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.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @01:32AM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @02:39AM
Publishers looooooooooooooove all kind of modern crap, nevermind efficiency.
When you push for plain old diff tools and simple markup (the one you can see instead of guess, "this big font was titlelevel1 or titlelevel2?" *moves pointer to check*) and real revision control, they say no... even technical oriented publishers (like, computer books...). They prefer all the headaches of a (the? starts with M, ends with d) wordprocessor (with it's hacky versioning) when all you want is to process raw content.
I understand why some writers use typewriters or DOS apps (if you are a big name, they say yes or lose the money) or deliver the printer-ready file themselves.
And don't ask me about Sharepoint.
(Score: 3, Touché) by coolgopher on Monday September 05 2016, @03:12AM
What about Sharepoint?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @03:34AM
Bah. LaTeX and git are the way to go.
$ git branch usa
$ git branch uk
etc. Don't forget to make use of line breaks to break up long sentences at logical points, e.g. conjunctions, prepositional phrases. That makes the diffs especially readable.
Interest that the UK version had a Fahrenheit 451 reference but the US version didn't. I tried to watch the Wachowski Sisters' version, but it was loooong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @05:48PM
Previous projects were going pretty fast with email and ftp. So they had to slow everything with a bit of electronic bureacracy.
(Score: 5, Informative) by physicsmajor on Monday September 05 2016, @04:00AM
It's actually way worse than that. Even if you want to use the best tools for the job, most publishers at this point only accept fucking Word documents. The rare exceptions are smaller or online houses, like O'Reilly.
There's a reason Edward Tufte had to self-publish his books on beautiful design. Nobody would allow him to actually fully control the layout and appearance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @05:50PM
"starts with M, ends with d"... MSWord
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheLink on Monday September 05 2016, @10:48AM
You can use tortoise git (and similar) to version control word documents and check for differences: https://berryware.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/nice-surprise-tortoise-git-word-document-diff/ [wordpress.com]
It doesn't show the actual markup but it works well enough for me.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @03:38AM
As the author explains, the UK version was 1.0, while the American version was 1.1 or 1.01, and there was a screwup in not getting the mods sent back over the pond.
Many authors like to tweak their copy even after it's been submitted; they keep thinking about the material and come up with minor improvements.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday September 05 2016, @10:20AM
It sounds more like they forked.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mendax on Monday September 05 2016, @04:23AM
Witness the Bible. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls brought forth ample evidence that the "standardized" Masoretic version of the Old Testament significantly varies from many of books from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Second, the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, was translated into Koine (that is "common" as compared to "classic" or "Attic") Greek sometime in the 2nd Century BCE. The Hebrew and Aramaic texts the translators worked from had obvious variations from the Masoretic text. Then let's look at the New Testament. That was also written in Koine Greek, but there is no one "standard" version of that text, and no one is completely certain as to what the original manuscripts actually said. In fact there are five general groups of textual variants [wikipedia.org]. My copy of the Greek New Testament contains the "Alexandrian" variant, but has footnotes and various annotations that point out the many variants. It's quite interesting to look over and ponder. So, who says the Bible is the "unerring word of God"?
Perhaps someone future civilization will find copies of the "Cloud Atlas", consider it to be a holy text, and fight silly wars over which version is the correct one.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by ticho on Monday September 05 2016, @08:13AM
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.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @08:55AM
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
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
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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Open4D on Monday September 05 2016, @09:18AM
A quick reading of Mitchell's response might leave people thinking that the only differences exist in the minor corrections made by the US and UK copy-editors. But the actual example I quoted in the submission would seem to indicate the differences are more significant. Here is how Eve puts it in that 2nd blog post [bbk.ac.uk] I linked to:
(my emphasis)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @10:59AM
As the texts say:
Your version of the truth is what matters."
Your version of the truth is the only one that matters."
So I think it's amusing and somewhat appropriate (it's one of those hipster novels that try to be meta and clever right?). It's also a good opportunity for the author to make even more money (get people to buy BOTH versions).
tldr; re-market it as a feature and not a bug.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Open4D on Monday September 05 2016, @11:41AM
The thing that would really make clear the extent of the differences would be a full listing of them all.
But the journal article's author (Martin Paul Eve) seems to be worried about copyright.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Open4D on Monday September 05 2016, @09:43AM
Obviously the theoretical solution is to train all novelists and editors to use plain text markup formats (like Doc Book or LaTeX?) and a revision control system (like Subversion or Git?) and some associated tools (like Beyond Compare or just diff?). And the editors should employ people who understand the technicalities of branching & merging.
Ever gonna happen? Or are we better off trying to convince lawmakers to take the plunge first?
Law as source code [blogspot.com]
source-control-for-bills-in-congress [slashdot.org]
legal-code-in-a-version-control-system [slashdot.org]
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Tuesday September 06 2016, @08:07PM
Perhaps getting techies more involved with the practicalities of legislation in general (e.g. as discussed in a UK context at the links below), might specifically lead to them promoting better understanding of modern revision control concepts amongst the people who work with legislation texts.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/projects/big-data-for-law [legislation.gov.uk]
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/good-law [www.gov.uk]
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday September 05 2016, @11:54AM
For those still working under the same erroneous assumption that I did, the author is this David Mitchell [wikipedia.org], not this one [wikipedia.org]. Which is a bit of a shame, because I love linking to Mitchell and Webb sketches. Ah fuck, I'm going to do it anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday September 05 2016, @09:12PM
For those still working under the same erroneous assumption that I did, the author is this David Mitchell, not this one.
Although the second David Mitchell is not totally irrelevant to this topic seeing as he clearly could care less [youtube.com] - and I believe I apply the phrase accurately - about differences between US English and English. Oh, yes, and he & Webb also underlined the danger of "versioning" successful things for different countries... like, say, ads for well a well-known computer brand who should have realised that (a) "knocking copy" isn't really cricket in the UK where we prefer our adverts to actually entertain us while skirting discretely around actual mention of the product until the money shot at the end, (b) it would have made more sense to cast the member of the duo with the more likeable, sympathetic established screen persona as "I'm a Mac" and (c) we Brits have a definite tendency to root for the underdog...
So maybe the two Mitchells are spiritually linked in some infuriatingly under-explained way that Hollywood would lay on with a trowel by having them depicted by the same actor...