![]() ![]() “ given that this text is widely taught, studied, and read by many groups, there are some important questions to ask around how we are discussing novels and the specificity of the language within them … shows the dangers of prize panels reading from different editions and the importance of standardisation here. “This is not a phenomenon unique to Cloud Atlas,” said Eve. “I really never dreamed back then that anyone would ever notice or care enough to email me about it, or that the book would still be in print 13 years later, let alone sell a couple of million copies and be studied or thought about by academics.”Įve says that Cloud Atlas is not the only text to vary between its editions he points to Andy Weir’s originally self-published bestseller The Martian as another novel with different editions, and has released for free the visualisation software that helped him compare the texts of Cloud Atlas, with the intention that other works of contemporary fiction will be examined by others. “It’s a lot of faff – you have to keep track of your changes and send them along to whichever side is currently behind – and as I have a low faff-tolerance threshold, I’m still not very conscientious about it, which is why my US and UK editors now have their assistants liaise closely,” Mitchell told Eve. ![]() When his new US editor David Ebershoff took over, Mitchell was presented with a substantial list of changes for the US edition, and “due to my inexperience at that stage in my three-book ‘career’, it hadn’t occurred to me that having two versions of the same novel appearing on either side of the Atlantic raises thorny questions over which is definitive, so I didn’t go to the trouble of making sure that the American changes were applied to the British version (which was entering production by that point probably) and vice versa”. Meanwhile in the UK, Mitchell and his editor and copy editor worked on the manuscript, but the changes were not passed on to the US. Mitchell himself explains the reasons for the discrepancies in an interview quoted in Eve’s paper: they occurred because the manuscript of Cloud Atlas sat unedited for around three months in the US, after an editor there left Random House. So when I found that one of the chapters here was almost entirely rewritten, it was very interesting and I decided to look further into what had happened and why,” he said. ![]() “We’ve become accustomed to thinking that, in worldwide simultaneous releases of contemporary fiction, editions are the same, perhaps with only minor US spelling differences (“color/colour”, etc) There’s this sort of belief that because the technologies of publishing have improved, texts are less corrupted. “Given that so much literary criticism has now been produced on the subject of Mitchell’s novel, 12 years after its publication, these version variants are potentially problematic as they have not previously been noted.”Įve told the Guardian that he was “extremely surprised” to discover what he calls “an astonishing degree” of variance in the editions of Cloud Atlas. “As well as exhibiting many minor linguistic variations and copy-edits throughout (accidentals), these different editions also contain sections of narrative unique to each version that must change any close reading of the text,” writes Eve in the paper, You Have to Keep Track of Your Changes: The Version Variants and Publishing History of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The different textual lineages of the Cloud Atlas manuscript: the UK edition, the US edition, the French edition, and the film. ![]()
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