In this ever changing world in which we live in

[james_davis_nicoll]

Some old files still survive.

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Wow. That book sounds like the kind of fiasco I haven't seen since Bester decided that The Count Of Monte Cristo needed an updated modern version, and figured "you know what's better than swordfights? TELEPORTATION!"

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I feel that I need this edition. (Unless you're referring to the classic SF novel which riffs on the idea, in which case no.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

As far as I know Bester only ripped off The Count Of Monte Cristo and made it worse in every way once.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

The Stars My Destination is one of those things like poutine--you either love it or you hate it. "It's The Count of Monte Cristo! But with interplanetary wars and teleportation!" either strikes one as The Best Idea Ever Had By Anyone or A Completely Useless Idea.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Regardless of whether it strikes you as a great *idea* or not, it was a terrible implementation.

[caper-est.livejournal.com]

It strikes me as a flippin' dreadful idea, but a *brilliant* implementation.

[affreca.livejournal.com]

And if you think it is the Best Idea Ever Had you could watch Gankutsuou. Anime version of The Count of Monte Cristo with interplanetary wars. No teleportation, but it does have a space vampire.

[hattifattener]

And trippy textures. Has that effect been used in other shows?

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Mononoke (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMVw-bad1Nc). Which is a massive mind screw in general even aside from the trippy visuals.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

And given the usual interests around here, I would be remiss if I failed to note that cats, demonic and otherwise, play a large role in the bookending Bakeneko arcs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1KXxD4ClkU).

[frogworth.livejournal.com]

"But if this ever-changing world in which we're livin'
makes you give up and cry..."

Sorry, I just couldn't let that egregious misquote (fitting though it is) go without commentary.
"Say Live and Let Die"!

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

For the first time in decades, that song now makes more sense.

[frogworth.livejournal.com]

The internet now makes me doubt myself.

Even if his sir-ness didn't write it that way, he bloody well should've! :)

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

I always thought James's version is what McCartney is singing, regardless of what he wrote.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

As I recall, Sir Paul has in the past admitted to writing "in this world in which we live in" and has subsequently sung it without the final "in", thereby mucking up the metre or scansion or that thing I don't know the term for.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I'm such a Bond geek, I filled in the piano glissando and the axe power-chords mentally in the appropriate places above. *hangdog droop*

-- Steve used to have the movie themes on cassette in his student days, until said cassette (among others) ended up in the back window of the car during a summer move...

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Fell to the pavement or overheated to the point of dropping the recording from the tape?

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

It achieved Nirvana and became One with everything; the tape surpassed mere de-Gaussing and actually welding itself into a sorta-cylindrical blob inside the cassette.

-- Steve will add that a couple-dozen other tapes suffered the same fate; the plastic keeper case of cassettes bubbled up into the sunlight after a fury of hasty packing. The keeper didn't melt or fuse itself but instead became fantastically brittle... the folks didn't appreciate having to vacuum the resulting spallation shards out of the upholstery.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

That's retconning, done by Sir Paul to cover up his embarrassment. Listen to it--they're definitely singing "In this ever changing world in which we live in."

[avram]

I'd always heard it that way myself -- and I'm glad to learn I'm not alone in that regard -- but the surrounding lyrics imply the other reading: "But in this ever-changing world in which we live in makes you give it a try" just plain doesn't make sense.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

Any resemblance between the revised RttM and (relatively) recent reissues of the works of J*me*s Schm*tz being, of course, purely coincidental.

[daev.livejournal.com]

"Rick Michigan" took me a while to get.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I read that and came back to say "Surely you're making this up".

::insert glyph of my jaw dropping so low that a buzzard has nested::

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Some old page designs also survive. Yikes.

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

Icon says it all

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

I'm with jonquil. Is this for real? I was cringing till I got to the punctuation paragraph, and having read the whole thing I feel much better knowing it is all a joke. (A decade old joke, at that.)

Right? Right?

[daev.livejournal.com]

This review is a joke about the re-issuing of James Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon adventure stories from the '50s in new collections by Eric Flint ("Rick Michigan" in the parody). The goal was to sell them to young readers, so Flint published the stories in a single volume -- a technique called a "fix-up novel" -- and made some names consistent. More controversially, he altered some of the old-fashioned tech terminology and (I think) some sexist words. There was quite a lot of brouhaha about this at the time, but I recall that most people who read the final published book decided they were fine with it. (Especially since Schmitz himself had been perfectly willing to make these sorts of changes when editors re-published his stories.)

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Agh! I enjoyed those and didn't realize I was reading an improved version.

I've never forgotten the torturer threatening to remove the bones from her arms and extend them. Shudder.

[deor.livejournal.com]

He also edited out a fair portion, wanting to 'tighten up' the tales for modern readers. Not the best choice.

[daev.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten about that, but you're right. Flint claimed that most of the missing text was introductory background material, meant to bring new readers of each story up to speed, and therefore unnecessary in a fix-up novel. But if I recall the arguments correctly, that wasn't all he'd cut.

[caper-est.livejournal.com]

He introduced me to Schmitz and his worlds, which is major points right there. I didn't like all of the editorial philosophy he put forth in defence of his changes, nor yet some of the specific ones that were brought up in the back-and-forth that followed - but the totality of what I saw as a reader, I liked a very great deal.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Some of what he cut was exposition that, in his opinion, slowed down the pace. E.g., IIRC some of the "why Trigger is scared of slimy things" psych talk in Legacy/Tale of Two Clocks was trimmed.

He also -- and most problematically, IMO -- trimmed the end of the first major Telzey novella. In the original, Telzey is relaxing and feeling somewhat smug about a job well done, when a psychic construct warns her that Things Are Not What They Seem, and that her abilities will be "necessary" in times to come. The effect is to take her down a peg or several. Flint felt that this was foreshadowing things that never actually materialized in the later Telzey stories, and that this failed foreshadowing would drive the young kids away in droves, and so he cut it. Which also means that Telzey is left un-peg-taken-down, which seriously changes the emotional tone of the story, if you ask me.

To be fair, in a discussion I had with him -- it may have been in e-mail, or maybe in r.a.sf.w -- he admitted that that was the edit he felt most uncomfortable about, and that if it hadn't been the very first Schmitz reprint they did he probably wouldn't have done it.

It's also worth noting that some minor changes that appeared to be odd and purposeless edits were in fact not his doing -- he was working, whenever possible, from the original magazine publications of the stories, and most of us who knew Schimtz knew him from the paperback versions, which it turned out were slightly different; somebody -- possibly Schmitz himself, possibly another editor -- having taken another editorial pass over the stories before paperback publication.

Also also, I think that the unedited versions of at least some of the stories are posted on the Baen free library.

[carbonel]

Was this posted on April 1?