"God and His Man"; Master/Maser
The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 27 Apr 2009
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/5414

Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright
in each message remains with the person who wrote it.

Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original
archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than
retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.

==============================================================================

Jonathan Goodwin — 27 Apr 2009, 18:41

In the afterword to this story in _The Best of Gene Wolfe_, the author
writes that when the story was first published, "the word _maser_ was
changed by the proofreader (I was told, at least, that it was by the
proofreader) to _master_. Not all the time, only sometimes."

In my mass market paperback edition of _Endangered Species_ (Tor,
1989), the inconsistencies remain, though they seem to have been
removed with this reprint. Why weren't they fixed when the story was
reprinted  the first time?

I've never seen the Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine edition.

I looked the archives of this list, and it seems that there was some
discussion of the master/maser being a deliberate change. It's not too
hard to invent a rationale for that.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------