Re: plagiarism

["Michael Edwards" mje@xxxxxxxx]

[George Scithers:]

>Now and then, an author will do this in the science fiction & fantasy
>genre, and sometimes succeeds in selling the work to a respectable
>publisher. Of course, since all the editors in the field know each other,
>this puts a quick end to that author's career.

   I came across an interesting case of this years ago. (One author died in
1983 and I suspect the other is probably dead too, so I'm probably not about to
destroy any careers in saying this.)
   I once read a short story in several chapters, about 20 pages long, by
Joseph Payne Brennan called "Slime", in Barbara Ireson's "Creepy Creatures"
anthology from 1978; it was a frankly sensationalist story about shapeless slime
terrorizing a village (rather like the notorious film "The Blob"). The date of
original publication of that story is not mentioned in the anthology.
   Then later I came across a novel called "Night of the Black Horror" by
Victor Norwood, undated, but published in 1962 according to Peter Nicholls'
"Encyclopedia of Science Fiction", which for its first several chapters followed
the same story line as the complete short story, before branching off into new
plot lines not incorporated in Brennan's story.
   The resemblance of plot is so strong, in spite of many differences in minor
details, that it cannot possibly be coincidence. I cannot be sure which one was
the original and which the copy (if you happen to know, George, I'd really be
interested to hear more about this; I'm something of a science-fiction
enthusiast, actually) - but the interesting thing is that you would probably
never find two sentences in the two stories that are even nearly the same. A
complete rewriting job was done, rephrasing everything, using different words to
name or describe things - yet the sequence of descriptions is to the same
effect, and in the same order, almost sentence by sentence - right down to the
descriptions of the slime, its biology, the primaeval urges that drove it, and
so on.
   I do not know whether copyright law would cover a complete rewriting job
like this where few actual phrases would be in common, although at the very
least it is not ethical to copy ideas and story lines on this scale without
permission or acknowledgement. (Neither story, at least in the editions I own,
carries any acknowledgement whatever of the other.)

   (George, are you able to tell me anything about either author, and whether
this instance of plagiarism is an already-known case? If you can tell me
(perhaps off-list if it's going too far off-topic), I'd really appreciate any
information on this. I've been wondering about this for years.)

             Regards,
             Michael Edwards.