-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, November 1984), pp. 207-288 AT p. 287.
This confirms something that was almost 100% obvious, that "space of time..." (my emphasis) was incorrect in Alight In The Void. See the previous post. We always have to check to be 100% sure what an author had intended. It might just possibly have been something unusual and not obvious. In any case, I would have been wrong to correct of to or when quoting the story as presented in Alight In The Void. Words between quotation marks have to be quoted as given. Apparently, when James Joyce dictated Finnegans Wake to Samuel Beckett, the latter was careful to write exactly what Joyce said because he, Beckett, did not understand any of it. Checking through what Beckett had written, Joyce found that the words, "come in," had been inserted because he, Joyce, had called, "Come in," in response to a knock on the door while he was dictating. Beckett thought that, since "come in" was an error, it should be removed but Joyce replied along the lines of: "This is a book about the cosmos. If the cosmos is going to take a hand in writing it, all the better. Leave it in." Reportedly, Beckett was disgusted.
Willis McNelly confirmed the truth of this story in conversation in a Dublin pub. James Blish was also a Joyce scholar. See his A Case Of Conscience and Spock Must Die!
This story of quotation marks has taken us away from Poul Anderson but not from fantastic or cosmic fiction.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Of course, texts should be quoted exactly as we see them in particular editions. And readers should at least sometimes take note of possible errors and typos, to be checked against other editions. I have noticed possible misprints/errors in the stories of both Anderson and Stirling.
Ad astra! Sean
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