{"id":146,"date":"2003-01-03T00:21:10-05:00","date_gmt":"2003-01-03T08:21:10+00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/wordpress\/?p=146"},"modified":"2003-01-03T00:21:10-05:00","modified_gmt":"2003-01-03T08:21:10+00:00","slug":"cover-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2003\/01\/03\/cover-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Cover story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Arthur Byron Cover<\/cite><\/a> 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<\/em> think reading this in the introduction to a media tie-in novel:<\/p>\n\n

The author would like to thank J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Rising Stars<\/cite>, and Harlan Ellison for putting their heads together and thinking of me….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Anyway. Cover’s novelization<\/a> of the first 8 Rising Stars<\/cite><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n

Nope. What bugs me most about the book is that it’s so poorly edited. Misspellings are common, particularly of proper nouns (Malotov<\/del>Molotov<\/ins> cocktail<\/cite> and Christian Bernard<\/del>Barnard<\/ins><\/cite> in the first eight pages). Words are missing everywhere; one general theme appears to be that forms of to be<\/cite> are verboten<\/cite>. (I’m not exaggerating, either: page 1 contains the sentence The job wasn’t going to any safer just because he’d taken it.<\/q>) There’s also a preponderance of comma misuse–look at Fowler<\/cite><\/a> or one of the many online resources<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n

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).<\/p>\n\n

Still in my stack of books to read are three more volumes from ibooks<\/a>, publishers of the RS novel. They’re all Alfred Bester books<\/a>, and I’m hoping they’re of better production quality.<\/p><\/div>

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