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Short Science Fiction Collection 081, by various authors
full contents (9h 5m)
with: "Dr. Kometevsky's Day", by Fritz Leiber (1952) - text / audio (42m)

Some background: Like the Insomnia Collection, LibriVox's many short-story anthologies are semi-random assortments, based on whatever the volunteers happened to feel like reading and could find in a public-domain source. But since those sources happen to include so many mid-20th-century pulp magazines, the SF collections tend to be heavily weighted toward "Golden Age" stuff, and even more heavily weighted toward whichever issues of those pulps most recently got added to Project Gutenberg. So, while this installment includes material as old as 1894(*), and (due to the vagaries of US copyright law) as recent as 1962, it's mostly from 1952-1958 and mostly from the magazines Amazing Stories, If, Imagination, and Planet Stories.

What I read

Fritz Leiber is legendary for all kinds of reasons, but "Dr. Kometevsky's Day" isn't one of his better-known stories and I hadn't seen it before. It's an odd one for sure, even by his eclectic standards: a world-in-peril thriller that's almost all dialogue and interior monologue and theorizing until there's one weird special effect, followed by an exposition-dump from an alien-possessed kid, and the big question other than whether the world will end is whether the partners in a six-person polyamorous marriage will manage to feel like coequal parents.
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Comedies of Courtship, by Anthony Hope (1894)
text - audiobook (6 hrs 28 min; I read 1h 17m)

This is a collection of two novellas and four short stories, nearly all on the general theme of young gentry types having romantic misunderstandings which usually turn out OK. I think these were probably churned out in that era at an even greater rate than Hallmark Christmas movies are today. The reason I was curious about this one was that the author is now best known for something in a different genre: the adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda. Both books were published in the same year, and I suspect that this one—collecting some previously published work along with some unpublished stories—might have been rushed into print due to the massive popularity of Zenda, before which Hope had had some minor literary success but hadn't been able to quit his day job as a lawyer. In any case, there's almost nothing here to interest most modern readers, but read on if you're curious.
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