Arthur Byron Cover is a pseudonym. That much should be obvious. That it’s not a pen name for the authors I thought is a relief… but what would you think reading this in the introduction to a media tie-in novel:
The author would like to thank J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Rising Stars, and Harlan Ellison for putting their heads together and thinking of me….
Anyway. Cover’s novelization of the first 8 Rising Stars comic books annoys me to no end. It’s not particularly bad–it’s extremely faithful to the original, which is one of the best series I’ve read–although the first-person style and obscure-cultural-references-for-the-sake-of-obscure-cultural-reference are annoying to say the least.
Nope. What bugs me most about the book is that it’s so poorly edited. Misspellings are common, particularly of proper nouns (MalotovMolotov cocktail and Christian BernardBarnard in the first eight pages). Words are missing everywhere; one general theme appears to be that forms of to be are verboten. (I’m not exaggerating, either: page 1 contains the sentence The job wasn’t going to any safer just because he’d taken it.
) There’s also a preponderance of comma misuse–look at Fowler or one of the many online resources to find out the difference between a comma and a semicolon, and where and how to use each symbol–and various other grammatical and usage errors.
I don’t know enough about mass-market publishing to say whether these are the fault of the credited editor–who’s also thanked in the author’s introduction–or somewhere else in the process, so I won’t name names. I will point out, however, that I recently finished a similar job for a pre-pub fantasy novel, so I may be more sensitive to these errors than I would be otherwise (but probably not).
Still in my stack of books to read are three more volumes from ibooks, publishers of the RS novel. They’re all Alfred Bester books, and I’m hoping they’re of better production quality.
