Saturday, 18 April 2020

Two More Errors?

"The Snows of Ganymede," XI-EPILOGUE.

The narrative speeds up, presumably because of a magazine word count.

Near the end of XI, "'...well be flayed...'" (p. 212) should be "'...we'll be flayed...'"

In the EPILOGUE, the Coordinator of the Planetary Engineers converses with a prisoner who has broken the Order's rule against involvement in politics. The conversation is recounted objectively, not from either point of view. As they discuss the case, we understand that the prisoner is Davenant and that the case consists of the way that he had handled the situation on Ganymede. What they say fits with what we have just read about Davenant's performance on Ganymede. However, the words "Davenant" and "Ganymede" are not used. Because he got the job done precisely by breaking the rules, the prisoner has, according to the Coordinator, acted correctly. He will receive extra training, will be elected to the Council and might eventually become Coordinator.

I will now quote what happens next as it is presented in two different editions. First:

"They clasped hands. The prisoner wheeled and stepped smartly to the door. It opened for him and he was gone.
"Coordinator Hall Davenant sighed, an old man's envious sigh. Memory ran back over a waste of years, to a night when he had walked across the snows of Ganymede."
-EPILOGUE, p. 213. (See the above link.)

Reading this, we now think that:

we have been misled;
the Coordinator in the EPILOGUE is Davenant;
the prisoner is a young man who has conducted himself in exactly the same way that Davenant did.

However, here is the same passage as presented in an earlier edition:

"They clasped hands. The prisoner wheeled and stepped smartly to the door. It opened for him and he was gone.

"Coordinator Hall Davenant sighed, an old man's envious sigh. Memory ran back over a waste of years, to a night when he had walked across the snows of Ganymede."
-Poul Anderson, The Snows of Ganymede (New York, 1958), EPILOGUE, p. 96.

A space between paragraphs means a change of scene. This implies that the prisoner was Davenant and that, many years having passed, he is now Coordinator. He is envious of someone or something but not of a young prisoner who has just exited the room.

So which is it?

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

The latter case, if that was what you saw in the original edition. That spacing of the paragraphs is meant to indicate many years had passed and Davenant had risen to become Coordinator of the Order of Planetary Engineers.

Incidentally, this means the Chief of the Order was titled "Coordinator," not "Abbot"!

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

Yes. I did say "Coordinator" when you asked earlier but it is hard to keep track of all these comments.

Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Dang! I missed your response to my question. And we see mention of a different kind of "coordinator" in Chapter VI of WE CLAIM THESE STARS.

Ad astra! Sean