Tag Archives: public domain

Pixel Scroll 8/5/19 Pixel Sacrifice, Files And Scrolls Living Together, Mass Hysteria

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(1) FANAC.ORG SCANNING STATION AT DUBLIN 2019. Joe Siclari looks forward to digitizing more zines and photos at the Worldcon —

FANAC.org has scanned and archived over 92,000 pages of fanzines. Next week, our Scanning Station is coming to Dublin. If you are attending the Dublin Worldcon and can brings fanzines appropriate for scanning, we would love to have them. We’ll scan right there on site – we’ll be set-up at a fan table in the Convention Center. Look for our banner.

We have run similar Scanning Stations this year at Boskone and Corflu with great success. To see what we already have scanned and have online, look at our main fanzine page: http://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Classic_Fanzines.html. 

If you have old fannish photos that you can bring, we’d love to scan them as well. If you have photos in digital format, please bring those too. 

Even if you don’t bring material to scan, stop by our table anyway and say hello.

The Fanac.org scanning station at Boskone earlier this year. L to R: Fred Lerner, Mark Olson, and Joe Siclari at the Fanac table. Photo by and copyright © Andrew Porter.

(2) PRE-’64 IN PUBLIC DOMAIN. Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow says “Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain”.

…But there’s another source of public domain works: until the 1976 Copyright Act, US works were not copyrighted unless they were registered, and then they quickly became public domain unless that registration was renewed….

…Now, Leonard Richardson (previously) has done the magic data-mining work to affirmatively determine which of the 1924-63 books are in the public domain, which turns out to be 80% of those books; what’s more, many of these books have already been scanned by the Hathi Trust (which uses a limitation in copyright to scan university library holdings for use by educational institutions, regardless of copyright status).

“Fun facts” are, sadly, often less than fun. But here’s a genuinely fun fact: most books published in the US before 1964 are in the public domain! Back then, you had to send in a form to get a second 28-year copyright term, and most people didn’t bother.

(3) WHEATON W00TSTOUT. The 2019 pouring of Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout is here. Comic artist Alan Davis designed the label. Will you collect it or drink it?

Each year, when July rolls through, Stone Brewing serves up a superhero of an imperial stout. Its sheer existence, a POW! BAM! WHAM! square to the face. Its contents – an art; its bottle – a collectible. Stone Brewing announces the release of Drew Curtis / Wil Wheaton / Greg Koch Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout.
 
Over the years, Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout has become one of Stone’s most anticipated annual releases, and not just because it’s an astoundingly flavorful beer concocted as a collaboration between FARK’s Drew Curtis, nerd royalty Wil Wheaton and Stone Brewing co-founder Greg Koch. It’s the incredible label art adorning this beer over the years that has elevated it to the pinnacle of beer, geekery and beer geekery. “W00tstout is more than a great beer,” said actor, writer and Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout collaborator Wil Wheaton. “It’s a work of art, carefully designed to be as drinkable right now as it will be in a decade. I am so honored and proud to be one of its parents.”

(4) CLARION WEST 2020. Next year’s Clarion West instructors have been announced:

(5) STRANGERS LIKE ME. Brian Doherty, in “San Diego Comic-Con and the Tensions of Market-Induced Growth” on Reason.com, reports from the convention and finds that despite its huge size lovers of comics and the small press can find a great deal to satisfy them at the convention.  He also interviews Maryelizabeth Yturvalde of the Mysterious Galaxy sf shop, who says she sold a great many YA novels to Comic-Con attendees.

…But who are “people like yourself” in the tent of fannish tents? That’s the sticking point. Things can get complicated when you are thrust in a tight space with people whose nerdy obsessions don’t match yours. Smith joked about seeing a bunch of people dressed as Klingons sneering at the lame geeks striding by dressed as stormtroopers.

On one of this year’s historical panels, Barry Short, a longtime SDCC worker and a former comic shop owner, described the vast crowds attracted to the con as a clear victory, the promised land all the lonely geeks of decades gone by had been fighting for. Their culture was no longer mocked and hated! Their tribe had grown beyond imagining! But one detail that he chose to highlight was telling—that it was no longer hard to find T-shirts featuring Marvel superheroes.

That sort of thing would not be any kind of victory to, say, indie cartoonist Mary Fleener, who on a historical panel remembered fondly the days in the 1990s when she and a few fellow independent artists could pool money together for a table that cost less than $400 and profit selling their homemade mini-comix. Her tribe was different than Short’s; they just awkwardly co-existed in the same grounds.

Comics are not just the root of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters; they’re a newly respected part of American literary culture. The artists and writers responsible for that aren’t necessarily obsessed with superhero T-shirts. But even that conclusion was complicated at a SDCC panel starring Chris Ware, author of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, one of the linchpins of modern literary comics. He admitted, in his self-lacerating sad-sack way, that as a nerdy, scared, hated kid in school, if he found anyone else who shared in any way his tortured love and fascination with crummy Mego toy figures of comics characters, he’d want to hold them close—too close for their comfort.

Comic-Con is filled with people who both seek validation in their manias and mistrust the manias next door, whether those neighboring fandoms seem to bring down the cultural property values or try to make them annoyingly highbrow.

No matter how pollyannaish you want to be about change and growth, more people in an experience makes for a different experience. Such changes may come to the benefit of the newcomers but the detriment of old-timers….

(6) GATHERING DATA. ScienceFiction.com, in “Brent Spiner Teases Data’s Role On ‘Star Trek: Picard’”, quoted the actor from his recent appearance at the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention.

I am delighted to be part of the show and all I am, is a part of the show…I want to make it semi-clear, because I don’t want to make it too clear, that I am not a regular on the show. Data did die at the end of Nemesis. But I am on the show. I do make appearances. Data’s story is a part of the thread of show.”

Apparently the Data-like android is a predecessor called B-4.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s also asked Spiner about Facebook’s Area 51 craze:

Given Spiner’s connections to Area 51 — his Dr. Brakish Okun was in charge of research there in both “Independence Day” and “Independence Day: Resurgence,” its 20-years-later sequel — you can’t let the actor off the phone without asking if he has advice for anyone looking to follow the Facebook phenomenon and storm the secretive military installation to “see them aliens.”

“Well, let me just say, I know this is going to be a huge disappointment to everyone, but if they do this, and they actually get there, I will not be there,” Spiner says, dryly.

“I mean, unless I’m well paid. Then I’ll show up.”

(7) TRADE WARRIORS. The Hollywood Reporter explains how “A boycott of Japanese products has been growing as a political spat with historical roots impacts sectors from beer to cars to movies” — “Anime ‘Doraemon’ Latest Victim of Japan-South Korea Trade War”.

     The Korean release of the latest installment of Doraemon, Japan’s biggest anime franchise, has been postponed indefinitely as a trade war between the Asian neighbors continues to escalate.

     Doraemon: Nobita’s Chronicle of the Moon Exploration, the 39th feature in the tales of the blue, “cat-type robot” and his human sidekick, schoolboy Nobita, is the latest victim in the Tokyo-Seoul spat.

     Last month Butt Detective: The Movie was also caught up in the growing boycott of Japanese goods, services and companies. The film, a spinoff from a children’s book and anime TV series about a detective with a head shaped like a backside, had received maximum scores on South Korean review websites on its release, but got a bum deal after the sites were hit with posts calling for cinemagoers to boycott Japanese films.

…The current row was triggered when Japan announced July 1 that it was placing export restrictions to South Korea on materials used in manufacturing semiconductors, a major Korean industry. Tokyo accused Seoul of breaking sanctions on North Korea, but the move was widely seen as retaliation for a Korean court ruling that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has to pay compensation to Koreans forced to work for the company during World War II….

(8) ROSEN OBIT. Fraggle Rock voice actor Stuart M. Rosen has died reports SYFY Wire.

Stuart M. Rosen, a prolific voice actor and creator who helped develop the iconic children’s puppet program Dusty’s Treehouse in the late 1960s and voiced The Storyteller in HBO’s Fraggle Rock, reportedly has passed away from cancer. He was 80 years old. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 5, 1891 — Donald Kerr. Happy Hapgood in 1938’s Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars which might be one of the earliest such films. His only other genre appearances were in the Abbott and Costello films such as Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man in uncredited roles. (Died 1977.)
  • Born August 5, 1935 — Wanda Ventham, 84. Mother of Benedict Cumberbatch. She’s showed up on during Doctor Who over a number of years playing three different roles (Jean Rock, Thea Ransome/Fendahl Core and Faroon) in three different stories, “The Faceless Ones” over six episodes, Serial: “Image of the Fendahl” over four  episodes and “Time and the Rani” over three  episodes. That’d mean she appeared with the Fourth and Seventh Doctors. She was also Col. Virginia Lake, a series regular on UFO, during the Seventies. 
  • Born August 5, 1940 — Natalie Trundy,79. First, she was one of the Underdwellers named Albina in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Next, she played Dr. Stephanie Branton, a specialist studying apes from the future who came into our present day in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.  Then in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, she played the chimp Lisa.  
  • Born August 5, 1947 — Élisabeth Vonarburg, 72. Parisian born, she’s Quebec resident. She was the literary director of the French-Canadian SF magazine Solaris. Her first novel, Le Silence de la Cité, was published in 1981. Since then she’s been a prolific witter of novels and short fiction. In 1993, her website notes sgphecreceived a Prix spécial du Jury Philip K. Dick Award  for In the Mothers’ Land.  H’h. I’m pleased to say that iBooks is deeply stock in her works but Kindle has nothing at all by her. Her website, in French of course, is here.
  • Born August 5, 1956 — Robert Frezza, 63. Wrote five SF novels of a space opera-ish nature in five years covering two series, McLendon’s Syndrome and The VMR Theory, and The Small Colonial War series which is A Small Colonial War, Fire in a Faraway Place and Cain’s Land) before disappearing from writing SF twenty years ago.
  • Born August 5, 1956 — Maureen McCormick, 63. Though better for being Marcia Brady on The Brady Bunch, she has done some genre performances. She was Eve in Snow White: A Deadly Summer and Officer Tyler in Return to Horror High, both decidedly pulpish horror film. A step up in class was her portrayal of the young Endora in two episodes of Bewitched, “And Something Makes Three” and “Trick or Treat”. She shows up in another magical show, I Dream of Jeannie, as Susan in “My Master, the Doctor”.  And she was used in six different roles on Fantasy Island.
  • Born August 5, 1968 — Matt Jones, 51. Started as columnist for Doctor Who Magazine. A decade later, he wrote two of the Tenth Doctor scripts, a two-parter, “The Impossible Planet” and “The Satan Pit”, and one for Torchwood, “Dead Man Walking”. He co-authored with Joan Ormond, Time Travel in Popular Media.
  • Born August 5, 1980 — JoSelle Vanderhooft, 39. Former Green Man reviewer with a single novel so far, Ebenezer, and several collections, Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Steam-Powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories. She also co-edited with Steve Berman, Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction.
  • Born August 5, 1961 — Janet McTeer, 58. Last genre role was as Jessica’s mother, Alisa Jones. in Jessica Jones. She was also Edith Prior in The Divergent Series: Insurgent, and the elderly Princess Aurora who was the narrator in Maleficent. 

(10) CHECK THAT OFF. J. Scott Coatsworth got into SFWA – not everybody does: “POINT OF VIEW: Setting Goals (And Making Them)”.

I set myself two missions at the start of this year – one, to get into the Science Fiction Writers’ Association (SFWA, pronounced Siffwuh) by writing and selling a qualifying short story. And two, to take steps to snag an agent for what I hope will be the next step in my writing career.

Well, missions one accomplished….

(11) A HOIST OF BOOKS. Atlas Obscura reads from the log of the “Bokbåten”, a circulating library afloat.

Sweden and its Nordic neighbors are among the world’s most literate countries. These nations boast a range of newspapers and public libraries, as well as provide convenient access to computers and strong educational resources to its residents.

Access to books and resources might be harder to come by for some, though, especially those living on the remote islands of Stockholm’s archipelago—the largest group of islands in Sweden and the second-largest in the Baltic Sea.

To combat this obstacle while continuing its prioritization of literacy, twice a year the Stockholm Library Service rents a boat for a week and brings books to 23 inhabited islands. Each spring and fall, the boat is packed with approximately 3,000 books and sets sail along Stockholm’s eastern seaboard as an aquatic library…. 

(12) IT’S EERIE. He looks just like a pinker version of my father when he was young.

My father is in the lower left corner of this holiday card, sent out in the early days of television.

(13) IN GLORIOUS BLACK AND WHITE. Jessica Holmes updates Galactic Journey readers about the current Doctor Who arc: “[August 5th 1964] A Bit Of A Flub (Doctor Who: The Sensorites [Part 2])”.

Meanwhile, John’s having his brain fixed, and the city Administrator comes in to whine about it. He was the one who wanted to disintegrate everybody last episode, if you recall. He doesn’t seem to like anything about the humans. Not their names, which he reckons are absurd (cheek!), not their culture of egalitarianism (though I could dispute that), and not their stupid, ugly faces (pot, kettle!)

(14) I DARN YOU TO HECK. TheWrap’s article is paved with good intentions – and spoilers (beware!): “‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ Creator Says ‘We’re Going to Hell’ in Season 3 – ‘and It’s Very Fun’”.

If the closing moments of the second season finale of “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” hadn’t already made it clear that the show was going to take an even darker turn next season, then creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa did so Sunday by confirming the fiery setting Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) and co. will be entering when the show returns….

(15) SECOND TIME’S THE CHARM. BBC is on the beach — “Franky Zapata: Flyboarding Frenchman crosses English Channel”.

French inventor Franky Zapata has made the first-ever successful Channel crossing on a jet-powered flyboard.

Mr Zapata, 40, took off from Sangatte, near Calais, at 06:17 GMT on Sunday and landed in St Margaret’s Bay in Dover.

The invention, powered by a kerosene-filled backpack, made the 22-mile (35.4-km) journey in 22 minutes.

Mr Zapata, a former jet-ski champion, had failed in his first attempt to cross the Channel on 25 July after complications with refuelling.

Here’s the Voice of America video:

(16) ROMANCING THE STONE? “‘Snow White’ gravestone on show in German museum”.

Once upon a time a museum in a charming old German town was given a very important, long-lost gravestone.

It was that of Maria Sophia von Erthal, a baroness who is believed to have inspired the Brothers Grimm to write Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Her restored gravestone has just gone on display at the Diocesan Museum in Bamberg, southern Germany. It was donated by a family who had rescued it.

The museum director says Sophia’s life “became the nucleus of Snow White”.

(17) LOTERIA UPDATE. BBC finds the game is evolving — “Loteria: A centuries-old game remade for millennials”. Beyond Picacio’s version: “La Mano” becomes “El Nail Art”, “El Mundo” becomes “La Student Debt”…

Lotería, a game that’s been played across Latin America for centuries, has been given a humorous and perceptive update by designer Mike Alfaro. The new version is now being sold online.

(18) BIRD IS THE WORD. You knew this, right? CBS News tells “How the Peanuts character Woodstock got his name”.

Charles Schulz, the creator of the comic strip “Peanuts,” was many things: a father, a veteran, an artist. But one thing he was NOT, by any stretch, was a hippie. 

When asked if he thought Schulz would have enjoyed attending the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Benjamin Clark, curator of the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif., laughed, “No!

“He was famous for not really enjoying travel, or crowds.”…

(19) SLASHER FICTION. Slate: “Jimmy Kimmel Debuted a Considerably Less Heartwarming Trailer for That Tom Hanks Mister Rogers Movie”. Is A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood genre? Well, if Jimmy Kimmel is to be believed it’s actually a horror film. (Hint: Don’t believe him.)

[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Jon Del Arroz, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

Wandering Through the Public Domain #15

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A regular exploration of public domain genre works available through Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and Librivox.

By Colleen McMahon:  E. Everett Evans (1893-1958) is one of those names I had never heard of before getting involved with Librivox. Based in the Los Angeles area, he was a long-time science fiction fan and minor author with a handful of short stories and novels to his name.

I stumbled onto him because one of Librivox’s current recording projects is The Planet Mappers, a YA novel from 1955. In this story, a family of space explorers (mom, dad and two teenage sons) are out in the galaxy attempting to independently map and explore a newly discovered solar system. Dad has taken loans to finance the expedition, so failure is potentially ruinous. Unfortunately, he takes a bad fall on the journey and his injuries put him out of commission. The two boys have to take the lead and complete their mission (Mom, of course, isn’t much use for anything but worrying and making hot meals).

The bits that I skimmed made me curious about Evans’ other public domain books available through Project Gutenberg. It turns out that there are three other novels. Man of Many Minds and Alien Minds star the same protagonist, a psychic secret agent taking part in interplanetary intrigue for the unfortunately-abbreviated S.S. (Secret Service!).

Masters of Space is probably Evan’s best known book, as it was co-written with E.E. “Doc” Smith. Masters of Space is the only Evans book available through Librivox, but The Planet Mappers should wrap up in the next couple of months.

Evans’ writing career only spanned the last decade or so of his life, but he was well-established in fandom through that period. After his death in 1958, Forrest J. Ackerman established the Big Heart award in Evans’ memory. The award is given annually at Worldcon to a fan who “embodies ‘good work and great spirit long contributed’” according to the Fancyclopedia website. Over the years the Big Heart award has been renamed twice, in 2006 in memory of Ackerman and in 2018 in memory of David A. Kyle.

Although it’s an award for fans rather than authors or SFF “celebrities”, there are some well-known names on the list of recipients over the years, including Robert Bloch, Bjo Trimble, and Julius Schwartz. And of course, our own Mike Glyer was recognized with the award in 2018!

Favorite fun fact I discovered while reading up on Mr. Evans: based on his initials, his nickname was Triple-E, or Tripoli. It speaks to my nerdiness that I think that is pretty cool.

Some recent birthday celebrants:

John Russell Fearn (1908-1960) was a British pulp writer who was one of the first to cross over to U.S. publications. He wrote under his own name and various pseudonyms. Most of his stories appeared between the late 1930s and mid 1950s. Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg does not have any of his works, but The Faded Page, based in Canada, has several of Fearn’s stories available through its site. As they note, public domain status outside of Canada is not confirmed. Internet Archive’s Pulp Magazine Archive also has several magazines containing Fearn’s writings, but again, public domain status is uncertain. It’s worth a click just to take a peek at the insanely awesome cover art in this selection, however!

Tom Godwin (1915-1980) has one novel and six stories available on Project Gutenberg:

The last two weeks have produced a bumper crop of new Librivox releases in the realms of science fiction and fantasy:

  • Snowball by Poul Anderson (1926-2001)

    Simon’s new source of power promised a new era for Mankind. But what happens to world economy when anyone can manufacture it in the kitchen oven?… Here’s one answer!


  • Korean Fairy Tales by William Elliot Griffis (1843-1928)

    Everywhere on earth the fairy world of each country is older and perhaps more enduring than the one we see and feel and tread upon. So I tell in this book the folk lore of the Korean people, and of the behavior of the particular kind of fairies that inhabit the Land of Morning Splendor.


  • Studies in Love and in Terror by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947)

    This is a collection of five stories by Marie Belloc Lowndes. The stories are neither love stories nor ghost and horror stories but they each combine elements of both.


  • The Goddess of Atvatabar by William Richard Bradshaw (1851-1927)

    An accident during a polar expedition leads the crew of the Polar King to the discovery of an entire world within the earth. Within the interior realm lies a vast ocean with continents and civilisations unknown to the outside world. The societies within possess new technologies and magics unknown to the outside world and these are lovingly described in great detail by the author. The crew proceed to explore and in true Victorian fashion then conquer the new world. An extraordinary feat of imagination and inventiveness by this obscure author.


  • The Magic Wand by Tudor Jenks (1857-1922)

    Three short children’s fantasy stories. The stories are light and humorous and can spark a child’s imagination.

Wandering Through the Public Domain #14

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A regular exploration of public domain genre works available through Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and Librivox.

By Colleen McMahon: I recently saw Tolkien, a fictionalized telling of the early life of that author. I enjoyed the movie, which was pretty standard biopic fare. It hits all the tropes — childhood trauma, close friends, inspiring mentors, war experiences, and young love, ending just as he began writing his most famous works.

The heart of the story is the friendship between Tolkien and four school friends, one of whom is Geoffrey Bache Smith. Smith was at Oxford with Tolkien, and both left the university to serve in the Great War. Smith died at the Somme in 1916. After the war, Tolkien worked with Smith’s mother to publish a book of his poetry. He also wrote the introduction to the book.

DB at Kalimac’s Corner wrote a post with more information about Smith, the book’s publication, and Smith’s actual poems, including some details that the movie changed for narrative purposes:

If you’ve seen the new bio-pic Tolkien, you’ll have noticed a fair amount of attention devoted to the poetry of Tolkien’s friend Geoffrey Bache Smith, one of his school fellowship the T.C.B.S., who died on duty in World War I in December 1916. There’s a scene in which Tolkien tries to persuade Smith’s mother to allow a collection of his poems to be published.

In fact, Mrs. Smith initiated the idea of the collection, asking Tolkien to gather up any poems of her son’s that he had copies of, and the book was actually published, with a brief introduction by Tolkien, in June 1918.

I had mentioned this here several months ago when I wrote about public domain Tolkien works, but as the film has raised interest in Smith and his poetry, I thought I’d mention it again. If you are curious about it, A Spring Harvest by Geoffrey Bache Smith (1894-1916) is on Project Gutenberg here.

The film’s lovely images of the spires of Oxford also reminded me of a poem that I read for a Librivox Short Poetry Collection last year. It’s from Great Poems of the World War — “The Gentlemen of Oxford” by Norah M. Holland:

The sunny streets of Oxford
Are lying still and bare.
No sound of voice or laughter
Rings through the golden air;
And, chiming from her belfry,
No longer Christchurch calls
The eager, boyish faces
To gather in her halls.

The colleges are empty.
Only the sun and wind
Make merry in the places
The lads have left behind.
But, when the trooping shadows
Have put the day to flight,
The Gentlemen of Oxford
Come homing through the night.

From France they come, and Flanders,
From Mons, and Marne and Aisne.
From Greece and from Gallipoli
They come to her again;
From the North Sea’s grey waters,
From many a grave unknown,
The Gentlemen of Oxford
Come back to claim their own.

The dark is full of laughter,
Boy laughter, glad and young.
They tell the old-time stories,
The old-time songs are sung;
They linger in her cloisters,
They throng her dewy meads,
Till Isis hears their calling
And laughs among her reeds.

But, when the east is whitening
To greet the rising sun,
And slowly, over Carfax,
The stars fade, one by one,
Then, when the dawn-wind whispers
Along the Isis shore,
The Gentlemen of Oxford
Must seek their graves once more.

Turning to more firmly genre material, several authors with recent birthdays turn up on Project Gutenberg. Ed Earl Repp (1901-1979) has one story, “The Day Time Stopped Moving”, originally published in Amazing Stories in 1940. It’s been recorded twice for Librivox.

Charles D. Hornig (1916-1999) published a zine in the 1930s called Fantasy Fan. As Cat Eldridge wrote in the birthday feature recently, Fantasy Fan included

…first publication of works by Bloch, Lovecraft, Smith, Howard and Derleth. It also had a LOC called ‘The Boiling Point’ which quickly became angry exchanges between several of the magazine’s regular contributors, including Ackerman, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

Project Gutenberg has 8 issues of Fantasy Fan from 1933-34. As far as I can tell, no one has recorded anything from these yet, but it might be a fun project to put together a set of dramatic readings from the angry letters columns — I’ll add it to my ever-growing list of “Librivox projects I want to get around to one day”!

Recent Librivox releases:

This is a short booklet on science fact commissioned by the U. S. Energy Research and Development Administration (Office of Public Affairs). It tells the story of the origins of nuclear physics in terms understandable to an audience with minimal technical background. What were the steps through history – the discoveries that built upon one another – from alchemy to chemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics, and quantum mechanics, that led to our understanding and harnessing nuclear energy? Asimov was a great writer of both science fact and fiction who wrote or edited more than 500 books, published in 9 of the 10 major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification.

In any status-hungry culture, the level a man is assigned depends on what people think he is—not on what he is. And that, of course, means that only the deliberately phony has real status!

A collection of twenty stories featuring ghoulies, ghosties, long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night. Expect shivers up your spine, the stench of human flesh, and the occasional touch of wonder. You may also feel more jumpy tonight than usual. This collection has a LOT of H.P. Lovecraft, plus some Poe, M.R. James, and some more obscure authors.

Wandering Through the Public Domain #13

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A regular exploration of public domain genre works available through Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and Librivox.

By Colleen McMahon: Serendipity strikes again…I started this edition thinking that I didn’t have any feature topic that I wanted to write about, so I would instead just do a roundup of a bunch of authors whose birthdays I missed in April.

First up was Stanley G. Weinbaum (1902-1935), who, it turns out, is an author who made an enormous impact on the science fiction field in a tragically short life. Reading about Weinbaum was so interesting that he immediately took over and became the feature topic!

Stanley Weinbaum was born in 1902 and died of lung cancer just 33 years later, publishing only a handful of short stories (and one pseudonymous romance novel) in his lifetime. But his few stories formed an important basis for the full development of the science fiction genre.

His very first science fiction tale, “A Martian Odyssey”, appeared in Wonder Stories in 1934, and set a new standard for stories that to this point had existed on the far (and often nonsensical) fringe of adventure fiction. The story tells of the encounter between astronauts exploring Mars and an intelligent alien. They gradually learn to communicate with “Tweel” who then accompanies the explorers and helps explain several other Martian life forms they discover.

While “A Martian Odyssey” includes some typical-for-the-time encounters with dangerous aliens, complete with chases and hairsbreadth escapes, the real excitement of the plot revolves around the trial-and-error process of the humans and Martian figuring out how to communicate and understand the information Tweel is providing about the other species on Mars.

Isaac Asimov saw “A Martian Odyssey” as a turning point for science fiction, one that changed the parameters of the field for the writers who came after. He called it

a perfect Campbellian science fiction story, before John W. Campbell. Indeed, Tweel may be the first creature in science fiction to fulfil Campbell’s dictum, ‘write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man’. (from Asimov on Science Fiction, via Wikipedia).

In 2017, Alan Brown wrote about Stanley Weinbaum:

Weinbaum’s stories immediately stood out as different. His characters felt real and acted realistically. There was romance, but the women did not exist only as objects to be captured and/or rescued. The science was rooted in the latest developments, and thoughtfully applied. And most of all, the aliens were not simply bug-eyed monsters existing to invade the planet or threaten humanity. They felt real in the same way the human characters did—and yet seemed anything but human in the way they thought and acted.

In Weinbaum’s hands, a genre that was known for immaturity had grown up, but in a way that didn’t sacrifice any of the humor, fun, and adventure. You could read the stories for the sense of thrilling adventure alone, but those who wanted more found that as well.

Weinbaum published thirteen stories in Wonder Stories and Astounding between July 1934 and December 1935, and several more appeared posthumously over the next few years. His impact on the genre was recognized by writers and fans alike, as “A Martian Odyssey” was overwhelmingly voted into the first Science Fiction Hall of Fame collection. He was recognized with the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2008.

Project Gutenberg has seven works by Weinbaum, six short stories and a posthumously-published novel:

All of these works are available on Librivox:

A few more authors who had birthdays back in April:

Robert Bloch (1917-1994) has one novel on Project Gutenberg, This Crowded Earth (1958), which has also been recorded for Librivox.

Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) is represented by three stories at Project Gutenberg:

All have been recorded at Librivox, along with an additional novel, The Creature From Beyond Infinity.

Howard Browne (1908-1999) has six stories on Project Gutenberg (though at least two are really novel-length, but were serialized in pulp magazines):

Recent Librivox releases:

  • Short Science Fiction Collection 065 by Various

    Includes stories by Gordon R. Dickson, Frederic Brown, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Lester Del Rey, Ben Bova and more!

  • Tarzan and the Golden Lion by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)

    Tarzan’s amazing ability to establish kinship with some of the most dangerous animals in the jungle serves him well in this exciting story of his adventures with the Golden Lion, Jad-bal-ja, when the great and lordly animal becomes his ally and protector. Tarzan learns from the High Priestess, La, of a country north of Opar which is held in dread by the Oparians. It is peopled by a strange race of gorilla-men with the intelligence of humans and the strength of gorillas. From time to time they attack Opar, carrying off prisoners for use as slaves in the jewel-studded Temple where they worship a great black-maned lion. Accompanied by the faithful Jad-bal-ja, Tarzan invades the dread country in an attempt to win freedom for the hundreds of people held in slavery there…

  • The Year When Stardust Fell by Raymond Fisher Jones (1915-1994)

    The story of The Year When Stardust Fell is not a story of the distant future or of the remote past. It is not a story of a never-never land where fantastic happenings take place daily. It is a story of my town and yours, of people like you and me and the mayor in townhall, his sheriff on the corner, and the professor in the university—a story that happens no later than tomorrow. It is the portrayal of the unending conflict between ignorance and superstition on one hand, and knowledge and cultural enlightenment on the other as they come into conflict with each other during an unprecedented disaster brought on by the forces of nature.

  • The Cartels Jungle by Irving E. Cox Jr. (1915-2001)

    In most ideally conceived Utopias the world as it exists is depicted as a mushrooming horror of maladjustment, cruelty and crime. In this startlingly original short novel that basic premise is granted, but only to pave the way for an approach to Utopia over a highway of the mind so daringly unusual we predict you’ll forget completely that you’re embarking on a fictional excursion into the future by one of the most gifted writers in the field. And that forgetfulness will be accompanied by the startling realization that Irving E. Cox has a great deal more than a storyteller’s magic to impart.

Wandering Through the Public Domain #10

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A regular exploration of public domain genre works available through Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and Librivox.

By Colleen McMahon: I have two things to share today that are a bit afield from my usual areas, but both will lead you to internet rabbit holes that are a lot of fun to explore.

The first is involves gaming, and I was led to it by an email from Jason Corley, forwarded to me by OGH:

While participating in the #1923GameJam at itch.io to celebrate the expansion of the public domain, I discovered an unproduced science fiction silent film screenplay by Nobel laureate Romaine Rolland, Man, Lord of Machinery, published in Vanity Fair in 1923.  I adapted it into an interactive fiction game for the jam and people can play it for free in a browser here:

https://jdcorley.itch.io/man-lord-of-machinery

They can also download a PDF version of the original publication there too.

Man, Lord of Machinery has a lot of the same themes as Metropolis, but predates it!

“Gaming Like It’s 1923” was a contest/challenge that ran in January, 2019. The challenge was to design a game in some way inspired by a 1923 work that had just entered the public domain. You can find the site for the completed game jam, with all 34 games and a list of the winners, here.

I haven’t had a chance to really explore the games, but I was particularly taken with the transformation of a Robert Frost poem into a typical game scenario in Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening To Steal Treasure!

The second is a treasure trove of images at the Magazine Art Collection at the Internet Archive. This collection was started pretty recently, in December 2018, and it’s unclear if it has been uploaded in its entirety or if there is more to come. It currently contains over 15,000 images, mostly magazine covers but also including some advertising and interior illustrations from magazines.

Only some of it is SFF related, and it’s likely that not all of it is in the public domain, as it contains pieces from well beyond 1923, but it’s a feast of eye candy and fun to explore.

If you have spent any time exploring fannish things, especially pre-internet, you have probably heard of APAs, self-published small magazines that circulated among fans. APA stands for Amateur Press Association, and it turns out that SF-related APAs are a subset of a wider phenomenon that began in the latter 19th-century and embraced “amateur journalism” around a wide variety of topics.

The United Amateur Press Association was founded in 1895, and H.P. Lovecraft became heavily involved with the organization beginning in the 1910s. He published nonfiction essays and critical pieces as well as early short stories in the United Amateur, the organization’s official magazine.

Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 collects these early Lovecraft pieces. Lovecraft continued writing and publishing with the UAPA well past 1922, but the later pieces are not in the public domain. There are commercially published books that collect all of the pieces, but this collection provides a good sampling of his developing fiction style as well as his eccentric (and sometimes offensive) opinions.

While the United Amateur writings have not been recorded for Librivox, virtually all of his other public domain works have been, most multiple times. You can find them here.

Among the recent birthday notices was Joe L. Hensley (1926-2007), who is represented at Project Gutenberg by one story, “Now We Are Three”, which has been recorded at Librivox as part of Short Science Fiction Collection 22.

April 1 marked the birthday of Samuel R. Delany (b. 1942), who has two novels at Project Gutenberg:

Both are also available as audiobooks at Librivox.

Periodically, the volunteers at Librivox declare a month to focus on finishing off languishing projects, and March was one of those months. The “March Toward the Finish Line” ended with an impressive 122 books added to the catalog, including some that may be of interest to folks here:

  • Dracula (Version 4) by Bram Stoker (1847-1912)

    Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. It introduced Count Dracula, and established many conventions of subsequent vampire fantasy. The novel tells the story of Dracula’s attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and a woman led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.


  • Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873)

    Laura grew up on a castle in the Austrian mountains with her father, slightly lonely as there are no potential companions around. Her loneliness is at an end when a carriage accindent close by their castle brings a mysterious visitor: Carmilla was injured in the accident, and remains at the castle to heal. But there is something dark about Carmilla. Is Laura in danger?


  • The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed by Cenydd Morus (1879-1937)

    Cenydd Morus’s (Kenneth Morris) imaginative retelling of tales from the Mabinogion, the great work of Welsh literature first recorded in the 12th-13th century. Written while he was working for the Theosophical Society in California, Morris’s version restores the Gods that he believed had disappeared from the written record but must have been present in the oral tradition of the Druid bards.


  • Pursuit by Lester Del Rey (1915-1993)

    Wilbur Hawkes wakes with no memory of the last seven months. He knows he’s in danger, but he doesn’t know why. No sooner does he leave his apartment than it explodes in flames, and, to escape, he must run through New York, not knowing where to run, or who he is running from. With heat rays, disintegrating men, and exploding cats, how can this not involve aliens? What other explanation can there be?

Wandering Through the Public Domain #6

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A regular exploration of public domain genre works available through Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and Librivox.

By Colleen McMahon: When I first discovered Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive, I struggled with how best to read the books I found, because reading on my regular computer was hard on the eyes and the layout was not always ideal. There are numerous formats for the texts on both sites, and many options for e-readers, so it might take some experimentation to figure out what works for you.

I thought I’d take a minute to describe the system I’ve worked out, in the hopes it might help someone else overcome this obstacle to enjoyable (and free!) reading experiences. My experience is mainly with Apple devices and I’m not familiar with the equivalent apps and procedures in Android, but the overall process should have similar steps.

As I’ve reached the age of needing reading glasses, I’ve found I have a strong preference for reading ebooks, usually on my iPad using the Kindle app. No need to find my reading glasses and a strong light with a backlit screen and easy text resizing!

However, it turns out that downloading the books in the so-called “Kindle format” (MOBI) often produces scrambled layout and punctuation — if you have ever attempted to read the free public domain books available through Amazon, you will be familiar. So for Kindle, I recommend using the PDF format rather than MOBI, on both sites.

Unfortunately, it can be a tedious process to get the PDF into Kindle. Each file must be “sent” via Amazon. They can be slow to show up in your Kindle library, and sometimes they get lost in the ether. The one advantage is that once the file does arrive, you can access it through any Kindle reader or app.

Recently I discovered that for both IA and PG texts, it’s much easier to use the Apple Books app, so it’s become my go-to for public domain texts.

On Project Gutenberg, the easiest way to transfer the file is to click on the Google Drive or Dropbox icon next to the EPUB option on the main page for the book. This puts a copy of the file on Google Drive or Dropbox, after which you simply open whichever one you use and select the “Open in…” option. Click on the Books app to open the file. After that, it is in your Books library on that device until you decide to remove it. If you use more than one Apple device, you will have to repeat it for each one.

Although Internet Archive offers EPUB and Kindle format for most of its files, I have found it far easier to open the text in PDF format and download that. If I’m looking at Internet Archive on my iPad (I use Chrome), then once the PDF version is open, it’s simple to click the “Open In…” button at the bottom of the screen and drop it directly into the Books app. On my laptop, I download the PDF, then upload it to Drive. Then I can pull it up on my iPad and open it in Books.

As I said, there are many routes to get the files to your preferred reader. If you have other methods that work well for your preferred formats, please feel free to share in the comments!

For everyone who hasn’t slipped into a coma after that scintillating discussion, how about some actual book suggestions?

In a comment on the previous installment, Robert Whitaker Sirignano mentioned that Nikola Tesla had written for Electric Experimenter magazine, edited by Hugo Gernsback. If you are curious about that magazine, Internet Archive has four single issues from the 1910s, as well as the complete volume 7 (1919).

F. Orlin Tremaine (1899-1956) had his 120th birthday on January 7, and it turns out that he has one work on PG, published under the name Warner Von Lorne: Wanted–7 Fearless Engineers! This is a multi-chapter novella originally published in Amazing Stories in 1939. It has been recorded as a stand-alone work on Librivox.

Algis Budrys (1931-2008) has several short stories on Project Gutenberg:

All of the Budrys stories except “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” have been recorded at least once at Librivox, as part of various Short Science Fiction Collections.

Recent Librivox releases:

  • Queen Sheba’s Ring by H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925)

    A famed archeologist, an aging doctor, and a young army engineer set out across the African desert on a great adventure. Professor Higgs is in search of new archeological discoveries, Dr. Adams seeks to rescue his kidnapped son, and Captain Orme wants to forget an unhappy love affair. Maqueda, Daughter of Kings, ruler of the Abati, enlists their aid to destroy the sacred idol of a neighboring tribe with promises to help the doctor rescue his son.

  • Short Ghost and Horror Collection 032 by Various

    A collection of 20 short stories about various things that go bump in the night. Includes stories by Lord Dunsany, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Ambrose Bierce, M.R. James and others. (Full disclosure: I recorded the Le Fanu story).

  • The Enemies of Books by William Blades (1824-1890)

    The author, an avid book collector, calls for the better protection of books against the “enemies” which lead to their physical destruction. In a series of brief chapters, he details the losses caused by raging fire, floods of water, noxious gases, sheer neglect, ignorant bigotry, invasions of bookworms and other vermin, inept bookbinders, clueless book collectors, clumsy servants, and mishandling by children.

Yes, I know that last one is not SFF, but it is certainly filled with horrors for the passionate book lovers among us!

Wandering Through the Public Domain #5

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A regular exploration of public domain genre works available through Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and Librivox.

By Colleen McMahon: We have passed the January 1 date and 1923 works have safely entered the public domain! There was a quite a flurry in the new projects boards in the volunteer forums at Librivox, and the recording process has already begun for some of the most anticipated books like Gibran’s The Prophet and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and the Golden Lion. I look forward to mentioning the SFF-related ones here as they are completed and released over the next few months.

Speaking of 1923 works, in the previous installment of this column, I had said that I had not found a copy of The Barge of Haunted Lives online as yet, but that recently changed. You can now access it on the Internet Archive here.

The New York Times took note of the public domain watershed and it mentions some of the “big name” items moving out of copyright, and also contains a pretty good explanation of the whole 20-year public domain “freeze” that had been in place. If my attempt at it wasn’t clear enough, this article might help!

A recent Pixel Scroll mentioned an upcoming comic book based on The Light Princess by George MacDonald (1824-1905). MacDonald was a prolific author as well as a poet and Christian minister. Much of his work was intended for children or what we nowadays call “Young Adult” audiences, but he also wrote novels and nonfiction for adults.

I don’t know much about him myself at this point and am interested in finding out more, so there may be an upcoming column with more in-depth information. For now, here are links to the two works mentioned in the Scroll item:

Birthday mentions in the Pixel Scrolls often send me off to Project Gutenberg to see what might be available from the older authors mentioned. Some recents:

Charles Harness (1915-2005) has one short story, The Professional Approach. It was co-written with Theodore L. Thomas (1920-2005) and originally appeared in Analog in September, 1962. It’s been recorded once for Librivox, as part of Short Science Fiction Collection 014.

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) has nothing Middle-Earthish in the public domain, but there is a 1922 reference work, A Middle English Vocabulary. This was a companion volume to Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose.

Tolkien also wrote a very brief introductory note to a volume of poetry, A Spring Harvest, by Geoffrey Bache Smith (1894-1916). This is a posthumous collection published in tribute to Smith, who was killed in France.

No one has been brave enough to tackle the recording of a Middle English glossary, but there is one Tolkien poem on Librivox. (Token Tolkien, you might say…) In 2010, Librivox volunteers produced Librivox’s Most Wanted, a collection of early poems by authors whose most famous works are often suggested/requested by Librivox listeners, but those works are still in the public domain. The collection includes one Tolkien poem, “Goblin Feet”, as well as poems by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, and others.

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) is represented on Project Gutenberg by five works, four of which are nonfiction (and three of those are separate volumes of the same work). The nonfiction books:

His one work of fiction on PG is Youth, a short story that was published in Space Science Fiction, May 1952. There’s one Librivox audio version, on Short Science Fiction Collection 034.

Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) shared a January 2nd birthday with Asimov, and has two stories on PG:

  • The Beautiful People (If: World of Science Fiction, September, 1952)
  • Elegy (Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy, February 1953)

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is best known for his non-SFF novels, particularly The Good Soldier and the Parades’ End series, but he has a few books that tip over into fantasy and science fiction, including:

The latter is also available as a Librivox audiobook, with a plot summary from Wikipedia:

The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901) is a quasi-science fiction novel on which Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad collaborated. It looks at society’s mental evolution and what is gained and lost in the process. Written before the first World War, its themes of corruption and the effect of the 20th Century on British aristocracy appeared to predict history. In the novel, the metaphor of the “fourth dimension” is used to explain a societal shift from a generation of people who have traditional values of interdependence, being overtaken by a modern generation who believe in expediency, callously using political power to bring down the old order.

Some other recent Librivox releases:

  • The Light Invisible by Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914)

    Fifteen short ghost stories by the Anglican then Roman Catholic priest, Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914). The form of the book is of an old English Roman Catholic priest telling stories to his young friend.


  • A Book of Bargains by Vincent O’Sullivan (1868-1940)

    This is a volume of short horror stories by American-born short story writer, poet and critic Vincent O’Sullivan. Sometimes considered the last of the decadents, O’Sullivan was a notable literary figure of his time, a friend of Oscar Wilde, and a favourite of many critics. The stories in the Book of Bargains are all of them notable horror stories, each involving a bargain with the devil – either explicitly or figuratively.


  • Armageddon 2149 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan (1888-1940) (version 3)

    This is the original ‘Buck Rogers’ SF classic. Thrill to the adventures of Anthony “Buck” Rogers, one of the most celebrated characters in the history of science fiction. Famed in comic strips, television, in movies, and even radio, this is the first novel to introduce Buck Rogers to the reading public. In Armageddon – 2419 A.D., Buck, a victim of accidental suspended animation, awakens five hundred years later to discover America groaning under the tyranny of the villainous Han, ruling from the safety of their armored machine-cities. Falling in love with one of America’s new warrior-women, Wilma Deering, Rogers soon become a central figure in using new-fangled scientific weapons – disintegrators, jumping belts, inertron, and paralysis rays – to revolt against the Han.


  • My Inventions and Other Works by Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)

    Between February and October 1919, Nikola Tesla submitted many articles to the magazine Electrical Experimenter. The most famous of these works is a six part series titled My Inventions, which is an autobiographical account of Nikola Tesla’s life and his most celebrated discoveries. This work has been compiled and republished as a stand-alone book several times under different names, but has been a cause of some controversy due to some versions deviating from the original text without explanation. This LibriVox project returns to the original text and expands upon it through the addition of Nikola Tesla’s own supplementary articles as they were published in 1919.

Pixel Scroll 1/5/19 Mr. Gorn, Tear Down This Suit

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(1) NOVIK SPEAKS OUT FOR FANFIC. In “Freed From Copyright, These Classic Works Are Yours To Adapt”, NPR discusses works newly entering public domain, and the writerly impulse to appropriate or retell stories.

A large body of films, music, and books from that year entered the public domain on Jan. 1, the first time that’s happened in 20 years. And that means they can be used according to the will of new creators who wish to adopt or adapt them.

…Those lengthy copyrights can be a barrier to the creation of new art. “Copyright has been overextended so many times, largely at the behest of major copyright holders,” says author Naomi Novik. “Even though what that actually does is inhibit people from creating new works and sharing these older works.” Novik is a founding member of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit that focuses on preserving fan fiction and art — that is, work created by fans, based on characters and worlds from their favorite written works, film, and TV, which can occasionally come into conflict with copyright law.

… Novik says that the impulse to re-imagine art is innate. “That kind of process of imagination is just something that our brains do. It doesn’t matter what law you put around it, our brains are still going to do it,” she says.

Inevitably, the spring of adaptations will bring about bad versions of these classic works. As Blake Hazard, great-granddaughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald, told The New York Times, “I hope people maybe will be energized to do something original with the work, but of course the fear is that there will be some degradation of the text.”

Miller, who adapted Homer, does worry about the possibility of betraying the texts. But as she was working on Circe, she says, “I came to the understanding that I can’t hurt Homer. He’s fine. Whatever I do, that’s just my response to him. But the original text will be just fine.”

(2) DEAMERICANIZING THE HUGOS. Australian writer T.R. Napper wants to broaden the meaning of diversity: “The Hugos: Putting the World into WorldCon”.

It’s time to put the world into WorldCon. Time to include geography and national culture in the definition of diversity. Past time.

This here is just a discussion in good faith. Remember those? There’s no outrage; no political side. All I’m saying is this: historically, the winner of the Hugo for best novel has been from the US, 82% of the time. If we take just the past five years (2014 – 2018) Americans have been nominated 90% of the time (27/30) and won 90% (the latter number comes from Ken Liu (as translator) sharing the award with Cixin Liu for The Three-Body Problem). For the Nebulas – while not related to WorldCon directly, still reflective of what is happening in the genre – the picture is worse: US writers have been nominated 91% of the time (30/34) and won 100%….

Of course, right in the sweet spot of Napper’s 5-year sample are three years deeply affected by Sad/Rabid Puppy slate voting. Diversity of all kinds suffered in those years. What happens if I go back and pick my own sample – say, the year 2010? The Worldcon was in Australia, and the five Best Novel nominees included two Canadians and a Brit – 60% — leaving Americans at only 40%. Or 2009 when it was in Montreal – the five nominees included two Brits – 40% — and Americans were 60%.

And are people really expected to stop thinking that diversity looks like N.K. Jemisin’s three-year run, an unmatched achievement, and dismiss it as just another bunch of Hugos predictably won by an American writer?

The remainder of Napper’s post is a suggested reading list of international novels, a positive contribution, and always in order.

Unfortunately, the next part of being constructive is putting up a list of potential novels and short stories to read. This is why outrage is so much easier than informed discussion: it doesn’t come with so much fucking homework.

But I’ve done my homework. I’ve talked to editors and writers from Australia, Zimbabwe, the UK, New Zealand, Singapore, and – yes – the United States. And I’ve come up with a list. It’s not a comprehensive one. I don’t have that sort of time, and I wouldn’t want it to be. A comprehensive list would be so eye-rollingly long the reader would have no idea where to start. And any such claim to completeness would be immediately debunked. I’m not aiming for perfection or quantity.

Also note that none of these are my nominations (yet). I will add my own to the list over the next few weeks as I get my reading done. I have two I’d like to include from my reading as Aurealis judge, though unfortunately I cannot divulge those until the awards are announced.

All these caveats aside, I present to you a flawed and partial list of stories that entirely reasonable humans from all across the world have recommended. Which is about as good as it gets…

(3) EX NIHILIS. Popular Science explains “Zero is just 1,500 years old. Before it, there was nothing.”

Accounting is an ancient profession. Sumer, the earliest known Mesopotamian civilization, had a positional numbering system, so there was no need for placeholders. A subsequent empire, Babylon, had different demands, so its number-crunching class used two empty wedges to represent a sum like 507. Across the world, the Mayan civilization came up with its own solution to a similar problem, placing a shell where modern mathematicians might place a 0. Some experts argue these wedges are ground zero, to borrow a phrase, but most academics attribute the invention of zero as a number—not as a warm body but a symbol in its own right, one that can be used in equations—to India.

(4) GENTLEMEN, BE SEATED. Now that Camestros Felapton has excused himself from the Hugo race, he knows it’s safe to resume writing hilarious stuff like “Other Revised Canon Aspects of Poo”, which would have increased his risks of winning one. Where are we going with this? Well, here’s the premise, with his second example

The other day J.K.Rowling’s Pottermore revealed that Hogwarts was originally built without toilets because wizards just pooped anyway and then magicked it away. Below are other poo related details about other franchises that you might not know….

Star Wars: there are no bathrooms in Star Wars but there are small toilet robots who follow you around waiting for you to do your business and clean it up. That’s what those little boxy droids are.

(5) EINSTEIN OBIT. The actor known as Super Dave Osborne died January 2. Mark Evanier paid tribute in “Bob Einstein, R.I.P.” —

[His work included a] long run as the self-immolating daredevil Super Dave Osborne. You never knew what daring feat Super Dave would attempt; only that at the end of it, he would meet some fate previously met by Wile E. Coyote.

GIMBEL OBIT. Lyricist Norman Gimbel died December 19. His Washington Post obit, “Norman Gimbel, Oscar-winning lyricist of ‘Happy Days’ theme and ‘Girl From Ipanema,’ dies at 91”, notes that “The Girl from Ipanema” was written for a science fiction musical in Brazil, to answer the musical question “Why is an alien hanging around in Brazil?” Gimbel also wrote the lyrics for the 1970s Wonder Woman theme.  

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • January 5, 1950 — The Flying Saucer opened in theaters.
  • January 5, 1951 — Two Lost Worlds premiered…with dinosaurs in Australia.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 5, 1914 – George Reeves. Best known for his role as the title role in The Adventures of Superman and several associated films. I remember the show fondly from much later syndication and thought that both the acting and stories were well done. He also played the lead role in The Adventures of Sir Galahad and was Mike Patton in The Jungle Goddess. He was in a fair number of series as well but I can’t determine if any of them were genre.  (Died 1959.)
  • Born January 5, 1929 – Russ Manning. An artist  who created and drew the Gold Key comic book character Magnus: Robot Fighter; who drew the Tarzan comic book from 1965 – 1969 and the Tarzan newspaper comic strip from 1967 – 1972; and the Star Wars newspaper strip from 1979 – 1980. (Credit to Bill here at File 770 for this Birthday.) (Died 1981.)
  • Born January 5, 1941 – Hayao Miyazaki, 78. A masterful storyteller who chose animation as his medium. He co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985 and has directed some of the best loved films of all time. His films include the Oscar winning film Spirited Away, My Neighbor Tortoro, and adapting the classic novel Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones for the big screen. (Thanks to Matt Russell for this Birthday.)
  • Born January 5, 1959 – Clancy Brown, 60. I first encountered him as the voice of Lex Luthor In the DC animated universe. All of his voice roles are far too extensive to list here, but I’ll single out his work as Savage Opress, Count Dooku’s new apprentice and Darth Maul’s brother, in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.  Very selected live roles include Rawhide in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, The Kurgan In Highlander, Sheriff Gus Gilbert in Pet Sematary Two, Captain Byron Hadley in The Shawshank Redemption, Sgt. Charles Zim In Starship Troopers and, one of favorite weird series, Brother Justin Crowe in Carnivàle.
  • Born January 5, 1978 – January Jones, 41. Emma Frost In X-Men: First Class is her only film role to dates but earlier when searching the net I did find her in The Last Man on Earth which is, and I quote, “an American post-apocalyptic comedy television series.”  Anyone seen this? 
  • Born January 5, 1978 – Seanan McGuire, 41. Ahhhh one of my favorite writers. I just finished listening to The Girl in the Green Silk Gown which was quite excellent and earlier I’d read her Chaos Choreography, both of her Indexing books which are beyond amazing and, God what else?, the Wayward Children series which I’ve mixed feelings about. I did read at a few of the first October Daye novels but they didn’t tickle my fancy. I’ve not read her Mira Grant work so do advise on how it is. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) BORG LICENSE REVOKED. A Canadian Star Trek fan is going to court after the government insurance company revoked his “ASIMIL8” license plate, that he got because he likes the Borg, and had a frame that added the tag “Resistance is Futile.” The term was considered insulting to First Nations people, who have often been asked to assimilate to settler culture. The Edmonton Journal has the story — “’Obviously inappropriate:’ Insurer says ASIMIL8 plate shouldn’t have been issued”.

In a recently filed legal brief, Troller explained that he drove around with the plate for nearly two years and no one complained. He renewed it with MPI in 2016 without issue.

An Ontario woman posted a photo of the licence plate on Facebook on April 22, 2017. Court filings show a transcript of a call she made to MPI in which she said the plate was offensive because of the history of government assimilation policies.

Not all plate requests go sailing through:

The documents include a 47-page list of licence plates that were denied by MPI. They include BITE ME, VINO, MMMBEER, SKODEN, HYZNBRG, HOLYCOW, PWALKER and 50 GREY.

A man in Nova Scotia has also gone to court over a personalized licence plate. Lorne Grabher has been trying to reinstate his “GRABHER” plate since it was revoked in 2016 by the Registrar of Motor Vehicles following an anonymous complaint.

(10) DOWNWIND FROM HOLLYWOOD. Just became aware of this fine blog entry published last year by Kip W: “Classical Gas”. Examples at the link.

The Disney corporation, ever sensitive to the winds of change, and (since at least the 1950s) ever willing to recut their old products up for present-day sensibilities, determined to get out on the cutting edge of kid appeal by folding flatulence humor into their classic releases. Leaked memo from 2008 reveals some of the specific ideas explored…

(11) IT’S A STING. Jalopnik: “You Can Buy All Four Bumblebee Camaros From Transformers, but They’re Not Street Legal”.

Perhaps you’ve seen a Transformers movie, or two, or six, in the past 11 years. (Google says there are six now.) Perhaps you’ve liked them, even, to the point that you’ve dreamed of one day owning the sporty, automatic stunt cars that turn into robots on the big screen. Now’s your chance to own four.

There’s one big catch, though: All four of the vehicles will come with a scrap title and none of them will be street legal. There go your carpool plans for the next Transformers movie premiere. Darn.

Barrett-Jackson is auctioning off four Transformers movie cars as a package deal in Scottsdale, Arizona later this month—all four of them black-and-yellow Chevrolet Camaros representing the robot character Bumblebee, who (which?) recently starred in an unnecessarily sexy movie of his (its?) namesake. Money from the Camaros’ auction will go to charity, and the person who wins will get a 2010 model from the first and second movies, a 2010 model from the third movie, a 2013 model from the fourth movie and a 2016 one from the fifth movie

(12) IS THIS WHAT SCIENCE IS FOR? Here’s another thing that’s coming – “Buttered Popcorn Oreos Are in the Works, and TBH, I Don’t Know What to Feel”.

We’re less than a week into the new year, and we already have a handful of new Oreo flavors to fuel us through 2019. As if the news of flavors like Carrot Cake and Dark Chocolate haven’t been enough to pique your interest, perhaps the rumors of Oreo’s latest out-of-the-box offering, Buttered Popcorn, will do the trick.

(13) HOW’S THEIR SFF SECTION? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The National Geographic website seems pretty certain that, “This is the world’s most beautiful bookstore.” Given that it was converted from a rather splendid theater, the Ateneo Grand Splendid bookstore certainly had a leg up in achieving that appellation.

On a bustling commercial street in the fashionable Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina, you can visit a serene temple of books. The lighting is soft, with accents that showcase the best in early 20th-century craftsmanship. Conversations are hushed, as if in a grand library, yet the space is so warm and welcoming that the raised café at the back of the cavernous room is filled with patrons reading and sipping cappuccinos and chocolate submarinos.

You’ve entered the Ateneo Grand Splendid bookstore, which blogs and guidebooks often dub “the world’s most beautiful bookstore.” They may not be wrong. The sprawling shop is housed in a beautifully preserved antique theater. Only instead of tango dancers and singers, the stars are now the printed word.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The Onion knows many claim success using other ways — but this really works: “Increase Your Cognitive Ability By Reading A Fucking Book For Once”.

[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, Olav Rokne, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Joel Zakem, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

Wandering Through the Public Domain #4

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From 1500 Miles Per Hour: A Story of a Visit to the Planet Mars by Charles Dixon.

A regular exploration of public domain genre works available through Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and Librivox.

By Colleen McMahon: As January 1 approaches and 1923 copyrights become public domain, commenters on the previous installment pointed out some 1923 works that might appeal to genre readers. Bill suggested four:

  • The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

  • The Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man”. This one is tricky, as the most common source is The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, which collected the final Holmes stories and was published in 1927, so it remains under copyright for a few more years. However, the story itself was published in The Strand magazine in 1923, so you can find it for free there when the 1923 issues of the magazine come online.

  • Certain “archy and mehitabel” pieces by Don Marquis. Without more detail on the pieces I couldn’t look around for an online version, but plenty of Don Marquis works published in 1922 and earlier are already available on Project Gutenberg.

  • Doctor Doolittle and the Secret Lake by Hugh Lofting.

Bruce Arthurs mentioned The Barge of Haunted Lives by J.Aubrey Tyson, a “club story” collection where an eccentric millionaire gathers nine people who have had supernatural experiences and has each tell his or her story.

I didn’t see an online version of this book (yet!) but Tyson also wrote a 1922 novel, The Scarlet Tanager, which is available through the Internet Archive. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes it as “ Near Future thriller…which is set in 1930, rousingly presents a submarine pirate and his right-wing cohorts; a tough US intelligence agent opposes their efforts to topple the American government. A UK agent, the actress of the title, also becomes involved. Sf devices include sonar and an invisible Ray.” Sounds like fun!

My favorite recent Project Gutenberg discovery is 1500 Miles Per Hour: A Story of a Visit to the Planet Mars by Charles Dixon (1858-1926). Published in 1895, it tells the story of four men and a dog who travel to Mars by rocket ship, where they encounter strange life forms, including terrible monsters. The illustrations are eye-popping, and a post at the Somnium Project blog contains several examples of them.

From this blog post, I also found out about the British Library’s Flickr account containing over a million illustrations from books in their collection. The illustrations from 1500 Miles Per Hour are included in the “Space and SciFi” album, along with over 400 others. The entire collection is wonderful and inspiring to browse through. There are albums of everything from children’s book illustrations to fashion to antique maps.

Terry Gene Carr (1937-1987) was a lifelong science fiction fan who published many fanzines and won the Hugo award for Best Fan Writer in 1973. He was well known for editing science fiction anthologies, and also wrote several novels. One of them, Warlord of Kor, is available on Project Gutenberg. There are also two audio versions available on Librivox.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) has two early short stories on Project Gutenberg:

Both stories have been recorded multiple times at Librivox, mostly in the short science fiction collections, but there is also a dramatic reading of 2 B R 0 2 B.

Rose Macauley (1881-1958) was an English novelist who has two novels with near-future themes:

  • What-Not: A Prophetic Comedy was published in 1918, and was recently described by The Guardian as “a forgotten feminist dystopian novel, a story of eugenics and newspaper manipulation that is believed to have influenced Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four”. It’s had some buzz lately because it is being re-released in a new edition, complete with restored sections that were left out of the original 1918 edition. But you can read the original version for free at PG.


  • Mystery at Geneva: an Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings, published in 1922, tells a then-near-future tale of Bolsheviks battling a counter-revolution of monarchists, and a communist plot to destroy the League of Nations foiled by a woman journalist. Librivox has an audio edition as well.

Recent Librivox releases:

  • A Christmas Carol (Version 11) by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

    The classic Christmas story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. The result of their visit shows that redemption is achievable for even the worst of us.


  • Cupid’s Whirligig by Edward Sharpham (1576-1608)

    Cupid’s Whirligig is a city comedy: a play in colloquial language dealing with the everyday life of London’s citizens. A knight, Sir Timothy Troublesome, suspects his wife of cheating on him and, to prove that any children she bears are not his own, decides to ‘geld’ himself. Meanwhile, the young Lord Nonsuch dreams of bedding the knight’s wife, and in disguise enters the Troublesomes’ employ as a servant. Cupid descends from the heavens to cast a love spell on the citizens of London and, by the last act, one character loves another, who loves another, and so on until the last loves the first: a “Cupid’s whirligig”.



  • In the Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace by H.G. Wells (1866-1946)

    In the Fourth Year is a collection H.G. Wells assembled in the spring of 1918 from essays he had recently published discussing the problem of establishing lasting peace when World War I ended. It is mostly devoted to plans for the League of Nations and the discussion of post-war politics.


  • Christmas Short Works Collection 2018 by Various

    A delightful collection of stories and poems, with several interesting selections discussing various Christmas and holiday traditions, and a lovely Christmas play, featuring a full cast. All selections have been chosen and narrated by LibriVox volunteers to commemorate Christmas 2018. Includes “Thurlow’s Christmas Story”, a spooky tale with a Christmas angle (which I read for the collection and really enjoyed!)

Wandering Through the Public Domain #3

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A regular exploration of public domain genre works available through Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and Librivox.

By Colleen McMahon: Fans of the public domain have been looking forward to 2019 for a very long time — 20 years to be exact! This is because on January 1, 2019, new works will enter the public domain in the United States for the first time since 1998. In this edition of “Wandering Through the Public Domain,” I want to take a brief look at how the “public domain freeze” happened.

In 1998, the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) was passed by Congress. For copyrights owned by an individual, the term was extended to life of the creator plus 70 years. For copyrights owned by corporations, the term was extended to 95 years from publication or first use.

The previous update to copyright law in 1976 had done away with the need to renew copyrights for 28-year terms. The 1976 law set the term for individual copyright at life plus 50 years, or 75 years for corporate copyrights, and the implications of this latter term is what set the stage for the 1998 changes.

Under the 1976 law, Disney faced the possibility of Mickey Mouse moving into the public domain in 2003, 75 years after the release of the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, “Steamboat Willie.” Beginning in the early 1990s, Disney heavily lobbied Congress to lengthen the copyright term, joined by other large corporations like Time Warner.

Republican Congressman Sonny Bono was a vocal supporter and sponsor of copyright extension legislation in the 1990s, and his unfortunate death in a ski accident in early 1998 created additional momentum for passage of the new law. Mary Bono, the late Congressman’s widow, was appointed to finish Sonny’s term and took up the copyright cause. The CTEA was renamed “TheSonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act” and passage of the law was promoted as a way to memorialize a popular Congressman and celebrity. The law was passed by both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Clinton in October 1998.

Up until the law was passed, works had been passing into the public domain each January as the 75-year mark was reached. Under the 75-year term, works copyrighted in 1923 would have moved into the public domain on January 1, 1999, but the 20-year extension meant that the new expiration date for 1923 works moved to 2019. The public domain limit that has been frozen at 1922 for two decades will at last begin moving again in just a few weeks.

I’ve been looking at 1923 publications and have not found much in the F/SF realm as yet. The one exception so far is H.G. Wells’ Men Like Gods, a “scientific fantasy” about a utopian society in a parallel universe. There is more to come just over the horizon, as the earliest science fiction magazines began publishing in the late1920s.

In the meantime, we can still enjoy the many pre-1923 works as well as later ones where the copyright was not renewed while we look forward to a new burst of public domain access each January — at least until Congress decides to change the laws again. Mickey Mouse is back on the expiration schedule for 2023, so Disney is probably revving up their lobbying efforts even as I write this….

On to this week’s finds:

Lester Del Rey (1915-1993) is best remembered these days as an editor, particularly of the publishing imprint that still bears his name, but he was also a prolific author of science fiction in earlier years. Project Gutenberg has three Lester Del Rey novels, all of which have also been recorded through Librivox:

I’m not sure this is really science fiction, but Atom Mystery by Charles Coombs (1914-1994) is a fun kid/YA book with a trope you don’t see anymore — finding a uranium mine as a ticket to riches!

Recent Librivox releases:

The Note-Books of Samuel Butler by Samuel Butler (1851-1928) and Henry Festing Jones (1835-1902)

A collection of unpublished writings of Samuel Butler, edited after his death by Henry Festing Jones. Musings on writing, art, and philosophy, including thoughts about Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited, which are often categorized as early F/SF.

[Full disclosure: I worked on this project, recording two of the chapters!]

Mowgli: All of the Mowgli Stories from the Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling (1868-1936)

In the Jungle Books, Kipling tells 9 wonderful and exciting tales about Mowgli, the human baby raised by a pack of wolves in the jungles of India. His exploits and adventures are many and varied especially his dealing with the other animals such as his wolf mother and father and brother wolves, Baloo the wise bear who teaches him the Law of the Jungle, and in his life long battle with Shere-Kahn, the lame human-killing tiger. This edition collects all the Mowgli stories from both Jungle Book volumes and places them in chronological order.

The Castle of the Carpathians by Jules Verne (1828-1905)

The Castle stood above the quiet little town for as long as folks remembered: barren, deserted, lonely and frightening to the townsfolk. Until one day, smoke began to ascend from the dunjon. They were warned not to go near, and when intrepid souls dared to venture to uncover the mystery of the ruined castle, they learned firsthand what supernatural terrors await inside The Castle of the Carpathians.

Short Science Fiction Collection 059 by Various

20 short science fiction stories by various authors. This volume includes stories by Lester Del Rey, H.Beam Piper, Robert Silverberg, Miriam Allen DeFord, Philip K.Dick, and others.