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posted by CoolHand on Monday September 05 2016, @01:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the ch-ch-ch-changes dept.

Last month an article was published in the (open access) Open Library of Humanities, "You have to keep track of your changes": The Version Variants and Publishing History of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and picked up in the Guardian as Cloud Atlas 'astonishingly different' in US and UK editions, study finds. (Cloud Atlas is a 2004 sci-fi novel by David Mitchell.)

In the UK text, for example, Mitchell writes at one point that: "Historians still unborn will appreciate your cooperation in the future, Sonmi ~451. We archivists thank you in the present. [...] Once we're finished, the orison will be archived at the Ministry of Testaments. [...] Your version of the truth is what matters."

In the US edition, the lines are: "On behalf of my ministry, thank you for agreeing to this final interview. Please remember, this isn't an interrogation, or a trial. Your version of the truth is the only one that matters."

[more...]

Mitchell explains:

The differences between the two editions came about by a combination of chance and my inexperience. The chance element was that in spring 2003 my American editor left my publisher Random House to take up a job elsewhere. I think 3 or 4 months passed before [a new editor] took me and my weird and risky new novel under his professional wing. During this interregnum the manuscript for CLOUD ATLAS was 'orphaned'. I interacted with my UK editor and copy-editor on the manuscript, but there was no-one in New York 'synch-ing up' the changes I made with the US side to form a definite master manuscript, as has happened with all my subsequent novels.

In late summer (I think) [the new editor] took me over, and gave the [manuscript] to the Random House copy-editor plus, I think, an external copy-editor, and presented me with a substantial list of line edits which the UK team had not highlighted (as is normal, and it goes both ways.)

Due to my inexperience at that stage in my uh three-book 'career' it hadn't occurred to me that having two versions of the same novel appearing on either side of the Atlantic raises thorny questions over which is definitive, so I didn't go to the trouble of making sure that the American changes were applied to the British version (which was entering production by that point probably) and vice versa. It's a lot of faff – you have to keep track of your changes and send them along to whichever side is currently behind – and as I have a low faff-tolerance threshold, I'm still not very conscientious about it, which is why my US and UK editors now have their assistants liaise closely.

The academic who brought this to light is called Martin Paul Eve. His peer-reviewed journal article doesn't explicitly draw the parallel between Mitchell's experience and the experience of programmers trying to keep code branches in sync, but I suspect he is well aware of it. He is 'Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing' and has put on GitHub some software that he modified to create a diagram for his article. Here is his main blog post, and here's another.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by ticho on Monday September 05 2016, @08:13AM

    by ticho (89) on Monday September 05 2016, @08:13AM (#397713) Homepage Journal

    I don't think the Christians claim that Bible is the "unerring word of God". Quran, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely.

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @08:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @08:55AM (#397725)

    Quran, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely.

    I don't think the Christians claim that Quran is the "unerring word of God" either.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by mendax on Monday September 05 2016, @09:01AM

    by mendax (2840) on Monday September 05 2016, @09:01AM (#397727)

    But many do, and worse, most of these view the King James Bible to be the one and only true and unerring version even though it is well-known by biblical scholars to be riddled with translation errors and biases. It is a nice read, and it is no accident that the King James Bible was produced while Shakespeare's plays were in circulation.

    --
    It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday September 06 2016, @01:08AM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Tuesday September 06 2016, @01:08AM (#397935) Journal

    That wouldn't be so easy to say after growing up in a Christian fundamentalist home. I suppose that's why extremist Islam doesn't look as uniquely threatening to me as it does to others. It's just generically threatening, same way every other form of religious extremism is.

    Nod and smile. Be polite. But be prepared at any moment for one of them to undergo a transformation not unlike a deadite [wikipedia.org]. The evil may taunt you by displaying the personality of its host before becoming a monster again. Just whatever you do, don't join them! Recommend boomstick and chainsaw. Groovy.