9 thoughts on “Progress Report on Heinlein Bio

  1. You should have seen it before the edit, Graham:

    “Cutting a 1400+ page manuscript back to about 1000 pages is a time-consuming and finicky process involving several passes through the entire thing.”

  2. Is it purely a physical constraint type of thing or a reader patience thing? Because I can imagine an “author’s cut” electronic edition from the full 1400 page ms since it has none of the physical constraints of a real book.

  3. Jason — My best guess is that it has to do with Tor editor David Hartwell’s vision for the book. I quoted Patterson at length in this post commenting that he and Hartwell spent some time splitting the last volume into two books, then Hartwell decided not to go that way and it’s been trimmed down to one again.

  4. 1100 manuscript pages will probably shrink by around a third for actual publication. (Depends on book-design choices like fonts, font size, margins, etc.) Still a big volume, I’d guess around 700-750 pages, but manageable.

  5. For what it might be worth, an unexpurgated electronic edition at the original 1,400 page count would be considered similarly valuable to the same people who bought the re-issued original versions of Red Planet, Podkayne of Mars, Stranger in a Strange Land, or The Puppet Masters.

  6. There’s got to be hundreds of us who would pay for the complete version of Patterson’s second volume. Since Tor has already elected not to go in that direction, I don’t suppose the project could be done before the rights revert to the author. And precisely because there’s such interest in Heinlein, Tor is likely to keep its version available for a good long time.

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