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Frontier Wolf: the 1983 author's note
May. 28th, 2024 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hedgebird(ETA: I've corrected my statement below about the first editions.)
I'm re-reading Frontier Wolf at the moment, and I happened to wonder if the author's note was originally placed before the story, as in my US 2008 Front Street paperback, or after it, as in my UK 2013 Random House e-book. So I looked for the first edition on Internet Archive and found that it appeared at the front of the original UK 1980 Oxford University Press and US 1981 Dutton hardcover editions. (It's not in their tables of contents, but don't be fooled like I was!) But the 1983 OUP paperback has a revised version of the note as its afterword, copyrighted 1983.
More importantly, the 1983 afterword is longer than the author's note in the other editions. Four middle paragraphs of it (from 'Almost on the outskirts of Edinburgh' to 'First Attacotti Frontier Scouts'), describing which aspects of the setting are historical and which fictional, are nearly identical to the original note. But the beginning and ending of the essay, describing the inspiration for the book and its importance to the author, were new and surprising to me, and perhaps to you also.
The full text (about 1,150 words) is below the cut. And if you have another edition of Frontier Wolf, I'm curious to know which version of the author's note, if any, it contains.
( Read more... )
I'm re-reading Frontier Wolf at the moment, and I happened to wonder if the author's note was originally placed before the story, as in my US 2008 Front Street paperback, or after it, as in my UK 2013 Random House e-book. So I looked for the first edition on Internet Archive and found that it appeared at the front of the original UK 1980 Oxford University Press and US 1981 Dutton hardcover editions. (It's not in their tables of contents, but don't be fooled like I was!) But the 1983 OUP paperback has a revised version of the note as its afterword, copyrighted 1983.
More importantly, the 1983 afterword is longer than the author's note in the other editions. Four middle paragraphs of it (from 'Almost on the outskirts of Edinburgh' to 'First Attacotti Frontier Scouts'), describing which aspects of the setting are historical and which fictional, are nearly identical to the original note. But the beginning and ending of the essay, describing the inspiration for the book and its importance to the author, were new and surprising to me, and perhaps to you also.
The full text (about 1,150 words) is below the cut. And if you have another edition of Frontier Wolf, I'm curious to know which version of the author's note, if any, it contains.
( Read more... )
