The Persistence of Errata
Oops
Earlier this week, John Scalzi copped to making an error regarding a specific handgun fact in The Kaiju Preservation Society. When I first read that, I flinched in sympathy, because gun people are intense about this stuff. I remember back in my Usenet days saying something positive about Pulp Fiction and getting a reply saying that the entire movie was worthless garbage because of some gun-related error in the opening scene. Which, you know, there’s a lot of stuff in that movie that strains belief, but that’s wayyyy down the list.
Anyway, while we mostly operate in very different ends of the business, the problem of errors creeping in and somehow making it past the seemingly endless rounds of editing is a pretty universal one. I’ve had a few over the years, and in fact just this week got another email pointing one out. The biggest of the errors that I’ve been alerted to are:
— I’m shocked to realize that this was ten years ago, now, but all the way back in How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, we ended up with a typo in Maxwell’s equations (on page 34 of the paperback)— there’s an incorrect sign in the Ampere-Maxwell law. In my defense, in the first round of proofs, basically every symbol in there had been replaced by some random dingbat because of a font issue, so it took quite a bit of effort to even get them close. I think the Kindle edition was still rendering a lot of them as empty boxes a few months after publication. I’ve gotten a bunch of emails about this one over the years, starting with one from Bill Phillips.
— In Breakfast With Einstein, on page 92, I just flatly mis-state the location of the invention of the laser, mistakenly putting Ted Maiman at Bell Labs, rather than Hughes Research Labs. This is kind of a bad one, since he had rivals at Bell Labs who he beat to the first working laser, but on the bright side, almost nobody noticed.
— In A Brief History of Timekeeping, on page 48, The Venerable Bede is put on the wrong side of the CE/BCE split— the printed text says he wrote in 725 BCE, which is almost 1500 years too soon. That one’s pretty much a pure typo— there are so many dates in the book that it was almost inevitable.
— Finally, on page 133 four of Tycho Brahe’s Mars observation campaigns are moved 400 years into the future, attributed to 1982, 1983, 1985, and 1987; this despite being placed in “the 1580s” in an earlier clause of the same sentence. This one is especially maddening because when I first went to look for it after Thony Christie pointed it out, I couldn’t find it. It’s not there in the bound proofs— they’re shortened to “‘82, ‘83, ‘85, and ‘87”— so this was actually an error that was added in the review process. Sigh.
Anyway, the point is: these things happen. If you tilt your head and squint like a puzzled dog, there’s even a way to see this as a kind of indirect compliment. Years ago, a friend who’s an editor talked about what a nightmare it was to get the books of a certain famous genre author copyedited because 1) he was notoriously cavalier about keeping track of details of names and descriptions, and 2) his books were so much fun that even professional copyeditors would ge swept up in the plot and forget to actually check the text for mistakes. This led to some entertaining retcons in later books, to account for contradictory descriptions that had slipped past the edit team.
So, I try to look at these in that light: maybe these errors survive because my books are just so compelling that the copyeditor didn’t even notice them. It’s a little hard to sustain this, mind, given the enormous number of misplaced commas they corrected, but you know, it’s worth the attempt…
This is kind of light but, you know, it’s been a long week. Here’s a button if you want to see what I get up to in the future:
And if you’re aware of other errors in my work, or just want to offer reassurance that this isn’t really that big a deal, the comments will be open: