Quote:Ancient History
For anyone that might be interested, a review/analysis of a notorious case of a new author plagiarizing Clark Ashton Smith's "The Seed from the Sepulcher":
Quote:greyirish
Nothing to much change the plot, but substantial enough to make me wonder if these were all her own changes, or the reflection of a different textual tradition.
While we like to think of stories as being “a text,†the facts are rarely that simple. Writers often create drafts and synopses before the final manuscript, which may be submitted, rejected, revised, re-submitted, accepted, copy-edited, published, corrected, and re-published. In the pulps especially, stories may be cannibalized and re-written, so that that a single story may have many different textual variations—some of which might be relatively minor (misspellings or odd punctuation) and some of which might be substantial (an editor re-wrote the last paragraphs to change the ending).
Here's something frightening: I nearly did just that myself, late last year. Flush from "Cult of the Singing Flame" I rooted around this site and found the synopsis for "Crabs of Iribos". Just when I started to flesh this one out I ran across "Master of the Crabs" - clearly the finished work. D'OHH
I mean, I would of course have declared that I'd based my version off the synopsis, because I'm not a thief; but it still would have been embarrassing. Especially if what I'd done wasn't as good as what the author himself would have done (which it wouldn't have been).
So I contented myself with
Feet of Sidaiva. I am pretty sure Smith didn't ever touch that one.