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The linked story is part of the online version[0] of a Baen anthology, _The World Turned Upside Down_, being a collection of stories that formed the imaginations of the two editors, Erik Flint[1] and David Drake[2]. The site seems to have been created in 2004, and for some reason is sprinkled with nonstandard characters and primitive formatting, which is a shame.

The list of stories in the contents[3] is indeed wonderful. I instantly recognize and remember "The Menace from Earth", "Black Destroyer", "A Pail of Air", "Who Goes There" (the original from which _The Thing_ and many other productions derived) and others.

[0] https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0743498747/0743498747___0.htm

[3] https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0743498747/0743498747_toc.htm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Flint

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drake




Some of the "non-standard characters" is a combination of incorrect encoding applied to the page, and web browsers apparently not handling certain Latin1 characters properly that should have been decoded right despite charset declaration being wrong (for example code 0xA0, aka non-breaking space).

Namely, the page contains text in Windows-1252 encoding, but declares it's in ISO-8859-1. Most of the characters are the same between the two, but few aren't, like em-dashes (code 0x97) in second paragraph of the preface.

This probably involved whatever pipeline was originally and over time used to maintain the pages from RTF masters that Baen used.


Page source links to a DTD OEB 1.2 doc. Libre Writer does this from time to time when C-c /C-v/ing blocks of text special characters will be left over after the processor undergoes a similar transformation as it compiles Windows-1252, encoding text to ISO-8859-1.


In Firefox, Display -> "Repair text encoding" solved the problem for me.


Thank you! I had never even noticed that menu item.


n.b. the book (ISBN-13 9780743498746) is available used, from many sources for ~$6 inc. shipping, e.g.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/156278324219?_skw=9780743498746




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