Sci-Fi Group Book Club discussion

This is the discussion thread for the first book of the month, or group read, for April. Please remember to use the spoiler tags where necessary. The other group read topic for this month (The Three-Body Problem) can be found here.

Hi Greg, the above cover is from the first edition. It has since been updated to The Alliance It might add some confusion, that's all.

Ah I didn't know there was a difference between the editions. It was easier copying and pasting the ISBN of the print volume as there was no ASIN for the kindle version. I'll fix that now.

Actually, there is an ASIN number but it's shared with this cover version: .....

I know, that was the Goodreads team not allowing the removal of that cover, since it was how the book was first published, even though Amazon has updated everything. The ISBN-10 for it is 152049467X and the ISBN-13 is 9781520494678, if that would help. Otherwise, don't worry about it.

Chris wrote: "I know, that was the Goodreads team not allowing the removal of that cover, since it was how the book was first published, even though Amazon has updated everything. The ISBN-10 for it is 152049467..."

Oh OK. It's Goodreads policy to retain all editions and covers of a book as readers prefer to shelf the edition or cover version that they had read. It's possible, therefore, that some people in this thread will be reading (or have read) different versions of the book. Is the text quite different between the different versions, Chris?

The original had some issues with scrambled text here and there because of an incompatibility between windows 7 and an editing tool I was using at the time, but that only lasted for 2 days. I quickly rectified the problem. Both editions are identical with the only difference that I added a timeline of events prior to the story and list of characters at the beginning of the new edition.

OK so whichever version readers are using will likely only be affected by the presence or not of the timeline since the scrambling issue was quickly resolved. (Had that experience once with an article that, when published, a handful of footnotes were garbled and my name was omitted from the head of the article [though it was included in the table of contents]. The article was republished in an online journal and then again on a blog allowing for those problems to be resolved.)

I read the ebook version without the Timeline, then bought the paperback and found the timeline quite fascinating as it lists events that happened a long time before the book's "present", kinda like ancient history landmarks. The list of characters is also a good touch as it is divided into Primary and Secondary, so you know who to focus on as you go through the book

Greg wrote: "OK so whichever version readers are using will likely only be affected by the presence or not of the timeline since the scrambling issue was quickly resolved. (Had that experience once with an arti..."

It's difficult to get software to communicate, these days. You have MS Word, then you have ProWriting Aid (which is where the problem started), then you upload a file to Amazon's faulty converter (which could have been the cause instead of ProWriting Aid), and you don't even realise that you've got a faulty .mobi book swimming around. It was a nightmare rectifying it.

Imagination_Hunter wrote: "I read the ebook version without the Timeline, then bought the paperback and found the timeline quite fascinating as it lists events that happened a long time before the book's "present", kinda lik..."

It was a recommendation by a reader, and I'm glad I took his advice.

I am about to start reading this. Anyone else started it yet?

I haven't got this one on my kindle yet

Quick update: Hired PaperTrue to re-edit the book and revise the final edition. I had taken it back to the drawing board for some refinement. For those who have bought the ebook before the 30th of November 2017, allow me to send you a copy.

Cheers,
Chris

Thanks for making that offer to the group's members, Chris! :)

Greg wrote: "Thanks for making that offer to the group's members, Chris! :)"

No problem, Greg. It's the least I can do.