Sci-fi short stories aplenty

LibriVox Volumes 1 and 2 are now available to the public, ten stories in each … and now we’re busy filling up the third. I’ve contributed one story to each so far, and I’ll need to stock up with more readings, since these things tend to go quickly!

The strangest thing about my contribution to Vol 1 is that it’s the only text I’ve knowingly recorded by a still living author (not counting various recordings of forum posts and FAQs and stuff.) US copyright law is plain odd: where a story by (alive) Harry Harrison published in 1962 can fall into the public domain — but where Kafka, who died in 1924 (more than 70 years ago which is the current US copyright term) still retains a US copyright on The Trial and The Castle (in original German and thus subsequent translations) until at least 2021. Note, I am not a lawyer in any country. Even the limited calculation I do with these laws makes my head hurt. But this is my working understanding of the state of play.

Still, it’s not like there’s any shortage of books to record, and since my legal understanding includes the “rule of shorter term” which in dangerously-abridged form I think means “if it’s by a USan author, and Public Domain in the US, the UK will just go along with that copyright status, thankyewverymuch,” I can be kept very happy reading Sci Fi shorts amongst everything else.