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Open4D [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 [doi.org], and picked up in the Guardian as Cloud Atlas 'astonishingly different' in US and UK editions, study finds [theguardian.com]. (Cloud Atlas is a 2004 sci-fi novel [wikipedia.org] 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."

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 [github.com] some software that he modified to create a diagram for his article. Here [martineve.com] is his main blog post, and here's another [bbk.ac.uk].

Original Submission