Cutting it, in other words, has no effect on the story. It simply removes an unneeded obsolescent social convention. There was a time — I’m old enough to remember it — when offering someone a cigarette was considered polite. Today it would be considered rude and, especially in the context of being in an aircraft, can be jarring to a reader. It tends to break their concentration on the story itself. As I said, when I read it I started laughing.
Making this cut also required making the following one, somewhat later in the story:
Her mouth went dry suddenly.She turned her head to Quillan. “Major,” she said, “I think I’d like that cigarette now.”
He came over and lit one for her. Trigger thanked him and puffed. And she’d almost spilled everything, she was thinking. The paid-up reservation. Every last thing.
The problem here is not the smoking itself. In the context of a private meeting like this one it wouldn’t necessarily seem obsolete. In several other instances in the Hub series — such as when Telzey’s father’s lights up a cigarette in the privacy of his office — we left it in.
The problem is continuity. How would Trigger know that Quillan was a smoker, if he hadn’t offered her the cigarette in the aircraft?
I have no doubt, of course, that some Outraged Critic will claim that by making these two small cuts — which obviously have no effect on the plot — I have somehow grossly altered the characters of Quillan and Trigger. They will claim that the fact that both of them smoke — which is portrayed elsewhere in the Hub series, by the way — is vital to their personalities and must, presumably, be reinforced periodically in the readers’ minds.
I’m not quite sure what the proper response to that charge should be. The first thing that comes to my mind is: “Get a life.” That’s rude, I know, but I find it hard to suffer fools gladly.
The only other “important” instance I can recall, in this third volume of the Hub series, where Guy and I made this kind of editorial change came in the story “Aura of Immortality.” There, in two instances, Schmitz used the term “newshen” to refer to the young female reporter who appears in the first part of the story. (I’m not going to cite the passage here, because it’s too long. Readers interested can look at “Aura,” starting after the first line break.)
The term “newshen” is hopelessly obsolete — again, I burst into laughter when I read it — and so we simply changed it to “newscaster” or “reporter” — both of which terms, by the way, were also used by Schmitz to refer to the same character.
One of my critics, in a debate online, made the accusation (three times, no less) that by making this change I was distorting the reader’s perception of Telzey’s perception of the reporter.
That criticism was pretty typical of what I encountered from the Outraged Critics. What it mainly exemplified — as usual — was that the critic had either never read the story or had forgotten it. First, because Telzey never appears in the story at all. Presumably, the critic meant to refer to Trigger. But, even then, the charge is absurd because the term “newshen” is not a term which appears as part of Trigger’s viewpoint. In other words, it’s not what Trigger thinks of the woman — which might, indeed, tell you something about Trigger’s character, however trivial. It is simply a third person narrator authorial expression.
Changing it, therefore, had no effect on either the plot or the character development. It simply smoothed over a narration which was awkwardly jarring because of the writer’s use of now-outdated slang.
Okay, I’m going to stop there. There were a few instances in the first two volumes of the series where we make these kind “updating changes,” but I’m not going to bother citing them specifically. There weren’t many, and all of them were of the same nature as these in Volume 3.
What I hope readers can see are two things:
1. None of these changes have any effect whatever on the stories themselves. They are irrelevant both to the plot and to the character development. They simply represent obsolete terms or social conventions which, especially cumulatively, can have the effect of constantly reminding the reader how long ago these stories were written. If I had edited these volumes for scholars doing research on mid-20th century society, I would naturally have left them in. But I wasn’t. I was editing them for a modern mass SF audience which, as a rule, tends to be put off by stories which are glaringly dated.
2. The nature of these editorial changes is what you might call purely “negative.” There was no attempt, as you can see, to “jazz up” the stories by “modernizing” them. To give an example, had we wanted to “modernize” the story we would have changed the scene where Telzey plays robochess into a scene where she plays a video game using a joystick.
That kind of editorial manipulation, which is sometimes done, is something I consider illegitimate. It amounts to an attempt to graft a modern twig onto an old tree, which produces a hybrid. Whereas what we did is simply analogous to smoothing down the seat of a slightly age-roughened wooden chair with fine sandpaper. Nothing is changed, and no hybrid is created. We simply removed the possibility that a reader might get distracted from the stories by encountering a narrative splinter.
Legacy
Now let’s move on to what was, by far, the biggest editorial input which I had on the Hub series. That was my genuinely extensive editing of the novel Legacy.
By “extensive,” I am not particularly referring to the amount of text which I cut, although that was not negligible. I cut about 3000 words from Schmitz’s original version of Legacy. That constitutes well over half of all the text which was cut in the course of editing the 4-volume Hub series. On the other hand, Legacy is also (by far) the longest story in the series. The original version was about 76,000 words in length — the only real novel in the series — and I reduced it to about 73,000. In percentage terms, therefore, I cut 4% of the text. That hardly constitutes, by anyone’s definition of the term, an “abridgement.”
Still, the editing was extensive — in qualitative if not quantitative terms. Because while the cuts constitute only 4% of the entire text, they are concentrated in a few chapters and do have, I think, a rather dramatic effect on those chapters.
I certainly hope so, because in the original version those chapters are just terrible. And they really hurt the novel as a whole. Legacy, despite the fact that it is in many ways the best story Schmitz ever wrote, has never had the popularity enjoyed by such Telzey tales as Goblin Night or the Lion Game, or the Nile Etland adventure recounted in the short novel The Demon Breed (appearing next April in Volume 4, The Hub: Dangerous Territory).
I am convinced — and have been for thirty years — that the reason for that is because of Schmitz’s two big mistakes in the way he wrote the novel. Both of which mistakes can be readily fixed by good editing, and both of which exemplify exactly the same error: as he did a number of times in his writings, Schmitz overloaded the story with unneeded background exposition. The effect of those kinds of “expository lumps” are threefold:
1. They slow the pace of the story down — badly — when there is no reason to do so and every reason not to.
2. They confuse and fatigue the reader by forcing them to concentrate on material which is actually irrelevant to the story itself. It’s much like the effect of trying to watch a movie while someone behind you is jabbering away on the personality of the movie director. A few people might find that interesting, but most will find it annoying and tiresome.
3. It distracts the reader from focusing on what is at the heart of the story. Much as, to use my analogy, having someone jabbering in your ear about the movie director’s personal quirks causes you to lose track of what’s happening in the movie itself. As a result, the pace of the story is not only harmed, but the developing “tension” is harmed as well.
Okay. Enough with the abstractions. Let’s get into the specifics. I think the best way for readers to follow what I did — which was extensive and sometimes complex — is to scan all the material below first. Don’t dwell on it, just scan it. I will then explain the rationale after the text, and you can go back again if you wish and read it more thoroughly.