A little more on the Rusalka series

[sholio]

After reading the first few chapters of my old paperback copy of Chernevog (the sequel to Rusalka) yesterday during our power outage and corresponding lack of Internet, I bought the revised/self-published version on Cherryh's website this morning, and wow, it IS different! Nothing major has changed with the plot (although she says the next book does apparently have plot changes) but there is a ton of sentence-level and scene-level reconstruction.

Most particularly, she explains things a lot better. Her books often leave a lot to the imagination, especially a lot of the character motivation and background worldbuilding stuff which is implied rather than stated, but in this edition she's gone back and cleaned up and made clear a lot of things that were subtextual in the original (often subtextual to the point of total incomprehensibility). It's a lot easier to get where she was going with some of the character stuff now. And she (and her editor; she credits Jane Fancher, her wife, with a great deal of the editing) greatly toned down the stream-of-consciousness narration of the original, editing it into something considerably more cohesive and conventional, while still retaining the flavor of the original.

So yeah, between the two, I'm finding the revised version definitely has enough changes to be worth choosing it over the unrevised one. The ebooks ARE expensive -- they're $9.95 each -- but these books are favorites and, to me, well worth buying.

I also bought the revised Rusalka just to compare, because I figure I've had more than $9.95 of enjoyment from it over the years. It's not markedly different -- she notes Rusalka was edited considerably less than the others -- but I was happy to notice that one of my favorite hugging scenes (of course I have favorite hugging scenes, who do you think I am), after [spoiler, highlight to read] Sasha loses his heart, literally, and his emotions along with it, and then gets it back, with corresponding "oh god what have I done" FEELINGSDUMP [/spoiler] is expanded in the revised version, with a bit more character-interaction cuteness than the original had.

Oh, and also, I rediscovered snarkydame's lovely tag to book 2 on AO3 yesterday. Sweet OT3 hurt/comforty goodness! Recommended. :) (But generally spoilery for the series up to that point.)

Comments

[ranalore]

This is very useful to know. Once I have some discretionary funds again (holidays is expensive yo), I'll be investing. Even without the old versions to compare yet, I think I'll enjoy just reading them again.

[sholio]

I'm having a lot of fun comparing the two, since I have my paperbacks right here, and I do think the revised versions are across-the board better. :D Like I was just mentioning over on LJ, one thing I find amusing, or perhaps telling, about the revised Yvgenie is that the book's two big h/c scenes (so far) are, if not word-for-word identical, then less heavily rewritten than most of the rest of the book. It's clear where her focus was. (I can relate.)