HG Wells, ripoff artist

A new book, The Spinster and the Prophet, traces the story of Florence Deeks, a Torontonian amateur historian who wrote an amazing, enormous history of the world from a feminist perspective during WWI. She submitted the manuscript to Macmillan, HG Wells's publisher, and shortly thereafter, Macmillan published Wells's "The Outline of History," a 1,300-page bestseller that ripped off enormous chunks of Deeks's works. Deeks sued in every Canadian and UK venue available to her and lost all the way. Today, though, she's vindicated in "Spinster and the Prophet," which makes a strong case for the claim of plagiarism. I wrote a novella, "A Place So Foreign," whose mcguffin is the idea that Jules Verne meets time-travellers and uses their technology to plagiarize sf writers from Wells to Gibson. I picked the wrong villain, it seems.

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(Thanks, Pat!)