David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

This coming weekend is OryCon 45, the very last OryCon! Come say goodbye to my hometown convention! You can find me on the following program items:

• Fri Oct 17, 2025, 6:00 PM, Washington Room
  Genre Hybrids
  Stories that incorporate core concepts and elements of more than
  one traditional genre offer something particularly satisfying. What
  does or doesn’t work? A discussion of genre hybrids with writers
  who create them with recommendations.
• Fri Oct 17, 2025, 8:00 PM, Lincoln Room
  Choose Your Seat
  When you settle down to watch a movie are you in a theater or
  snuggled on the couch streaming? We’ll discuss preferences and the
  pros and cons of both.
• Sat Oct 18, 2025, 2:00 PM, Gather Side Room
  David Levine Kaffeeklatch
  Come spend time with David Levine in an intimate setting.
• Sat Oct 18, 2025, 3:00 PM, Madison Room
  The Evolution of Technology in Science Fiction
  Most early science fiction was action-oriented and centered around
  robots, spaceships and computers in futuristic societies. Nowadays
  there’s far more to the genre than that. How has SF changed since
  the heyday of Asimov et al, for better and for worse?
• Sat Oct 18, 2025, 7:00 PM, Oregon Room
  David Levine reading
  Reading and Q&A with David Levine
• Sun Oct 19, 2025, 11:00 AM, Halsey Room, Table 1
  David Levine Autographs
• Sun Oct 19, 2025, 4:00 PM, Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills, 3415
  SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR 97005
  Powell’s AuthorFest
  I’ll be signing my books, along with 18 other Pacific Northwest SF writers!

You may have heard about the Anthropic AI piracy settlement, in which (some) authors whose work was downloaded and used without permission or compensation by Anthropic will receive a cash payment in compensation for (some of) their pirated works. You may not know that the list of pirated works includes not only novels but short story anthologies.

I have over sixty published short stories, many of which have been collected in anthologies. Fortunately I keep very good records. I have been able to identify 56 published anthologies that contain at least one story of mine. Of these 48 have ISBNs, and of those 14 have copyright registration numbers and are included in the Anthropic settlement database.

My understanding is that if I file claims on these anthologies I may eventually receive a share of the settlement on those titles. Assuming the settlement goes through as I understand it and that my claims are accepted, I may eventually receive roughly a hundred bucks for each story (assuming the settlement per title is about $3000, minus 25% for the lawyers, minus 50% of the remainder for the publisher, divided by the number of authors which I’m assuming for the sake of argument is about ten).

This is in addition to the claims I’m going to file on my two novels Arabella of Mars and Arabella the Traitor of Mars, which may eventually pay off about $3000 * 0.75 * 0.50 = $1125 each. (I think the publisher’s 50% in this case will go to Open Road, the current publisher, rather than Tor, the original publisher, but there are still a lot of open questions here.)

Arabella and the Battle of Venus, the middle book of the Arabella trilogy, does NOT appear in the Anthropic settlement database, and I believe this is because Macmillan failed to register the copyright for that volume. However, according to Locus, Macmillan has issued a statement that “If your work was excluded from the settlement for this reason, we will make you whole by paying you what you otherwise would have been paid under the settlement.” I’ve already sent an email to Macmillan inquiring as to next steps.