine falcon taking dunlin at a sewage lagoon, and it was amazing. (I, uh, may possibly have once derailed a safari by asking to be taken to the local sewage lagoon in Zambia. Fortunately it was at the end of the trip and everybody was used to me by then.)
Aaron on March 28, 2016 at 4:00 pm said:
Ok, IANAL, but that’s definitely not what Wikipedia says.
“For works that received their copyright before 1978, a renewal had to be filed in the work’s 28th year with the Copyright Office for its term of protection to be extended. The need for renewal was eliminated by the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, but works that had already entered the public domain by non-renewal did not regain copyright protection. Therefore, works published before 1964 that were not renewed are in the public domain.”
(Emphasis mine.)
The Internet Archive has lawyers who specialize in copyright law, is a registered member of the American Library Association, and works closely with the Smithsonian Institute. They are extremely careful about what they publish! If they think those old copies of Galaxy and If are in the public domain, I think there’s an excellent chance they are actually in the public domain.
@Darren Garrison — Thank you! That was fascinating!
Aaron:
In other words, if someone brings suit, it is likely the defendant will lose. I agree.
I surmise that the Internet Archive is hoping that it promotes public good while stepping on as few toes as possible by restricting itself largely to orphaned works.
I’d be interested in case law specifically regarding this scenario–where the original story has lapsed into the public domain but the magazine has not.
In other words, while I understand it violates fair use to make no changes other than scanning a story under copyright, if the only thing under copyright is the presentation, then scanning would be a significant transformation.
Of course, it’s a moot point. The defense to a cease and desist from the owner of the presentation is to OCR the scan! 🙂
Thank you for the fun and enlightening discussion, Aaron!
We’re gonna need a bigger boat.
Or at least a bigger shovel.
Ok, IANAL, but that’s definitely not what Wikipedia says.
“For works that received their copyright before 1978, a renewal had to be filed in the work’s 28th year with the Copyright Office for its term of protection to be extended. The need for renewal was eliminated by the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, but works that had already entered the public domain by non-renewal did not regain copyright protection. Therefore, works published before 1964 that were not renewed are in the public domain.”
Yes! Thank you for this. 🙂 It is this irregularity that lets me distribute unrenewed, pre-1964 works. The stories in IF and Galaxy published before 1964 and which have not had their copyrights renewed are completely, totally, and utterly in the Public Domain (as are the magazines, themselves, as their copyrights were not renewed).
The magazines published 1964 and beyond are not. The stories published pre-1964 that have had their copyrights renewed are not.
The Archive is gambling. What they are doing is technically actionable. Whether it’s unethical is a completely different (and worthy!) discussion.
Galactic Journey (@journeygalactic) on March 28, 2016 at 4:44 pm said:
Only if you can confirm that they are unrenewed. Which is a non-trivial task.
No and no. The Archive is extremely careful about what they publish. If they were violating copyrights, their government funding would dry up in short order. The majority of their funds come from the Smithsonian. They cannot afford to gamble! They research!
Unless you can afford the same type of research, I would stick to publishing works that have been published by those who can afford it, like the Archive and Project Gutenberg.
It’s not too bad. Copyright.gov has the registrations for domestic works. I check them every. single. time. 🙂
All of my research suggests they are under copyright. So are the video games they distribute. There is (currently) no exclusion for orphaned works/abandonware.
I think that there should be. I’ll keep hoping…
Galactic Journey (@journeygalactic) on March 28, 2016 at 4:57 pm said:
Unless things have changed since I last checked, that’s only a reliable source for fairly recent works. A lot of older information is still not digitized. If it says something is under copyright, then it’s probably right, but if it doesn’t list something, you can’t infer that it’s public domain.
And I’m tellin’ ya that I don’t believe you unless you can offer much better proof than you have so far. They don’t do that!
Video games are a whole separate matter. Software was not considered copyrightable until 1980! This is how the tradition of licensing software, rather than selling you a copy, got started.
In any case, the Archive doesn’t limit itself to public domain works. They publish what they are allowed to publish. This is why they have the world’s largest collection of Grateful Dead recordings, even though the Grateful Dead hadn’t even been formed in 1964. But they do not gamble! They research, and they get permissions. This is why they have no Phish concerts, even though Phish, like the Grateful Dead, allows fans to record and trade concert tapes. But Phish, unlike the Dead, has never given the Archive explicit permission to host these recordings.
The works I’m scanning are from the era of reliable records. If it turns out that there is a copyright owner and they want me to cease and desist, I’ll consider it a win if it brings them out of the woodwork.
I regret my jocular tone (which I changed immediately upon publishing!) 🙂
It’s not a matter of belief. My research suggests that post-63 stuff is under copyright. So does yours, for that matter. Just because IA distributes the stuff, regardless of their lofty credentials, doesn’t actually make it legal.
But I’d love to be proven wrong!
it is even getting hard to convince many Hugo nominators to think about having a quick peek at Heinlein
More lies.
Aristotle-paraphrasing! *drink*
@Zil, re Valente
You could dip your toe into her shorter works with Planet Lion if you want. I haven’t gotten to Radiance yet so I can’t say if you’d be likely to have the same issues.
Ah, I didn’t realize they had post-’63 stuff. Yeah, that has to be under copyright. But, since the Archive only publishes stuff which is public domain or for which they have explicit permission, I still think there’s a plausible alternative to “they’re gambling.” See if you can guess what it is? 🙂
…and that’s most of my Hugo nominations in. Still struggling on Fancast (not a podcast kind of person) and Fan Artist.
it is even getting hard to convince many Hugo nominators to think about having a quick peek at Heinlein
Who said that?
Thank you to everyone who gave me advice about getting ebooks (and not just fanfic or Project Gutenberg texts) onto my Kobo!
… I am completely baffled.
I’ve been using Calibre all along on my PC to organize & tag my ePubs. How do I go about buying e.g. “Cuckoo Song” and get it onto my Kobo? Do I get a DRM-stripping calibre plugin? Where from, and what would it be called? Or do I use an Adobe ID, which seems to be what e.g. Books-a-Million wants me to do?
Whew.
Finished my nominations for the 2016 Hugos. Not entirely happy with the result. There are a few categories for which I have not a clue, and others for which I’m only familiar with one or two items that I would consider rocket-worthy. So it goes. Now to wait and see what actually turns up on the ballot.
Hampus
The Spirit’s artwork was quite competent from the start, yes, but the character didn’t have any non-standard expressions—he was stodgy, in comparison to the fully realized version of himself (like the difference between Sonny Tufts and James Garner). He didn’t act much, just did stuff. The staging of the stories was earthbound, compared to the way they would soar and take chances when Eisner hit his stride.
Steve Simmons
The main problem with Lynch’s Dune (for me) is that they were going along fine, and then it was like the light went on to tell them they only had fifteen minutes left, and they went into hyperfast mode and a bunch of things happened, armies marched from right to left, and then left to right, and somebody said, “He is the Kwisatz Haderach!” and it was all over.
Xfiltr
I wonder how it came to be that National Lampoon (every issue, pretty much) is at the Internet Archive. Copyright-wise, I mean. As you say, they have lawyers who have intelligence, so I’m not wondering “how they got away with it,” but “what lets them do that.”
JJ:
The TROLL!
Kip W:
As The Spirit at its best is, well, the absolute best that has ever been created in the comic world (apart from other works by Eisner), I find it a bit unfair to compare the comic to what it would be instead of to its competitors at the current time.
Doctor Science,
You CAN use Adobe, but I frankly find that interface non-intuitive. (Your mileage may vary.) Follow their directions and see what you think. This is the way you get books from the Kobo store, by the way. (Unless you do as I do and download them and add them to your Calibre library. Because I like backups. I like backups a LOT.)
Since you use Calibre, I assume you have books in your Calibre Library and/or know how to put them there?
And I’m further assuming that your Aura H2O works similarly to my just-plain Aura; I apologize if my instructions don’t work for you….
To put existing epubs into your Kobo:
1) Start Calibre.
2) Plug the USB cable into your Kobo and into your computer. (You can probably do this process wirelessly but I’ve never bothered to figure out how…)
3) Hit the “connect to computer” icon on your Kobo. Calibre will now give you a “Send to device” icon at the top (fifth from the left).
4) Highlight the work or works you want to sideload to the Kobo.
5) Now, here’s the slightly tricky bit. Sometimes if you just hit “Send to device” it won’t upload properly (I don’t know if Calibre has fixed this bug yet) — but if you hit the dropdown menu on the right side of “Send to device” and choose “Send specific format to >” and “Main memory” it’ll upload just fine. Wait for the “jobs” icon at the bottom right to stop spinning and you’re done.
6) Once you’ve uploaded everything you want to upload in one session, go to the dropdown menu to the right of “Device” (7th from the left) and hit “eject this device”. Then unplug it. It’s recommended to always eject before unplugging so as not to bollix up any data.
This is all assuming that the books you want to sideload are already in, or can be put in, your Calibre library. If the books have DRM, you’ll have to download and install a de-DRM tool for Calibre or your Kobo won’t display them.
Hope this helps. Feel free to ask clarifying questions. I rather wish I’d had someone to ask… <wry grin>
Incidentally, my Kobo Aura has a web-browser (very slow, but useful for emergency email checking) and solitaire and a suduku game and a sketchpad and a few other basic games all hidden in Home/Settings/Beta features. I’d guess that your Kobo Aura H2O may have something similar, if you poke around and look for it.
Cassy:
Where would I find a DRM-remover?
you’ll have to download and install a de-DRM tool for Calibre
I keep seeing this, but never details: what am I supposed to be looking for? Does it have a name and a location? Are there clear instructions for using it?
I’m dubious that they got permission from every author published in the pages of IF and Galaxy for every story published. The fact that they scanned and posted all of the issues at the same time suggests they made a command decision based on the determination that prosecution was unlikely.
More power to them.
Dr. Science, Apprentice Alf has one that works with Calibre. Obviously, you’ll only want to use this for personal use. The directions are fairly simple, and once it’s in place it works automagically whenever you load a book into your Calibre library.
PJ Evans, see my post above. Hope this helps. Again, this is for personal use; I can’t load books I purchase from Amazon onto my Kobo without it.
@ Kevin Standlee,
Thank you for that judgment. The language I guess you are referring to, “once retrospective Hugos have been awarded for a Worldcon, no other Worldcon shall present retrospective Hugos for that Worldcon,” may speak to the drafter’s intent to only do it once. Otherwise a natural question might have been what about 1942-45, or similar cases in the future.
Ah, thanks, Hampus.
I started reading that post and realized that it just consisted of more “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” barking, so I just skimmed past it.
Hey sealions!
Tagged: don’t read heinlein without a good social justice aware person or people to discuss it with after, especially if you are young, that shit can fuck you up.
Yeah… I don’t read Heinlein because of the religion he spawned. And, while I do like Card still… I find it difficult to justify buying his works
I never did read Starship Troopers because I don’t read Heinlein on principle, so I have no input on how much this story is like that one… Though, the very fact that Kloos’ main character is not full of himself and women are present and intelligent makes me doubt it really is very much like Heinlein’s book.
Drink several shots and rant on social media every time someone says you can’t be a true genre fan if you don’t read Heinlein
(This last from the originator of the juried Retro Hugo idea.)
Your gravatar is every kind of awesome, by the way! 🙂
I’m not aware of *issue* renewals for If and Galaxy, though I haven’t recorded a comprehensive search for them.
I *am* aware of numerous renewals for *stories* that appeared in those magazines, though, including from some authors who have not been shy about pursuing their legal rights in various venues. (Harlan Ellison alone has several renewals for stories that first ran in _If_; and there are also plenty of other renewals from other authors.)
So I would not assume that the magazine’s contents are in the public domain. If the Internet Archive has permissions from all those authors, they’re fine. If they have the authorization of the publishers of the magazine, they might also have acquired that magazine’s “privilege of reproducing and distributing the contribution[s in the magazine] as part of that particular collective work”, in the absence of any contract terms to the contrary, per 17 USC 201c. But I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know to what extent that privilege can transfer to third parties like the Internet Archive. (I don’t believe it would transfer simply by virtue of the magazine’s own copyright expiring.) I do know that contributors can bar republication when their contributions are taken *out* of the context of their original periodical issue, as in the _New York Times v. Tasini_ case. And there are also various ways that an author can take back even the initial rights they gave to a magazine.
I hope that IA did clear rights appropriately. Though until I know more details about how they did, I’m not yet listing on my Online Books website any issues of these magazines that have renewed-copyright stories in them.
Hampus Eckerman
I freely grant the greatness of Eisner’s Spirit. I’ve been a fan since the first time I read one of them. The first entries are competent but mundane, though. Still, as the series was created in June of 1940, I wouldn’t be surprised it it started to improve fairly soon, and perhaps by the end of the year, I’d be seeing the difference.
So if this is what you’ve been talking about all along, then I beg your pardon. For some reason, my mental image of “1940 Spirit” has been the first three months or so.
@Simon: I too have been assimilated into the Neko Atsume collective for the past 5 days. Today I got my first free can of food and my first memento.
Regarding natural fertilizer, the people I know who use it best are RedWombat, a transman pal, and a SWF who volunteers for Pride. Whereas the worst user was basically the Republican platform in human form. QED.
Freer: Putting the “mad” in MGC since 20-whenever.
Why is it that so many people who have problems with the way Hugos are awarded claim simultaneously that the majority is being repressed, AND that things would be better if there were a jury? You can’t have both a direct democracy of equals AND a limited number of voters. Not freedom AND authoritarianism.
Democracy or oligarchy — you only get one.
I got more retro reading to do, quick.
I have not been reading for the Retro Hugos, but I did consider using the sticks-in-the-mind criterion to find nominees. I flipped through von Dimpelheimer’s collections to see if anything looked familiar, and checked anthologies containing stories I like to see if any of them were from 1940, and came up with nada. If I was to nominate, it would be “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertis” and nothing else.
It is a good point, though, that retrospective choices are often nothing like those that fans of the day would have made. Borges sure fits oddly in the company of US genre SFF. So the Retros don’t exactly supplement past Hugos.
They may not have needed to. The US has never had the “moral rights of the author” element of copyright found in Europe, and it’s always been (and still is) possible to sell all rights to a publisher.
I’m just saying, the Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit strongly associated with the Smithsonian. They do not play fast-and-loose with the laws. They have plenty of lawyers. They joined with the publishers who sued Google over the first version of Google Books. This may have made publishers regard them with some favor. And they’re a non-profit, so donations are tax-deductible. So, publishers who have old, not-really-publishable works may be motivated to donate some of those works to the Archive!
Honestly, I can’t answer specific questions about specific items you’ll find at the Archive, but these guys are at the cutting edge of copyright law, working with their own lawyers and those of organizations like the EFF and Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation. When they push the boundaries, they do it inside the law. With lawyers. Not by posting stuff and hoping they don’t get sued!
Farming and growing up. We kept a garden throughout most of my childhood. I honestly can’t remember if we used manure from the goats and Podunk in the garden. We grew corn, peas, various squash, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and more. In addition on our land or nearby were strawberries, blackberries, blueberries and more. Yes I grew up in a town surrounded by farm country (cows & their farms made dairy products they sold from road side stalls along with vegetables and fruit). Many families practiced organic family gardening in the 1970s where I grew up. I used to look forward to yearly ladybug shipments to deal with insect control.
Nothing wrong with being proud of the farming you do. Sharing the cool and difficult parts is all good. But thinking playing at farming makes you more in touch with the average Joe farmer is absurd.
@Brian Z
We have many of the older out of print work coming back as ebooks for authors and work relevant to Retro Hugos. I wouldn’t be surprised if over the next 5-10 years we see a resurgence of WSFS voters becoming familiar with the shorter works through these reasonably priced anthology/lifetime work ebooks. I’ve picked up a number of authors I didn’t expect I’d ever read as I’m more willing to give shorts a chance than read long novels.
Hey, I’m happy the works are out there, regardless. 🙂 Thanks for the discussion!
Brian Z: You missed the one where someone slated the Heinlein bio out of contention last year because Wisdom From My Innertube was so much more worthy a Best Related Work.
You hate to see that kind of thing at this level of play.
Hope this helps.
I’ve seen his post (and have it bookmarked). It’s remarkably unhelpful, IMO.
I was able to make it work by downloading it to my computer and reading the “readme”. (And re-reading, and re-reading….) But that’s the best I’ve got for you; someone else might have another resource.
@Brian Z – I don’t know for sure, because I don’t care to read overly-politicized critiques of art in any form – music, writing, painting, movies, etc. – but it looks to me like the links you posted were not coming from any zeitgeist-forming folk, just arbitrary posters on various forums. I’m pretty sure Sturgeon’s rule applies to people who post on the internet as much as to books. The sources I use for news and recommendations re SFF are not worried overmuch about policing people’s tastes. Sites like this one are excellent for that.
@Brian Z
So a few people have said they don’t read Heinlein. More people have claimed others don’t read Heinlein. I find what puppies think non-puppies read to frequently be wrong so their quotes need to be taken with shakers of salt.
Do you have any quotes from a movement that is trying to keep Heinlein from being published and read in schools or kept in libraries?
I personally haven’t read Heinlein. So many books. So little time.
I get 2 groups of people telling me to read Heinlein. The first group can’t name any women who were writing at the same time and they frequently follow up with nothing good has been written in 20+ years. They don’t make very good points since I’ve enjoyed lots of SF written during the time period they dismiss. Between their lack of knowledge of other writers during Heinlein’s time period and their taste differing from mine in general this group gets dismissed out of hand.
The other group tells me I should read the classics and foundational books and they aren’t able to agree on what those are. I’ve been working on that but in IMHO it requires going much further back in time than Heinlein. I’m working my way through the first novels, first fantasy, first science fiction ever written and working my way to the present while keeping up with current SFF. It’s going to be a while before I get to late works such as Heinlein as I’m reading works which would have influenced him first. I’ve had to go back to 1600s or was it 1100s for the start of my reading? That’s if I stick with western authors. I have a hard time believing they weren’t influenced by eastern authors since trade and world diversity has always been greater than portrayed. If I add in early non-western works I have to go back even further. Do you have any idea how much one needs to read to get a good grounding in what influenced Heinlein?
I know he’s your/puppies touchstone but he seems late on the scene and kinda arbitrary to me. Just one reader not indicative of all fans.