FIRE TIME: The Ballantine Edition II

Fire Time.

Continuing our appreciation of a particular edition of Poul Anderson's Fire Time, we now display its back cover.

Usually, we just discuss the content of a novel. This content is like a Platonic Idea. It can be instantiated in an unlimited number of different editions, in translations or on audiotape and we might think that the content is accurately reproduced in an adaptation to a different medium. (Usually not.)

Any given edition is one instantiation of the content and in turn is instantiated in multiple copies. So I possess one copy of one edition but we never encounter the content in the abstract, uninstantiated. That maybe existed in the mind of its author/creator who is no longer with us.

In the Ballantine Books edition, the text covers pp. 1-246 and is followed by two pages of information about other books published by Ballantine. Between "FOREWORD" (pp. 1-5) and "AFTERWORD" (pp. 241-246), there are twenty-four chapters, on pp. 7-240, and they are headed I-XXIV. There are no "Parts" or "Books."

OK. All that remains is to reread the novel!