XPost: rec.arts.sf.written

Ted Nolan wrote:

Jason Evans wrote:

Jack Bohn wrote:

For anyone who doesn't know gutenberg.org is more careful to stay on the >>> legal side.
(There's even an Australian Gutenberg site because they allow more stuff >>> into the public domain than most.)

I love Project Gutenberg. I've even donated to them a couple of time and
I have my own backup of all of their epub files (at least from 2 years >>ago). The problem is that you're not going to find much science fiction >>that's in the public domain. Old magazines like the ones that I posted
are a "grey" area. Someday they may get taken down because the individual >>stories are under copyright, but for now they can be enjoyed freely.

This is not my experience. There is tons of old SF on PG. The problem
is finding it.

This seems to be some attempt:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/68

but it's clunky when you would really just like to pull all authors & titles. (And of course it depends on someone having done the categorization).
Perhaps there is some way to pull all titles from ISFDB that have gutenberg links.

That's also why I mentioned the Baen free library. These are clearly >>copyrighted materials but they are allowed to be shared freely without >>being tied to DRM.

Legal or not (it's in France apparently), this site seems to have
virtually all of van Vogt's work:

http://www.prosperosisle.org/spip.php?rubrique31

including my favorite:

http://www.prosperosisle.org/spip.php?article220

it's all oddly organized, but somewhere in there is a collection of all
VVs short fiction which I can't find now though the individual stories
are easy enough to locate.

The www.prosperosisle.org website was frequented by me back in the day
when your RI threads included a link to it.

In regards to organized short fiction, let me tell you (again?) about my _Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams_ web page. It cross references a (relatively) recent PKD TV series of adaptations to their original
shorts:

A 2017 TV series entitled Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams
recently came to my attention. It's a collection, an adaptation
of ten, less than novel length, stories.
An intriguing aspect of the TV series is the age of the
stories selected for adaptation. PKD wrote all of the stories
during the 1950s, close to the start of his career as an author.
As such, all ten stories are apparently now in the public domain.

(excerpt, more at the link below)

https://crcomp.net/arts/electricdreams/

So, perhaps those PKD shorts aren't in the public domain after all.
Regardless, all the links to archive.org content works so far this
morning. Although some days archive.org's _The Philip K Dick Reader_
displays a message about how you need to wait until later to read it
because it's already maxed out with too many readers.
Further investigation leaves me with the impression one (or possibly
more) copy(ies) were donated with a "library" proviso. Namely, only one
online reader at a time can access _The Philip K Dick Reader_.

Danke,

--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,.
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Don wrote:

In regards to organized short fiction, let me tell you (again?) about my _Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams_ web page. It cross references a (relatively) recent PKD TV series of adaptations to their original
shorts:

A 2017 TV series entitled Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams
recently came to my attention. It's a collection, an adaptation
of ten, less than novel length, stories.
An intriguing aspect of the TV series is the age of the
stories selected for adaptation. PKD wrote all of the stories
during the 1950s, close to the start of his career as an author.
As such, all ten stories are apparently now in the public domain.

(excerpt, more at the link below)

https://crcomp.net/arts/electricdreams/

So, perhaps those PKD shorts aren't in the public domain after all.

Well, "The Hanging Stranger" seems to be.

On a side question: When did Philip K. Dick get such pop culture status as to get not only a series adapting his works, but his name in the title? This puts him up there with "The Ray Bradbury Theater" and "The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells"!

Hmm... what would be a second tier of popular knowledge? Having their name used heavily in advertising of adaptations, I would say. Who all gets that?

--
-Jack

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 08:15:27 -0700 (PDT), Jack Bohn
<jack.bohn64@gmail.com> wrote:

Don wrote:

In regards to organized short fiction, let me tell you (again?) about my
_Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams_ web page. It cross references a
(relatively) recent PKD TV series of adaptations to their original
shorts:

A 2017 TV series entitled Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams
recently came to my attention. It's a collection, an adaptation
of ten, less than novel length, stories.
An intriguing aspect of the TV series is the age of the
stories selected for adaptation. PKD wrote all of the stories
during the 1950s, close to the start of his career as an author.
As such, all ten stories are apparently now in the public domain.

(excerpt, more at the link below)

https://crcomp.net/arts/electricdreams/

So, perhaps those PKD shorts aren't in the public domain after all.

Well, "The Hanging Stranger" seems to be.

On a side question: When did Philip K. Dick get such pop culture status as to get not only a series adapting his works, but his name in the title? This puts him up there with "The Ray Bradbury Theater" and "The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells"!

Hmm... what would be a second tier of popular knowledge? Having their name used heavily in advertising of adaptations, I would say. Who all gets that?

The situation may be different with TV shows, but, in my experience,
most movies with an author's name in the title, such as /Bram Stoker's
Dracula/ are most decidedly not Bram Stoker's /Dracula/ but rather a profanation of it.

IOW, in movies, this is a red flag saying "we know nobody in his right
mind would watch this film, so let's put the author's name on it to
attract a least /some/ paying customers".

Also, I wouldn't necessarily expect a TV series with a Famous Name on
it it to consist entirely by works by the Famous Name, but rather of
works hand-picked by the Famous Name, thus guaranteeing a quality
experience.
--
"I begin to envy Petronius."
"I have envied him long since."

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Paul S Person wrote:

On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 08:15:27 -0700 (PDT), Jack Bohn
<jack....@gmail.com> wrote:

Don wrote:

In regards to organized short fiction, let me tell you (again?) about my >> _Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams_ web page. It cross references a
(relatively) recent PKD TV series of adaptations to their original
shorts:

On a side question: When did Philip K. Dick get such pop culture status as to get not only a series adapting his works, but his name in the title? This puts him up there with "The Ray Bradbury Theater" and "The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells"!
Hmm... what would be a second tier of popular knowledge? Having their name used heavily in advertising of adaptations, I would say. Who all gets that?

The situation may be different with TV shows, but, in my experience,
most movies with an author's name in the title, such as /Bram Stoker's Dracula/ are most decidedly not Bram Stoker's /Dracula/ but rather a profanation of it.

The third example I can come up with, "O. Henry's Full House" (1952) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044981/) is not so bad. Maybe a bit of overwriting where they have to make up the dialog.

Also, I wouldn't necessarily expect a TV series with a Famous Name on
it it to consist entirely by works by the Famous Name, but rather of
works hand-picked by the Famous Name, thus guaranteeing a quality experience.

In my experience, the Famous Name on a TV series title is mostly the star, with, from "Ozzie and Harriet" to "Seinfeld," a lot of them pretending to the conceit that the actors are just being themselves while a three-camera setup documents their lives.

One show you'd not have a problem with, then, would be "Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected" which was popular enough to continue despite running low on Roald Dahl's tales of the unexpected. They did then drop the author's name from the official title.

--
-Jack

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)