In this ever changing world in which we live in

[james_davis_nicoll]

Some old files still survive.

Comments

[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.