Jelaza Kazone
In which Korval is keeping its head down.
And now we’ve caught up with the final chapter of Neogenesis.
There are a bunch of minor punctuation and word-choice changes between the two versions of the scene, and once the meteor alert is sounded there are some more substantial changes in the ensuing dialogue, though none that make a major change to the course of events. The biggest one is that Jeeves starts co-ordinating with Bechimo a few paragraphs later in the new version than in the old one. There’s also a pronoun change, with the occupant of the arriving ship being established as a “she” and not an “it”.
Looking at the old version, there’s an interesting bit of sleight-of-punctuation: the sentence before the meteor alert ends with a three-dot ellipsis mark, like this… which at the time looked like the sentence was being cut off by the meteor alert, but in retrospect can be read as a section of the scene being left out, as more happens between those two sentences in the new version.
The authors have used this kind of strategy before, in repeating a part of the previous book to begin the next, but it always taken me by surprise. This time, when we began with other pieces of the story, I had been momentarily misled that somehow we would skip ahead, rather than repeating what we’d already seen. *sigh* Oh, well . . . onward.
We’re told that the Tree swelled out of the depths of a self-imposed restorative slumber. I do wish we’d “hear” more from the Tree and Theo’s offshoot.
Ed8r:
Ditto on the timeline overlap with Neogenesis.
Ditto: I’d like to hear more from / about the trees, too. The offshoot on Spiral Dance, especially.