Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga is one of the most decorated and acclaimed science fiction series in history. However, a lot of people who bought Baen Books’ first paperback edition of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen got an unintentionally abridged version of the book. The novel follows the original protagonist of the series, Cordelia, in her later years offering a look into aging, retirement, and in many ways a farewell coda to the series that so many people have loved.
Bujold posted on GoodReads about discovering the error, dating all the way back to 2017:
So...
Someone brought to my attention a defective copy of the mass market paperback of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, missing its last pages in a particularly deceptive way as it ends at the end of a paragraph. (On page 408, with "Gamelin tells me that if I pick up one more biochem course, and pull together all those field notes I've been sending him for the journal the past two years into a coherent paper, he wants to roll my bachelor's and master's into one, and shove me directly into his grad program.")
My own copy of the first, and as far as I know only, mmpb printing dated September 2017, ends as it should, on page 410 with the line: "It's a deal," he said, and they stood a while longer, looking at the horizon line where a new sun would rise tomorrow.
Now I'm wondering how many other defective copies were bought all unknowing...
This is most probably a printing plant glitch, of the sort that happens now and then. Missing pages, duplicated pages, pages bound in upside down or weirdly, and so on. I have in my possession, for a souvenir, a copy of the hardcover of Komarr where the cover and dust jacket are for my Baen book, but the book bound between the boards is a lengthy study of poetry from publisher Scribner's. My local bookseller's best guess was that this happened at a changeover between the two print runs, as he got several in his carton.
I should I suppose say that printing plants do not normally belong to publishers. Publishers job their books out to a plant that keeps itself profitably busy serving many publishers.
If anyone has any more bizarre printing glitches to share, feel free to do so down in the comments.
(This may be another good place to point out that the "Red Queen" in the title refers not only to Cordelia, but to a biological theory about evolution,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Que...
Which is quite pertinent to one of the main themes of this science fiction novel. I'm surprised at how many SF readers miss that reference.)
This is quite the rough one, and anyone who has that paperback edition might want to go get a copy that has the full story to it.
What do you think about this?
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Nothing Baen did could possibly make Convos With Cordie: A Frontier Romantasy any worse. Abridgement is a mercy.