Tag Archives: Wandering Through the Public Domain

Wandering Through the Public Domain #27

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

By Colleen McMahon: Back on January 17, the daily Scroll noted that it was the anniversary of the release of Freejack, the extremely forgettable movie based on Robert Sheckley’s Immortality Inc., also called Time Killer.

I am one of the few who saw Freejack in the theater on the original release, mostly because there had been great hoopla about it being filmed in Atlanta (back when that was still a big event!). My most vivid memory of the movie was my first exposure to how movies play with locations in the editing — a wild car chase plunges down a ramp that in real life leads to an underground parking deck, but a few wild turns later, the chase continues on a highway in New York City. My friends and I immediately began to refer to that ramp as the “teleportal.”

Of course, the mention of the book behind the movie sent me off to see whether that book was in the public domain. It isn’t. But a whole bunch of Sheckley stories are:

Sheckley appears to have gone through a couple of incredibly prolific periods for short stories in the 1950s, so much so that twice here he has more than one story published in a single issue, so one story appears under a pen name. “The Leech” was published under the name Phillips Barbee, and “Forever” has Ned Lang as the author. The second story by Sheckley in that February 1959 issue of Galaxy was none other than “Time Killer”; presumably the copyright to that was renewed with the tie-ins around the 1992 movie, so it’s not available on Project Gutenberg.

Most of Sheckley’s stories have been recorded in various Short Science Fiction collections at Librivox; you can check his index page here.

Two Robert Sheckley stories were dramatized in the X Minus One radio show, and you can listen to them here:

Recent Librivox releases:

  • The Black Cat, Vol. 01 No. 01 October 1895 by Various

    The Black Cat (1895-1922) was a monthly literary magazine, publishing original short stories, often about uncanny or fantastical topics. Many writers were largely unknown, but some famous authors also wrote original material for this magazine.


  • The Rainbow Cat by Rose Fyleman (1877-1957)

    There was once a cat which was not in the least like any cat you have ever seen, or I either, for the matter of that. It was a fairy cat, you see, and so you would rather expect it to be different, wouldn’t you? It had a violet nose, indigo eyes, pale blue ears, green front legs, a yellow body, orange back legs and a red tail. In fact, it was coloured with all the colours of the rainbow, and on that account it was known as the Rainbow Cat. It lived, of course, in Fairyland, and it had all sorts of strange adventures.


  • Grampa in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson (1891-1976)

    Another great book in the world of Oz, in which King Fumbo of Ragbad loses his head in a storm and Prince Tatters, accompanied by the wise and wonderful old soldier Grampa, sets off to find the king’s head, a fortune, and a princess. With Bill, a live iron weathercock, they visit a Wizard’s Garden and discover Urtha, a lovely girl made all of flowers — and proceed to fall, swim, explode, sail, and fly above and below Oz and Ev. Grampa and Co. eventually meet Dorothy herself, traveling with a Forgetful Poet in search of the missing princess of Perhaps City who has been condemned to marry a monster!


  • The Variable Man by Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)

    A man from the past. He fixed things—clocks, refrigerators, vidsenders and destinies. But he had no business in the future, where the calculators could not handle him. He was Earth’s only hope—and its sure failure!

Wandering Through the Public Domain #26

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

By Colleen McMahon:

I took a hiatus for the holiday season but I’m back and ready to dig into some more of the public domain treasures out there for fans of old-time science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

Since the new Robert Downey Jr. version of Dolittle is coming out this week, I thought it might be a good time to take a look at Hugh Lofting, the originator of the Dr. Dolittle character and stories.

Hugh Lofting (1886-1947) didn’t set out to be a writer. Born in Berkshire, England, he studied civil engineering at MIT and London Polytechnic and spent several years traveling the world doing engineering work. When World War I began, he enlisted and served in France for several years before being wounded and invalided out.

The character of Doctor Dolittle, a Victorian physician who can talk to animals and ministers to them instead of humans, originated in the trenches during the war. Lofting later explained that his actual experiences were either too horrible or too dull to include in letters home to his children, so he began writing stories about Dolittle and illustrating them with pen-and-ink line drawings instead.

He collected those stories into his first book, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, which was published in 1920 to immediate acclaim. He wrote seven more Dolittle books between 1920 and 1928, when he tried to end the series by sending Doctor Dolittle off planet in Doctor Dolittle in the Moon. 

Popular demand led him to write four more Dolittle books in the 1930s and 1940s, and two additional collections were published posthumously in the 1950s. He also wrote several works for children that were not in the Dolittle series, and a book-length anti-war poem called Victory for the Slain, published in 1942.

The first few Doctor Dolittle books are in the public domain now and are available at Project Gutenberg:

Doctor Dolittle’s Circus was published in 1924 and thus entered the public domain in the United States on January 1 of this year. It will likely be released by Project Gutenberg in the next few months.

A non-Dolittle picture book, The Story of Mrs. Tubbs, was also published in 1923 and is on Internet Archive.

Librivox has multiple versions of The Story of Doctor Dolittle and The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, including dramatic readings (where different volunteers voice the various characters) of both. Two versions of Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office are in progress, a solo version and a dramatic reading, and will be released in the next few months.

Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) came up in the birthday lists this week. He’s best remembered now as a fiction writer — one of the “Big Three” of the early years of Weird Tales (the other two being H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard), but he began his writing career as a poet.

Project Gutenberg has two volumes of poetry by Clark Ashton Smith:

Ebony and Crystal contains a long blank-verse poem called “The Hashish Eater, or the Apocalypse of Evil”. This poem caught Lovecraft’s attention and his fan letter to Smith initiated years of correspondence and collaboration. 

This poem and nineteen other works are included in a recent Librivox release, Lovecraft’s Influences and Favorites. The compilation was inspired by Lovecraft’s 1927 essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, and collects the stories and poems Lovecraft mentions, from Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” to “Seaton’s Aunt” by Walter de la Mare.

Ron Goulart (1933- ) shares his birthday with Clark Ashton Smith, and is represented at Project Gutenberg by three short stories:

None of these have been recorded for Librivox yet.

Recent Librivox releases:

  • The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle (1890-1942)

    In the future, people will be fitted with clockwork devices in their heads which, among other things, allows them to travel through time. Well, it seems one of these devices has frizzed-out, and a Clockwork man appears in the middle of a cricket match in 1923. The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle is believed to be the first instance of a human-machine cyborg appearing in literature.

  • The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1878-1957)

    This is a 1924 fantasy novel by Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany, which became public domain in January 2020. It is widely recognized as one of the most acclaimed works in all of fantasy literature. Highly influential upon the fantasy genre as a whole, the novel was particularly formative in the subgenres of “fairytale fantasy” and “high fantasy”. And yet, it deals always with the truth: the power of love, the allure of nature, the yearning for contentment, the desire for fame, the quest for immortality, and the lure and the fear of magic. Arthur C. Clarke said this novel helped cement Dunsany as “one of the greatest writers of this century”.

  • Crossings: A Fairy Play by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

    Under the terms of a will, the Wildersham children have to relocate from the family house in the city to “Crossings” in the country, and to spend the first fortnight alone fending for themselves in the house. The children encounter interesting country neighbors, including ghosts and fairies. Or are they dreaming? Walter De La Mare was a poet, and we have a number of his poems available at Librivox. This is his only play.

  • The Phantom Death and Other Stories by William Clark Russell (1844-1911)

    This is a book of remarkable nautical ghost and horror stories written by William Clark Russell in 1893. The stories are for the most part set on ships and bring the reader on board for ghostly nights, wonderful sights, and strange occurrences.

Wandering Through the Public Domain #25

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

By Colleen McMahon: I had a vague memory that I began this little column/project last November, and just checked to make sure. Yes, the first “Wandering Through the Public Domain” was posted on November 16, 2018, so this will mark my first anniversary here. Thank you for reading and for your comments over the various columns, and thank you so much to Mike Glyer for hosting my natterings!

It’s been a fun project and I look forward to keeping it going for the foreseeable future. If you have any feedback or suggestions, and especially if you have sought out and enjoyed anything I’ve mentioned here, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

As so often happens, I prepared to write today without any clear notion of what I wanted to do (though I have a document with author and topic ideas to rev my brain up when needed). And as so often also happens, I was gifted with a suggestion somewhat randomly.

A very recent Librivox release (described in detail below) is An Earthman on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley (1887-1963). When creating the listing for it, I had to look up Mr. Farley to get his birth and death dates, and found something interesting when I did. His Wikipedia entry was under the name Roger Sherman Hoar.

That in itself is not too surprising, since many authors use pseudonyms. What did catch my eye was Mr. Hoar’s day job — he was a state senator and assistant attorney general in Massachusetts. He was descended from a distinguished American family. His grandfather had served as a U.S. Attorney General, and his great-great-grandfather was Roger Sherman, founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Hoar was a graduate of Harvard for both his undergraduate degree (1909) and law school (1911). The same year that he finished law school, 1911, he began serving in the Massachusetts state senate, although I could not find any detail about the circumstances as to whether he was elected or appointed and how long he served. He continued to have a distinguished career in law in Massachusetts and later in Wisconsin, as well as taking a turn into engineering and teaching.

Hoar also began writing and publishing at a young age. He wrote multiple books about law, mainly business law, under his own name. He published a tariff manual in 1912 and a book about constitutional conventions in 1917.

Meanwhile, he was turning out pulp fiction stories and novels, with most of his work being published between the world wars. After he moved to Wisconsin, he joined the Milwaukee Fictioneers, whose members also included Robert Bloch and Stanley G. Weinbaum (both of whom were covered, coincidentally, in Wandering Through the Public Domain #13)

His most famous works were a series of “Radio Man” stories published through the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with 1924’s “The Radio Man”. The stories began as serials in magazines like Argosy and Amazing, but found a wider readership when they were reprinted as paperback novels in the 1950s. 

There are three Farley works available through Project Gutenberg:

As mentioned below, An Earthman on Venus was just released on Librivox, and The Radio Planet is currently listed as “in progress”. “The Danger from the Deep” is included in the recording of the complete August 1931 Astounding Stories issue.

Recent Librivox releases:

  • An Earthman on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley (1887-1963)

    When Myles Cabot accidentally transmitted himself to the planet Venus, he found himself naked and bewildered on a mystery world where every unguarded minute might mean a horrible death.

    Man-eating plants, tiger-sized spiders, and dictatorial ant-men kept Myles on the run until he discovered the secret of the land—that humanity was a slave-race and that the monster ants were the real rulers of the world!

    But Cabot was resourceful, and when his new found love, the Kewpie-doll princess Lilla, called for help, the ant-men learned what an angry Earthman can do.

    An Earthman on Venus was originally published as The Radio Man in 1924.

  • The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (Dramatic Reading) by Hugh Lofting (1886-1947)

    Doctor John Dolittle is an animal doctor and famous naturalist whose success hinges on his ability to speak the languages of many different kinds of animals. This book, the second Dr. Dolittle adventure, is narrated by Tommy Stubbins, who meets the Doctor after finding an injured squirrel. Stubbins becomes interested in the Doctor’s work and has the opportunity to travel with him and several animal companions to a mysterious floating island called Spidermonkey Island.

  • The Green Odyssey (Version 2) by Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009)

    A rip-roaring, pulpy and quirky space odyssey for your listening pleasure. Follow earth man Allen Green as his space ship fails and leaves him on a barbaric planet filled with other human descendants who have reverted to pre-technology existence. Naturally he is made a slave and must connive, plan, love and fight his way across 10,000 miles of danger to freedom. Full of strange beings, this planet highlights the amazing imagination of Philip Jose Farmer and his ability to make it scary and fun at the same time.

Wandering Through the Public Domain #24

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

By Colleen McMahon: It’s hard to escape the fact that the vast majority of science fiction in the public domain was written by men, so when I come across work by a woman, I’m eager to feature it here. That was my thought when I saw the name Kris Neville (1925-1980). 

I soon discovered, however, that Kris Neville was a man, but with an intriguing history as a writer of science fiction. Both Science Fiction Encyclopedia and Wikipedia agree that despite Neville’s early success (he began publishing in magazines in 1949 and continued steadily well into the 1950s), he made a conscious decision to largely stop trying to have a full-time fiction writing career due to what he saw as limitations in the field.

Although he never became a widely known “big name,” Neville was well respected by his fellow authors. Barry Malzberg wrote about him in 1979:

Kris Neville could have been among the ten most honored science fiction writers of his generation; instead, he virtually abandoned the field after conquering it early on…I can hardly blame him for this decision, and it was in any case carefully thought out. Neville, who sold his first story in 1949 and another fifteen by 1952, concluded early on that the perimeters of the field in the 1950s were simply too close to contain the kind of work he would have to do if he wanted to grow as a writer, and accordingly he quit. A scattering of stories has appeared over the last quarter of a century, and a couple of novels….Nowadays a short-short story shows up once a year or so in a magazine or original anthology; sometimes written in collaboration with his second wife, Lil, and always so astonishingly above the run of material surrounding it as to constitute an embarrassment to the other writers.

Project Gutenberg has one novella and eight shorter works by Neville. The novella is Earth Alert! from the February 1953 issue of Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy. The short stories and novelettes:

None of Neville’s stories have been recorded for Librivox so far. 

In one of those serendipity moments, I noticed the name Damon Knight (1922-2002) on the cover image from the April 1963 Galaxy issue that accompanied “Voyage to Far N’jurd”. Knight is probably best known as the author of “To Serve Man”, a short story that became the basis of one of the best-remembered Twilight Zone episodes (and a Halloween episode parody on The Simpsons). “To Serve Man” is not at Project Gutenberg (it’s been reprinted and anthologized enough times that it surely remains under copyright several times over), but three other stories are:

“The Worshippers” has been recorded twice at Librivox, in Short Science Fiction Collection 014 and Short Science Fiction Collection 050. “Special Delivery” also appears Short Science Fiction Collection 050 (two Knights in one!), as well as in Short Science Fiction Collection 037.

I did find one female author to include this week: Catherine Moore, who usually published as C.L. Moore (1911-1987). She was married to Henry Kuttner from 1940 until his death in 1957, and they frequently collaborated. (Kuttner is covered in Wandering Through the Public Domain #13) She was a lifelong and active SF fan, but stopped writing in the 1950s, turning to a scriptwriting career in Hollywood for several years before retiring entirely upon her second marriage. Sadly, she was nominated to be the first woman SFWA Grand Master in the 1980s, but the nomination was withdrawn by request of her husband, as Moore was too ill with Alzheimer’s to accept or attend.

Project Gutenberg has two of Moore’s early stories from the 1930s:

“The Tree of Life” appears in one Librivox anthology, Short Science Fiction Collection 038. “Song in a Minor Key” has been recorded three times, in Short Science Fiction Collection 042, Short Science Fiction Collection 056, and Short Science Fiction Collection 058.

Librivox has an additional Moore novelette, “Shambleau”, included in Short Ghost and Horror Collection 024. The original text is available on Internet Archive.

One more work to briefly mention, Log of the Ark by Noah; Hieroglyphics by Ham by Irving L. Gordon was recently released on Project Gutenberg. It’s a short comic work that spoofs both the biblical story and ocean liner travel of the time (1915) and includes plenty of silly illustrations.

Recent Librivox releases:

  • Coffee Break Collection 24 — Ghosts, Ghouls, and Spooky Things by Various

    This is the twenty-fourth Coffee Break Collection, in which Librivox readers select English language public domain works of about 15 minutes or less in duration — perfect to listen to during commutes, workouts or coffee breaks. The topic for this collection is Ghosts, Ghouls and Spooky Things in honor of Halloween. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, prose, essays… all chill and perplex.

  • John Thorndyke’s Cases by R. Austin Freeman (1862-1943)

    John Thorndyke was one of the many successors to Sherlock Holmes’ “scientific deduction” approach to mystery solving. Thorndyke was a British doctor AND lawyer who practiced what we now call forensic science. Like Holmes, he had a friend who narrated his adventures (Jervis, not Watson), and appeared in numerous short stories and novels between 1907 and 1942.

  • Short Ghost and Horror Collection 035 by Various

    A collection of twenty stories featuring ghoulies, ghosties, long-legged 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. This collection includes stories by Poe, Le Fanu, H.G. Wells, Lovecraft and more!

  • The Stolen Bacillus and Other Stories by H.G. Wells (1866-1946)

    A collection of 15 humorous short stories by the original master of speculative fiction: H. G. Wells. This was the first collection of short stories published by the author, and contains a mixture of fantasy, science-fiction and humour!

Wandering Through the Public Domain #23

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

By Colleen McMahon: A Pixel Scroll item on October 11 mentioned a discussion among younger SF readers of a Katherine MacLean story. This led me off to see what kinds of public domain works might be available.

Katherine MacLean (1925-2019) mainly wrote short fiction from the 1940s through the 1970s. She was well respected among the “hard” SF writers for stories that involved real science. Her Wikipedia entry includes a fabulous anecdote in which her science fiction fans help her get into an engineering conference in the 1950s:

In the 1930s and 1940s, scientists and boys planning to be scientists read Astounding (Analog) with close attention to the hottest most promising ideas and took them up as soon as they could get funded lab space. They did not openly express their gratitude to science fiction, because the funding depended on keeping claim to have originated the ideas they had put so much work into testing and verifying….

“I hastily looked around for a door to a lecture hall where I could sneak some listening time and get a line on current research, and be out of sight before the desk was reoccupied by the guardian of the gate….

Too late, a man built like a fullback in a business suit was bearing down on me. “I see you don’t have your badge. May I have your name? I’ll look it up in the registry….”

“Katherine MacLean, I came in because I am interested in–“

He interrupted. “Katherine MacLean! Are you that Katherine MacLean?” He gripped my hand and hung on. Who was that Katherine Maclean? Was I being mistaken for someone else?

“Are you the Katherine MacLean who wrote ‘Incommunicado’?”

Speechless with relief, I nodded. I would not be arrested or thrown out if they would accept me as a science fiction writer. He kept his grip on my hand and turned around and bellowed to his group of chatting friends, “Guess who I’ve got here. The little woman who wrote ‘Incommunicado’!”

…I had not been aware that my playing with communication ideas would attract the attention of prestigious Bell Telephone researchers. I had left radio and wavelength theory to my Dad as one of his hobbies and learned early that I could get a nasty shock from playing with his wiring. I could not account for their enthusiasm. I went back to the typewriter and lost myself in the story again.

The point is, that scientists not only read Astounding-Analog, they were fans of the writers and understood all the Ideas, even the obscure Ideas that were merely hinted at.

“Unhuman Sacrifice”, the story under consideration at Young People Discuss Old SF, is not on Project Gutenberg, but several other stories are available:

Contagion is a stand-alone audiobook at Librivox, and the other stories (except “The Man Who Staked the Stars”) are available in various of the short works collections.

“The Snowball Effect” was adapted for the radio SF series X Minus One. More recently, two Maclean stories were read for the radio show Buxom Blondes with Ray Guns (scroll down for the specific episode). One of the stories, “Carnivore”, is also available through Project Gutenberg and Librivox, but the other story, “Collision Orbit”, doesn’t appear to be available anywhere else.

Fitz James O’Brien (1828-1862) was an early American writer of fantastic fiction who has largely been forgotten, though one of his stories is still frequently anthologized. He is best known for “What Was It?”, the tale of a man who is attacked by a seemingly ghostly presence in the middle of the night. However, the presence turns out to be more of an invisible man — or man-creature — and the main character is able to overpower and capture it. It becomes a local curiosity for several weeks, and then dies, with no one the wiser as to what the creature was or where it came from.

O’Brien was a contemporary of Poe’s, and his stories have a similar tone and style. Like Poe, he was a major influence on later writers, including M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce, and H.G. Wells.

“What is It?” is collected in Famous Modern Ghost Stories, edited by Dorothy Scarborough (Librivox recording). Two more stories, “The Golden Ingot” and “My Wife’s Tempter”, were included in The Lock and Key Library: The most interesting stories of all nations: American. Both were recorded for Librivox as part of another anthology collection, Library of the World’s Best Mystery and Detective Stories, Volume 3, along with two other stories, “The Bohemian” and “A Terrible Night”. 

Another weird tale, The Diamond Lens (Librivox), could be considered proto-science fiction, since it concerns a scientist using a new type of microscope and discovering (and, of course, falling in love with) a tiny woman he finds in a drop of water.

Recent Librivox releases:

  • Short Science Fiction Collection 066 by Various

    Includes stories by Harry Harrison, Frederic Brown, Charles Fontenay, Laurence Janifer, and others.

  • The Raid of Dover: A Romance of the Reign of Women, A.D. 1940 by Douglas Morey Ford (1851-1916)

    Britain is ruled by women who experience invasion and natural disasters. Men eventually figure out a plan to regain power to replace the government.

  • Lion Loose by James H. Schmitz (1911-1981)

    The most dangerous of animals is not the biggest and fiercest—but the one that’s hardest to stop. Add intelligence to that … and you may come to a wrong conclusion as to what the worst menace is….

  • 3 Science Fiction Stories by William Tenn (1920-2010)

    These are three imaginative SF stories by an author I admire a lot, William Tenn. Venus is a Man’s World, (Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1951), Project Hush (Galaxy Science Fiction, 1954) and Of All Possible Worlds (Galaxy, Sept 1956).

Wandering Through the Public Domain #22

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

By Colleen McMahon: This was a slow week. No new Librivox audiobooks that fit into the genre categories, however broadly drawn. So this might be a good time to mention that Librivox does have a lot of older short science fiction available. They have been doing a series of short science fiction collections for years. 

The way it works is that a volume is started, and anyone can contribute a short science fiction story that is known to be in the public domain. Once there are 15-20 stories, the volume is closed and released and a new one opened. They are up to 64 volumes at this point. If you are curious and would like to sample some of them, the whole Short Science Fiction series is here.

I have a bit of a backlog of random authors who were mentioned in the birthday lists over the last few months, and this is a good time to do a little catching up with some of these.

Stanton Coblentz (1896-1982) had a birthday back in August. He is represented in Project Gutenberg by two short stories:

“The Cosmic Deflector” has not been recorded yet for Librivox, but “Flight Through Tomorrow” has been recorded three different times for Short Science Fiction Collections 

Paul W. Fairman (1909-1977) was active as an author from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, publishing several novels and many short stories under his own name as well as the pseudonym Ivar Jorgensen. He is also the founding editor of If science fiction magazine, and later became editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic from 1955-1958.

He has four stories on Project Gutenberg:

Librivox recordings:

Bryce Walton (1918-1988) is best remembered now as a television script writer (Captain Video and His Video Rangers, Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and a pulp mystery author, but he was quite prolific in science fiction too.

Project Gutenberg has 16 of his stories. He published most often in If: Worlds of Science Fiction and, interestingly, in two cases he had two stories in one issue, one published under his own name and one under the pseudonym “Kenneth O’Hara”.

Only two of Walton’s stories have been recorded for Librivox so far: “Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly?” in Short Science Fiction Collection 028, and “Strange Alliance” in Short Science Fiction Collection 035.

Recent Librivox releases:

As I mentioned at the top of this installment, I could not find anything genre-related in the list of recent releases, which is very unusual. However, there is one book that might be of mild interest here: an all-but-forgotten 1923 mystery novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs!

  • The Girl from Hollywood by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)

    The countryside outside of Los Angeles is a paradise on Earth: nature gives bounty on the land, the animals are majestic, the oaks breathe and the natural pools and ponds are all you would want on a summer’s day. And if you are a Pennington or an Evans, life is simple and complete. However, every paradise has a serpent. For Rancho Ganado, that comes in the shape of Bootlegging, Drugs and Murder. All the vice of nearby Hollywood manifest themselves in the picturesque landscape, throwing the lives of these families into turmoil.

Wandering Through the Public Domain #21

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

By Colleen McMahon: I wanted to start out this week with two offbeat suggestions that are not strictly fantasy or science fiction literature, but that might be of interest to some Filers. Both are recent audiobook releases from Librivox.

The first is The Lost Art of Reading by Gerald Stanley Lee (1862-1944). Lee was an American author and Congregationalist minister, and he wrote The Lost Art of Reading in 1902. Long before the age of Netflix and screentime, even before radio and widespread movie attendance, passionate defenders of the written word were lamenting a decline in reading. In this case, Lee blames cities, trains, and industrialization for speeding up life too much.

If listening to an audiobook about how no one reads anymore is too meta, the text edition is available through Project Gutenberg. (While searching around for information on this book, I discovered that a book of the same title was published 108 years later, this one by Paul Ulin!)

The other is one of Librivox’s quirkier collections: Insomnia Collection Vol. 004, in which volunteers found the most soporific reading material possible with the idea of boring the listener to sleep. I can vouch for previous volumes, with their excerpts from early 20th century telephone directories and copyright renewal lists, as they have sent me off to dreamland on many mornings after overnight shifts, when it was otherwise hard to settle down to sleep.

The new volume is promising for more of the same, with selections like “W. Kent and Co’s Annual Catalogue, April 1859,” and “Disinfection and Disinfectants.” I contributed an excerpt from the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology’s detailed listing of items collected in field expeditions in 1881, and it nearly put me to sleep while I was trying to edit it, so it should work for anyone else who is battling insomnia.

Alan E. Nourse (1928-1992) was on the August birthday lists, and it turns out that he was a very prolific author. In addition to his science fiction writing, he was a physician and wrote plenty of nonfiction books as well, with titles like So You Want to Be a Doctor (1957) and The Backyard Astronomer (1973). Late in life, he seems to have turned toward sex education, with books on sexually transmitted diseases, herpes, AIDs and a 1990 Teen Guide to Safe Sex.

His public domain works on Project Gutenberg include lots of short stories and novelettes, 25 titles in all. That’s too many to include here, so I’ll just mention a few below and include a link to his complete works at PG.

Jerry Sohl (1913-2002) is probably best remembered now as a scriptwriter for television, including shows like The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and Star Trek. (He wrote or co-wrote the episodes “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “This Side of Paradise,” and “Whom Gods Destroy”.) However, he was also a novelist with over twenty titles to his credit, as well as nonfiction books on chess and bridge, and numerous short stories. 

Five of his stories are on Project Gutenberg:

“The Hand” is included in Short Science Fiction Collection 065.

Recent Librivox releases:

“Man’s Rights; or, How Would You Like It?: Comprising Dreams” is the first known feminist utopian novel written by a woman. The text features nine dreams experienced by a first-person female narrator. In the first seven dreams, she visits the planet Mars, finding a society where traditional sex roles and stereotypes are reversed. The narrator witnesses the oppression of the men on Mars and their struggle for equality. In the last two dreams, the narrator visits a future United States ruled by a woman president. 

This is a collection of original and interesting fairy tales. We have here princes and princesses, pirates, wizards, and all the other ingredients for entertaining stories for kids.

Sabotage accidentally takes Earth’s first manned interplanetary expedition to the Moon, where a sublunar adventure ensues, involving two intelligent species and a good deal of fighting as well as romance. The perceptive reader will perceive the author’s peculiar notions concerning the behavior of volcanos, an offense against scientific fact that is hard to pardon in a writer of science fiction, but if it can be overlooked, the variety of incident and the fast pace of the action, full of surprises, amply repay the reader’s generous indulgence.

Librivox volunteer Kirk Ziegler assembled his own anthology of 30 ghost stories (including multiple selections from a book of ghost stories from India) to record as a solo project. The collection includes intriguing titles like “The Phantom Toe,” “The Fight With a Ghost,” and “What the Professor Saw”.

Wandering Through the Public Domain #20

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

By Colleen McMahon: I swear this happens almost every time I start to write one of these entries. I open up the blank document with no idea what I’m going to write about, and decide to do just a quick roundup of some links without going into any detail about any of the authors, etc.

Then as I’m poking around looking for what I want to link to this week, something catches my eye and sends me in a completely unexpected direction.

This week it was Captain Midnight.

There were a couple of mentions of the Captain Midnight TV show in recent Pixel Scrolls. September 4 saw the anniversary of the first broadcast, and September 9 was the birthday of Richard Webb, who played the title character.

Off I went to Internet Archive, to see if there were any Captain Midnight episodes available (since a lot of lower-tier 1950s TV appears to have fallen into public domain). I found two full episodes (at least one includes the Ovaltine commercials) but I’m not linking them because they aren’t tagged as public domain. There are some Captain Midnight comic issues and old-time radio shows as well, but again, not clearly labeled as public domain.

So at this point I would normally drop the idea and do something else. But then I saw another video item intriguingly labeled “Captain Midnight HBO Broadcast Intrusion”…and the rabbit hole opened up and down I went.

Turns out that in April of 1986, in the middle of an HBO showing of The Falcon and the Snowman, the movie was interrupted for several minutes, first by a flickering screen, and then a “rainbow bar” screen overlaid with text reading “GOODEVENING HBO FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT $12.95/MONTH? NO WAY! (SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE).”

This was a now largely-forgotten protest by one John R. MacDougall, a satellite dish seller/installer in Florida who was angry about HBO’s rates for satellite subscribers. He figured out how to take over of the HBO satellite to put out his message.

It was a small gesture by a guy angry that HBO and other paid cable services had begun scrambling their satellite signals so that dish owners could no longer watch for free. The $12.99 HBO subscription price for dish users was significantly higher than the cable price. (That’s over $30/month in today’s dollars; for comparison, you can currently subscribe to HBO NOW for $14.99.) And the subscription cost was on top of the several hundred dollars you would have to pay for descrambling equipment.

While the protest was fleeting and mostly unnoticed, the response was major. MacDougall was ultimately charged and pleaded out for probation and a $5,000 fine. But new laws were passed that made satellite hijacking a federal felony, and the ATIS signal identification system was developed.

The Wikipedia entry about the incident has a lot more interesting detail about MacDougall, the event, and the aftermath. John R. MacDougall is still around and still has his Florida business; the biography page on his business website proudly claims his Captain Midnight identity.

So, how about some actual public domain material before I call it a week?

Jack Williamson (1908-2006) is another recent Pixel Scroll mention. I enjoyed the 1992 interview in the September 9 Scroll.

Several Williamson works are on Project Gutenberg:

A recent Librivox edition collects three of Williamson’s stories (see below in new Librivox releases). Other Williamson stories are included in various Short Science Fiction volumes:

There is also a standalone solo recording of Salvage in Space.

Internet Archive has plenty of Williamson stuff of uncertain copyright status. A couple of items of interest that are listed as Creative Commons but not public domain:

Recent Librivox releases:

Lady Truman received word fourteen months ago that her husband, Sir George Truman, has died in battle. Now a very eligible widow with a large estate, she has more suitors than she knows what to do with. As if that wasn’t enough, her house is now being haunted at night by the horrible and ghostly sound of a drum, apparently caused by the restless spirit of her husband. When an old man arrives who claims to be able to lay the spirit to rest, she is so desperate for relief that she determines to give him a chance. Written with wit and good humor, this play will have you laughing out loud!

Three classic SF stories by Jack Williamson: The Cosmic Express, The Pygmy Planet and Salvage in Space. All were published in Astounding Stories in the very early 1930’s. and all are fine examples of the far ranging imagination of science fiction writers of the day. 

When Earth loses contact with the colony planet Eden, an expedition is sent to find out why. Even though the planet has been determined to have no hostile properties, the second expedition is astonished to find no evidence of the colony. The colonists are spread out, naked, wandering dazed among the bushes, with no sign of any of the technology they brought from Earth.

An anthology of short, chilling stories from Algernon Blackwood. They will make you start at noises in the night and wonder about your neighbors. These stories likely stem from Blackwood’s investigations into haunted houses for the Psychical Research Society and reflect his fascination with the weird, occult and supernatural. 

Solo project by reader Kirk Ziegler, collecting 20 public domain science fiction stories. Authors include Jerome Bixby, Randall Garrett, Algis Budrys, August Derleth, Edward Bellamy and others.

Wandering Through the Public Domain #19

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

By Colleen McMahon:

Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) was a name that appeared multiple times in the Retro Hugo ballot this year. His Conjure Wife took the best novel Retro Hugo, and another Leiber novel, Gather, Darkness! was the second-place finisher. He was also in the hunt for Best Novelette for “Thieves’ House”. 

While none of these works are currently in the public domain, I did find a podcast with an hour-long discussion of Conjure Wife on Internet Archive. The podcast was Necronomipod (which appears to be from 2007 and a completely different iteration than the current day podcasts of the same title, which discusses weirdness and true crime).

Conjure Wife was adapted as a movie called Inner Sanctum in 1948, and the movie is in the public domain and available on Internet Archive. Interestingly, Fritz Leiber Sr., father of the writer, was an actor and played Dr. Valonius in the movie.

However, there are plenty of other Lieber works, from short stories to full-length novels, available on Project Gutenberg and Librivox, so I thought this would be a good time to take a look.

Short stories:

All of these stories except “Dr. Kometevsky’s Day” and “Time in the Round” have been recorded for various collections on Librivox. 

Novelettes, Novellas, and Novels:

Librivox volunteers sometimes make their own anthologies by recording a set of stories as a stand-alone audiobook project, either on their own or with a group of volunteers. Lieber features in several of these audiobooks:

One more interesting Librivox anthology is X Minus One Project. This collects an assortment of short SF tales that were adapted by the radio show X Minus One that ran from 1955-1958. The anthology includes “The Moon is Green” by Leiber, along with other stories by authors like Robert Sheckley, H. Beam Piper, Frederik Pohl, and several others. (X Minus One adapted even more famous stories by the likes of Asimov, Heinlein and Bradbury, but those stories aren’t in the public domain yet.)

Speaking of X Minus One, the series adapted three Leiber stories during its run, and they are available on Internet Archive:

Recent Librivox releases:

  • Deathworld by Harry Harrison (1925-2012)

    A world that actively seeks to kill the colonists. Not a pleasant place. The hordes of ferocious animals all come with deadly poison and a will to kill as many humans as possible. Even the plants have teeth and claws and toxins dripping from every surface. They fly, crawl and run for the chance to sink something terrible into a human arm or leg. Oh, and did I mention the 2G gravity? Pyrrus is its name. The settlers there were supermen… twice as strong as ordinary men and with instantaneous reflexes. They had to be. For their business was murder…a 3 year old Pyrrian had a loaded gun strapped to his forearm and knew how to use it or he was a dead 3 year old. It was up to Jason dinAlt, interplanetary gambler, to discover why Pyrrus had become so hostile during man’s brief habitation…if he could stay alive long enough to even make a start…


  • A Martian Odyssey and A Valley of Dreams by Stanley Weinbaum (1902-1935)

    The first of these stories was originally published in the July 1934 issue of Wonder Stories. It was followed four months later by a sequel, “Valley of Dreams” in the same magazine. These classic stories take us to Mars where we meet a Martian, or at least something very different from us, and several other completely original specimens of life. The Martian “Tweel” looks like an ostrich and the Egyptian god Osiris – for good reason, as you will find out if you listen to the story!


  • With Her in Ourland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

    Third in the trilogy of the feminist classics, after Moving the Mountain and Herland. In Herland, three American young men discover a country inhabited solely by women, who were parthenogenetic (asexual procreation), and had borne only girl children for two thousand years; they marry three of the women. Two of the men and one woman leave the country of Herland to return to America; Jeff Margrave remaining in Herland with his wife, Celis, a willing citizen; Terry O. Nicholson being expelled from Herland for bad conduct; and Ellador electing to leave Herland with her husband, Vandyck Jennings. We now continue the story, told from the viewpoint of Vandyck Jennings, as they return to America.


  • Doomsday Eve by Robert Moore Williams (1907-1977)

    In the midst of the war—that terrible conflict that threatened humanity’s total destruction—the “new people” suddenly appeared. Quietly performing incredible deeds, vanishing at will, they were an enigma to both sides. Kurt Zen was an American intelligence officer among the many sent to root them out. He found them. Taken captive in their hidden lair, he waited as the enemy prepared to launch the super missile, the bomb to end all bombs—and all life. If only he could find the source of the new people’s power, Kurt alone might be able to prevent obliteration of the Earth…. 

Wandering Through the Public Domain #17

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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 had the privilege of attending a free lecture (via the Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library) by Dr. Lisa Yaszek, who is a professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech. She gave a presentation on the history of time travel in science fiction. Not only was it fascinating for itself, it also led me to lots of works in the public domain to mention here. (Bonus: I also met fellow Filer Kirby Bartlett-Sloan there!)

In fact, there are LOTS of interesting time-travel tales in the public domain, and it seems like the more I dig, the more I find. So this will be the first of two back-to-back columns on time-travel themes, with more random installments to come in the future. Because there is a lot to say on this topic, I’ll also be departing from my usual format to focus just on the time-travel topic for these two columns.

One of the most intriguing points is that time-travel fiction as we know it, SF or otherwise, didn’t really exist before the 19th century. There seems to be two main reasons for that.

The first is that one of the main ideas of time travel is visiting historical eras in the past, or bringing people from historical times to the present day and interacting with them. But the sense of historical periods being very different from and foreign to the current day, and thus more interesting to interact with, is relatively recent. For vast swaths of human history, the past looked a lot like the current day, as people stayed in the same places and did the same things. Since much of the narrative interest in time-travel fiction is in the contrast with earlier times, it does not seem to have been as much of an imaginative stimulus.

(However, even in those centuries, there was a sense of a distant past that was different — the days of Moses, Jesus, or the gods of ancient mythologies worldwide. It seems odd to me that there wasn’t much apparent imaginings or discussions of what it would be like to see those times in person or talk to legendary figures like Buddha or Confucius or Hercules.)

The other reason was that, while time as a linear concept existed, the cyclical sense of time, based on seasons and repetitions of holidays and festivals, was far stronger in people’s minds. The rhythms of the agricultural year reinforced this, and even the few who did not directly grow their own food were keenly aware of the annual cycles of food production. 

It’s really the standardization of time intervals, time zones, and calendars that began in the 18th century and fully took hold in the 19th, that gave most people a distinct sense of a one-way march of clearly delineated time periods. The fact that more people were becoming detached from the farm and food production, with its cyclical emphasis, and were moving to towns and cities where transit, factories, and stores ran on strict schedules, helped reinforce the rise of linear time sense.

Dr. Yaszek points out that it’s not a coincidence that the first mechanical time-travel stories, where a machine could precisely target and “jump” to a particular era, appear within the same decade as the 1884 International Meridian Conference that established standard time zones worldwide.

However, the earliest time-travel story device is one that is still used, and is more of a fantasy trope than a science fiction one. That’s the “time slip”, where a character interacts with another time period through an unexplained or magical connection. This can be seen as far back as portions of the Indian Mahabarata or the Japanese folk-tale Urashima Taro, where characters magically travel to other dimensions, and return to themselves to find that years have mysteriously passed. Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” is a variant of this theme that most of us are familiar with.

Mid-19th-century tales like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court also use this “time slip” device — the authors are not as concerned with how the time travel happens as the experiences that the main characters have as a result. 

A less well-known example is “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” by Edgar Allen Poe. This 1844 short story is a rather confusing tale in which an unnamed narrator tells the story of his meeting, years earlier, a mysterious young man named Arthur Bedloe. Bedloe was in his 20s, but seemed far older to the narrator, perhaps because of ill health. He was attended by a physician, Dr. Templeton, who specialized in a form of mesmerism. 

Bedloe narrates his strange experience of hiking in a deep mist in the “Ragged Mountains” of Virginia (which appear to be the Blue Ridge Mountains) and suddenly hearing drumming sounds and noticing plants and people that appear to be native to India rather than Virginia.  Bedloe ultimately finds himself in an eastern city in the midst of a battle between English soldiers and native people. He is struck by an arrow and dies.

Bedloe insists that it was a real experience, and not a dream, but the narrator points out to Bedloe that he is not dead, so it could not have been real. Bedloe reacts by becoming visibly ill, and Dr. Templeton intervenes to explain that the experience Bedloe narrated sounded much like that of his old friend Oldeb, who had been in India in 1780 and died in a battle there in the way that Bedloe described. What actually occurred with Bedloe is left vague — he was under the influence of both mesmerism and strong drugs when he had his experience, but it’s also strongly implied that Bedloe time-traveled into the mind of Oldeb or was a reincarnation of him. When the narrator later sees Bedloe’s name misspelled on his tombstone as Bedlo, he realizes that Bedlo is Oldeb spelled backwards.

Edward Bellamy’s 1884 novel Looking Backward is another time-slip tale, although this time the narrator has a dream-vision of the future rather than the past. Bellamy’s main purpose was to write a political utopian tale to illustrate possible resolutions to the contemporary political and economic conflicts in the United States, but his book has the distinction of becoming the third best-selling American novel of the 19th century after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur, which I believe would make it the first SFF best-seller.

The time-slip trope remains alive and well down to the present day, and drives the plot in stories ranging from the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day to the best-selling Outlander novels by Diana Gabaldon. 

(In fact, while time travel in science fiction gets most of the attention, the romance genre has a strong tradition of time-travel romance stories, nearly all of which use the time-slip trope, as the hero or heroine is thrown backward or forward in time by devices ranging from standing stones to family curses to mysterious pendants and more).

Librivox has recordings of most of the above-mentioned works:

Internet Archive has the 1910 one-reel Edison adaptation of A Christmas Carol. 

There are no extant complete copies of the 1921 film of Connecticut Yankee, but the trailer for the very hokey 1949 version is in the public domain!

In the next column, I’ll look at the H.G. Wells novel, The Time Machine, which popularized the mechanical time-travel plot device, and the many tales that followed.