Asymmetrical Information

When the "unedited versions" of some of Heinlein's works came out posthumously, I did close-reading comparisons of a few of them. In each book, I found one substantive scene that had been cut in the 'edited' version, and was a bit of a loss. But what I found far more of was that the edited version said the exact same thing as the unedited version, only with about 30% fewer words. Just on a sentence-by-sentence level, Heinlein without an editor is much wordier than he needs to be.

Hmmmm... Remind me to see about picking up an unedited copy of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress one of these days. Partly to see if the libertarian-based governmental concepts Heinlein introduced in the text were vastly altered in the final printing, but partly to see if the (cough) interpersonal relationships wound up being toned down as well.

My best Heinlein story--after having read a dozen or so Heinlein novels, I was thumbing through Number of the Beast (now my favorite RAH book aside from Job) in a used bookstore. I flipped through two thirds of the book before any references to time traveling incest occurred, so I decided to buy it.

To each their own, I suppose. The rampant sex didn't really bother me and I enjoyed the post jealousy society that he'd created. From a strictly editorial standpoint, I thought that the longer versions had more flavor.

Erm, 1/4? MM, FF, and MF are 3; dare I ask what the 4th is? Or do I just need to read more Heinlein?

April:

I don't think the comment was referring to "generic" pairing, but instead referred to specific pairing, such as Lazarus with W, X, Y, or Z. From Lazarus and W, we can extrapolate X, Y and Z with pretty good accuracy.

It's startling how much better the heavily constrained and edited childrens' books and short stories hold up on rereading than the stuff he wrote later in his career.

From what is in his letters collection, Grumbles From the Grave, the children's novels had relatively minor edits that he did himself when he got the editor's inputs. (Only one book had a major plot change in it and is now available "unedited". And knowing Heinlein, I figured out at the time what the original ending must have been from other clues in the surrouinding text.) Length didn't seem to be a problem.

The short story edits were all over the map, due to the varying editorial constraints. Most of the edits in Stranger were to cut to length - I did a side-by-side reading of about 10% of the book and found the changes essentially a NOOP. Only one minor plot point was changed.

Hmmmm... Remind me to see about picking up an unedited copy of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress one of these days.

Don't think there is one. Only a handful of the uncut works have come out - about 4 or 5 novels (SiaSL, Red Planet, Podkayne of Mars, and Puppet Masters, IIRC) and a couple of short stories.

However, Jane's larger point about the value of editors remains. Prime example: Tom Clancy.

In the un-edited Red Planet, Lazurus Long (under one of his masquerade names) steps forward at a moment of crisis to save the Martian revolution and then fades back into the role of a minor character. I suppose it was too confusing a plot twist for the editors.

I've been reading Heinlein stuff lately, and I find huge variation in quality. Starship Troopers and Moon Mistress are excellent, but so much of his stuff is well-written crap. Sounds contradictory, but there it is.

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