A Quest for Leslie Stone: Update 1

It's been about three months since I started on this odd little mission, so I figured it's a good time to pop in with an update.

My initial dive into the copyright renewal archives turned up just about as well as I had hoped: of the 20 short stories Leslie had published in the pulps, only one of them had ever been renewed -1937's "The Great Ones", which was also the only story published in Astounding Stories (later the famous Analog Science Fiction, which was generally a lot better at renewing copyright than Gernsbeck was.)

After figuring that out and plugging everything into a spreadsheet, I went and downloaded pdf scans of all the relevant magazine issues. UPenn's renewal archives were an invaluable tool here, as they not only listed which issues had been renewed and which ones hadn't, but included direct links to all the public domain periodicals that had been uploaded onto Internet Archive. Since Leslie was writing primarily in Weird Tales and the other Gernsbeck pulps, basically everything was up there already and all I had to do was download them. The one exception was "The Space Terror", which was published in a very small fanzine called Spaceways that I could only find thanks to the unsung heroes of preservation over at fanac.org.

After that, I ran everything through some OCR software and copied everything over into a big document. The rest is the heavy lifting of making sure everything is formatted correctly.

As of writing this, 10/19 stories have gotten their first pass. I'm focusing mostly on fixing spelling errors and re-adjusting the spacing and paragraph breaks at this stage; second pass is going to be the in-depth line-by-line to make sure everything is exact.

It's remarkably fun to just put a stream on the other monitor and vibe. I would say I wish I could do this for money, but work tends to suck the fun out of things and I like that this is actually fun. Educational, too; science fiction (and fiction, and writing in general) has changed a lot in 95 years.

Some observations: 

• Perhaps the biggest thing is the cumulative effect of all the small changes; shifts in spelling, grammar, word usage. Highlights include: "imbedded" for "embedded", "h'm" for "hm" or "hmm",  ellipses of four dots like this. . . . and using interclausal dashes like-this instead of like - this.
• There's a story where Character A is recounting something to Character B, normal frame narrative stuff, but most of that recounting is dialogue so nearly the entire story is in nested quotes.
• Rays! We love a ray. X-rays, Z-rays, T-rays, any kind of ray you can think of. No such thing as a plot that can't be jumpstarted with the right kind of ray.
• In some of the earlier stories, spaceships are usually called "space-fliers" or just "fliers", and in the very early ones they aren't even rocket shaped - they're spherical in a story from 1930. We're right in that sweet spot between "you can fly between planets with an airplane" and "everything is either a rocket or a saucer".
• Odd scare quotes show up a-plenty, ex. going "through" a portal. I assume this is because the concept was not as blase at the time as it is to readers now, but it has the side effect of making the dialogue sound stilted in a way I can only describe as a robot imitating lower-tier children's educational television with weirdly placed emphasis on key words. 
• Lots of italics for emphasis, too. 
• There are more footnotes than I expected, though I don't know if these were Leslie's or the editor's. Most of them are definitions of alien terminology, or clarifications about science and whatnot.
• Since I'm working off of magazine scans, all the ads are included. Weight loss regimens, get-rich quick classes in chemistry and radio repair, a guy promising the mystic secrets of the universe if you'll just buy his book. Some things never change.
• It's no surprise that there's a fair bit of colonialist fantasy going on in some of these stories, but what's truly wild, and perhaps most educational, is just how dedicated that particular genre trapping is to denying the reality of even the story it's found in. Prime example: the local aliens are continually described as primitive - only rudimentary language, fire but no metalworking - but then much of their part of the narrative is taken up by their elaborate social and religious hierarchy and their copious supply of worked metal goods. And this is in a story where the thesis is "the human prospectors who came to this planet are idiots who got themselves killed because they thought they could take advantage of the locals!" Which, I suppose, might indicate that it is an intentional subversion and this entire bullet point is moot in this particular circumstance. 
• I have finally learned what the HOME key does. 

During this whole process, it's given me a lot more appreciation for the pulps, beyond just a "this is where a lot of things started" level: they served the niche that fanzines played in the postwar decades and that webfiction and fanfic serve today. A place for amateur writers to get out there and just write shit and maybe make some money on the side. Does it mean that a lot of it's bad? Yeah, of course it does. But that's the point of amateur fiction; it's an environment where you can safely write stuff at low investment and both improve the craft in real time and build an audience (I learned more about writing from the SCP wiki and running this blog than I ever did in any of the classes I took in college.)

Anyway, the next update shall happen when it happens. Probably when I get all of Pass 1 done.