"God and His Man"; Master/Maser

Jonathan Goodwin · 27 Apr 2009, 18:41 · from 2009-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: joncgoodwin at gmail.com (Jonathan Goodwin)
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:41:52 -0500
Subject: (urth) "God and His Man"; Master/Maser
Message-ID: <37bfbeb60904271141u5c5ee89etf343a462e21b6120 at mail.gmail.com>

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.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net