Book People Archive

Re: Science Fiction ?

As far as I've been able to tell, most science fiction on the Net
falls into two categories:

  -- "classic" SF old enough to be in the public domain
       (e.g. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley...)
  -- recently-written SF that has not been published in print
       (e.g. The Tailnapping, various stories written by netters, etc.)

A few books don't fall into either category.  (For example, Bill
Ransom's _Jaguar_ was published by Ace Science Fiction in 1990,
and was then placed on the Net after it left print.)

On the On-Line Books Page, I list previously published SF books
in my individual list of titles, but I don't separate the SF listings
from the literature listings as a whole.  For readers that want to
focus specifically on science fiction, I've pointed to JRR Leavitt's
Speculative Fiction Clearing House off my main page.  Unfortunately,
the site it was on is down at the moment, but he's told me that it
should be up on a new site Real Soon Now, and I'll relink to it as
soon as it's back.  If anyone knows of other sites that have comprehensive
listings of on-line science fiction (which is one of the things the
SF Clearing House had), I'd be happy to check them out too. 

On the On-Line Books Page, I do occasionally list individual titles in SF
(and other genres) that have not been published in print and made it into
libraries, but I don't do it very often.  Generally I require that to be
listed on my page, unpublished fiction has to be clearly of publishable
quality.  Most of the on-line SF I've seen has not been up to this standard,
but if anyone has found some particularly outstanding on-line SF and would
like to review it, feel free to send a note to me or to the list.

Over the years I've gotten a number of letters from people who want
to see books by people like Asimov, Heinlein, Jordan, and Tolkien on-line.
The works of these and other recent SF authors are copyrighted, and cannot
go on-line unless the author or copyright holder grants permission.
(This permission is not likely to be granted for books that still sell well.)

Still, if anyone on the list is interested in seeing more SF on-line,
and is interested in the early development of the genre, there is actually
a fair bit of public-domain material that could still go up.  In particular,
in the US anything originally published before 1922 is fair game, and
many early SF books were written before then and either are still remembered
or deserve to be remembered.  Also, much SF faded into obscurity after
initial publication, and the copyrights were never renewed.  In the US,
anything originally published before 1964, and originally published in the US,
is in the public domain *if* its copyrights were not renewed.  It's possible
to research the copyright history of a book if you're really interested
in putting it up (and if the original copyright was after 1950, you
can even search for the renewal records on-line).  If anyone wants more
details, let me know.

John