Confirming Talirican's _Fifth Head_ variation

Dan Rabin · 13 Mar 2000, 21:56 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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: Dan Rabin <danrabin at a.crl.com>
Subject: (urth) Confirming Talirican's _Fifth Head_ variation
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 21:56:31
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0841 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0841.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

"Talarican" <exultnttalarican at mindspring.com> writes:

>I recall when I read the hardback library copy, I was struck by one
>particular passage that I was positive had been added from the older
>paperback version. It was in "A Story", where the Old Wise One was
>explaining to Sandwalker how the Shadow Childrens' "singing" worked. In the
>paperback version, as I recall, he said something like "Shake your hands.
>Now imagine your hands gone. That is what we shake. You may call it nothin=
g,
>but what you think is nothing holds all things apart. When it is gone, all
>the worlds are born". I seem to recall the hardback version continued with
>another new sentence, not present in the paperback, which indicated this
>"birth" would follow the collapse of the universe. (so the Shadow Children=
s'
>"singing" vibrates Einstein's Cosmological Constant, or Fred Hoyle's
>C-field? <g>)

Confirmed.  The first edition hardcover has (p. 88)

  When it is gone, all the worlds will come together in a fiery death from
  which new worlds will be born.

where the Ace paperback has (p. 95)

  When it is gone, all the worlds will be born.

The Orb trade paperback (p.96) follows the text of the first edition here.

The discrepancy can be accounted for by assuming that the person
re-entering the text for the paperback edition confused the two occurrences
of the word "worlds".  A pity, but it now stands corrected.

All three editions have the passage concerning the volume by V. Vinge.

  -- Dan Rabin

P.S. The hypothetical must have been pretty bored to skip over a phrase
such as "fiery death"!

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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