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Remaining inconsistencies in New Millennium Editions 1-3

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  • #16
    I wonder whether the original editions needed re-entering via OCR (or some such technology) before the NM editions could be produced from them, and that's where the typos you've found crept in?
    -- Rick.

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    • #17
      Originally posted by Lazy Leopard View Post
      I wonder whether the original editions needed re-entering via OCR (or some such technology) before the NM editions could be produced from them, and that's where the typos you've found crept in?
      I wondered that, too, but while there are a few errors of that sort ("did not care to nave the Song enacted just now" DW p88, and notably in the strings of 1s Spot emits when the motherboard is talking to it for the first time, a good few of which have become l's, particularly where they appear inside words, e.g. p1ge has turned into 'plge'), the vast majority are not of that variety -- but possibly the frequent typographical problems involving missing spaces after ellipses in A Wizard Abroad and run-together words in all four books are OCR errors too, since OCR often misses spaces, in which case the majority of errors would be OCR errors.

      Some of the errors look like the source was unproofread content -- i.e. they look like ordinary, plausible typos e.g. "Need anything from met?" from Dilemma p10, or 'pocket of time space' rather than space-time from p11 of the same. I don't know how to interpret cases where italics run on too long ("And there was her phone, on the table", p75, wrongly italicized): I guess it was an ebook conversion error, putting a closing tag in the wrong place. The same applies to the two missing chapters (!) in High Wizardry, whose titles were simply set in bold: a tag was used but it was the wrong one. Some are the results of epub -> mobi conversions hitting the limitations of mobi: the computer text in High Wizardry is set in small caps, for instance, but mobi can't do small caps so some of it just ended up looking like ordinary running body text, in lowercase even when it was at the start of a sentence. (Most was converted to italics, but some was missed). Some are conversion errors where discretionary hyphens were mistakenly converted into hard hyphens, leading to words like "every-thing" (p61, HW) or "lan-guage" (p76) or even "com-uter" (p87) which struck a word with a typo in it!

      But the missing words and letters and transpositions are just weird, particularly given that they often occur in regions of text that were not changed from the original. e.g. High Wizardry p19, "The last time she'd held it, it had looked like a well-worn kid's book from the library. When she'd borrowed it, had read like one." (missing 'it', present in original), or "To Nita Timeheart had lat that point ooked like a bright city", DW p164, which brings Unseen University's Librarian to mind: I'm sure he's in Timeheart!

      Not all the errors are typographical. In several places consistency errors have been introduced, rather than being fixed. The new HW gives the practicingotential ratio as 1:100 and the potential:nonpotential ratio as 1:10, then says that this means there are 654,000,000 wizards in the world. The old text had the latter ratio as 1:3 and the total number of wizards as 16,400,000-odd. I can't figure this one out: it's not that someone multiplied instead of dividing, because the new figures are insanely wrong unless the Earth has a population in the hundreds of billions now. It looks like someone forgot to factor in the practicingotential ratio at all. (The correct figure, assuming a global population of 6.5 billion, which is, uh, old and needs updating for the new timeline, is 6.5 million.) [Edited to remove babbling which was based on an error of my own and led to a figure ten times too low! sigh.]

      One new typo I love. p49 of High Wizardry mentions that Tom's phone has a 'sharger cradle'. This should be a word, dammit! Probably for those charger cradles that are so delicate and/or shoddily built that if you once drop them on the floor they erupt into shards...
      Last edited by Nix; November 5, 2015, 04:09:42 PM. Reason: Made a mathematical error when complaining about a mathematical error.

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      • #18
        I just spotted a particularly appalling consequence of the reset timeline: it cheapens probably the most harrowing of the books so far, The Wizard's Dilemma. In the new timeline, this takes place in late September 2009 -- but the next book, A Wizard Alone, takes place in January 2010, by which point Nita's mum has been dead for 'weeks'. Are we seriously supposed to believe that that tumour killed Betty in a month despite being blatted hard by Nita at the end of the book, and despite not really having metastasized much yet? (There were metastases, but they were tiny: only Nita's wizardry could spot them at all). Did all of Nita's work mean so little? At the end of that book, they think she has "more than enough time to say our good-byes". Am I meant to believe that a time period of less than a month counts as that?

        No. Just no.

        By this point I am actively ignoring the 'time fixes'. They're clearly hideously wrong and match nothing in the actual books. I'm willing to believe the 2007/2008 start, but the rest... just no.

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        • #19
          That's unfortunately not completely unrealistic when it comes to cancer. The metastases being tiny doesn't change that there were multiple, and having metastasized at all for many types of cancer upon discovery gives a life expectancy of a few months. Yes, this was less than a month, no, that is not outside of reasonable expectation for how cancer operates.
          We will remember you PM. And your little GingerBear.

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          • #20
            Originally posted by Tuttle View Post
            That's unfortunately not completely unrealistic when it comes to cancer. The metastases being tiny doesn't change that there were multiple, and having metastasized at all for many types of cancer upon discovery gives a life expectancy of a few months. Yes, this was less than a month, no, that is not outside of reasonable expectation for how cancer operates.
            It's not outside unreasonable expectation unless lengthening that period was the climax of the previous book. Are we supposed to believe that the cancer would have killed her in a week or something, absent Nita's intervention, or that Nita's intervention had no effect at all? Because I can't really see any other interpretations, and both of those are rather depressing -- yet Nita never considers either of them, since in the pre-timeline-rewrite world she did win her mother some time, with probably half a year to a year lying between the two books.

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