Mindwebs: The Metal Man and Knock and Kellerman's Eye Piece

[james_davis_nicoll]

The Metal Man

I was going to call this an early Jack Williamson story but I see it is in fact the early Jack Williamson story, his first sale. Williamson's style in this tale of horrific transformation is very different from the approach he took later on in his long, long career.

(You know, surprisingly little of Williamson's work is on Gutenberg. Is it still under copyright?)


Knock

Ah, this story again. The aliens who have conquered Earth and slaughtered humans down to the last pair are still idiots and I don't like this version as much as X Minus One's.



Kellerman's Eye Piece

The term I needed the last time one of these went by is "epistolary". In this example, we once again taken to the customer relations department of a company, this time a telescope company. It works out a little better for this customer than it did for the previous one but the previous was executed so that's not saying much.

That's some classic Broken English there part way through.

Comments

[redbird]

Williamson was not only alive but publishing until a couple of years ago, so it seems likely that he or his agent was keeping an eye on copyrights.

[stevendj.livejournal.com]

Williamson's first sale was in 1928, so all of his work is under copyright unless he and his publishers failed to file the proper paperwork. It was surprisingly common for authors and magazines not to file copyright renewals, but some were better about it than others.

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

And he's only been dead since 2006, so it's gonna be a long time before his later works emerge from the grasp of Disney and the antiKampfers.

--Dave

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

It's not unlikely that some of the work from the pulps (not just Williamson's) is in the PD in the US because of failure to renew at 28 years, assuming that copyright was held by the magazines. But yeah, failing that, under current US law Williamson stories from 1930 will enjoy nearly 150 years of copyright protection.

[stevendj.livejournal.com]

Project Gutenberg won't clear a story if either the author or the magazine renewed the copyright. Doesn't matter which one actually held the copyright. There are indeed a lot of stories where that didn't happen, mostly because the magazines went out of business or just didn't bother and the authors didn't realize it was something they needed to take care of.

[carbonel]

I think you mean "epistolary," unless the "to" adds some meaning I'm not familiar with.