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Echo o o o
Oct. 18th, 2006 04:53 pmI had a bit of a grump the other day about buying a book only to find that I already had it under another title. There is another variation on this which I encountered with my latest bit of reading - Dead Travel Fast by Kim Newman. It is a collection of 10 of his short stories. But when I got into it I found that I already have four of the stories in other Newman collections. Not in original magazine publishing nor in multi author best-of or themed publications but in other purely Newman collections. I think I know why this happens. An author like Newman does a number of stories for magazines and then he or his publisher says - "oh you have enough for a collection". So the stories are collected together and published. This happens a few times and then the same or usually another publisher says "I say, wouldn't it be a good idea to collect all your Diogenes club stories into a volume" or something similar. And so some of the stories get collected again. Do this often enough and all the stories get published twice (plus original magazine and best-of collections). Harlan Ellison, possibly because he wrote almost exclusively in the shorter form, was a particularly obvious example of this.
So I understand why it happens, but it does make me feel just a tiny bit cheated. On the up side, Dead Travel Fast is a very entertaining collection. And here is the thing - I read most of those duplicate stories again. They were worth the re-reading and I may not have gone back to them otherwise. To add another positive note, the afterwords on the stories in this collection were very good. As a number of people have commented recently, a good afterword really adds to a story.
Thinking about re-reading. I don't believe that I do enough of it. Given the choice of going back over a known piece of quality or something new, I almost always always just take aim at the to-read shelf. Strangely with other forms that isn't the case - I happily re-read comics/graphics novels and cartoon strips and likewise re-watch TV series or movies.
So I understand why it happens, but it does make me feel just a tiny bit cheated. On the up side, Dead Travel Fast is a very entertaining collection. And here is the thing - I read most of those duplicate stories again. They were worth the re-reading and I may not have gone back to them otherwise. To add another positive note, the afterwords on the stories in this collection were very good. As a number of people have commented recently, a good afterword really adds to a story.
Thinking about re-reading. I don't believe that I do enough of it. Given the choice of going back over a known piece of quality or something new, I almost always always just take aim at the to-read shelf. Strangely with other forms that isn't the case - I happily re-read comics/graphics novels and cartoon strips and likewise re-watch TV series or movies.