A Quest for Leslie Stone

A couple nights ago, as the Youtube algorithm flailed desperately in an attempt to parse my viewing history into something advertisers can understand, I was recommended a video with maybe 200 views about a pulp science fiction author named Leslie F. Stone. I'd never heard of her before, but "sci-fi author I have never heard of" + "public domain" is a guaranteed way to get my attention. So I brought up her Wikipedia page and started digging.

Leslie wrote from 1929 - 1940, all of them short stories published across the pulp magazine ecosystem (sans a compilation book published in 1967 and a short autobiographical essay in 1974). Quite a few of these stories are definitely public domain, and the rest are cozy in that grey area of "did it get renewed or not?"

But when I checked Gutenberg, she only had one story to her name - 1929's When the Sun Went Out.

There's a quote (that I can't remember the source of off the top of my head) that's something like this: the  history of women (or queer people, or people of color) in genre fiction has to constantly start over from 0, because they are consistently left out, forgotten, overwritten, sidelined, and ignored by the historical narrative. The same sort of narrative that leads to thinkpieces in whatever thinkpiece magazine du jour is announcing with self-satisfied triumph that science fiction is written by women, now - as if they hadn't been writing it from the beginning.

And once that got in my head, the next thought was "if not now, when?"

I haven't felt this fired up (positive) about something for a long, long while. Let's see if I can sustain it.

Here's Stone's bibliography, sorted according the year and copyright status. Would not have been able to do this without an extremely helpful Kirkus Reviews article which provided the magazine and month for each of her stories (which are left out of her Wikipedia page)

Already on Project Gutenberg

• When the Sun Went Out (1929)

Very Definitely in the Public Domain

• Out of the Void (Amazing Stories, Aug-Sep 1929)
• Men With Wings (Air Wonder Stories, Jul 1929)
• Women with Wings (Air Wonder Stories, May 1930)
• Through the Veil (Amazing Stories, May 1930)
  
• Letter of the 24th Century (Amazing Stories, Dec 1930)
  

Very Definitely Not in the Public Domain

• Out of the Void (1967 novel version)
• Day of the Pulps (1974) 

Possibly in the Public Domain

• Across the Void (Amazing Stories Apr-May-Jun 1931)
• The Conquest of Gola (Wonder Stories, Apr 1931)
• The Hell Planet (Wonder Stories, Jun 1932)
• The Man Who Fought a Fly (Amazing Stories, Oct 1932)
• Gulliver, 3000 A.D. Wonder Stories, May 1933)
• The Rape of the Solar System (Amazing Stories, Dec 1934)
• Cosmic Joke (Wonder Stories, Jan 1935)
• The Man With the Four-Dimensional Eyes (Wonder Stories, Aug 1935)
• When the Flame-Flowers Blossomed (Weird Tales, Nov 1935)
• The Fall of Mercury (Amazing Stories, Dec 1935)
• The Human Pets of Mars (Amazing Stories, Oct 1936)
• The Great Ones (Astounding Stories, Jul 1937)
• Death Dallies Awhile (Weird Tales, Jun 1938)
• The Space Terror (Wikipedia says 1939, Kirkus Reviews doesn't provide a magazine, but searching the name got me a zine called Spaceways, where it appears in Issue #7.)
• Gravity Off! (Future Fiction, Jul 1940)
  

A cursory search through the UPenn periodical copyright renewals database doesn't ping for any renewals of the stories, but since we're trying to prove a negative here I'm going to double-check with New York Public Library's renewals database.

Then once I have a list and find all the scans, I guess all that's left is to start transcribing. Somehow, after over 30 years on this planet, I only learned earlier today about Distributed Proofreaders. 

Who knows how it will go, but let's see where it ends up.