Currently Reading #6 (cont)

[littlerdog.livejournal.com]

And the irritation continues. Typos, misplaced commas and apostrophes, and one very annoyed reader.

I do wonder if some of the stories were scanned in from print copies of the magazines in which they were originally published. Editing and proofreading scanned text is a horrible chore. The mistakes humans make are predictable. You can and do learn what to look for, what to expect. Scanners make some predictable mistakes--for example, rm and rn are very difficult for them--but a lot of the time they just produce random garbage. Making sense of it can be a nightmare. This is why we have proofreading. Also, alcohol.

The stories themselves are a bit slight at times, but it's fun to see Emshwiller's thoughts on how relationships might develop when people have access (at a price) to 'perfect' android wives and husbands. There's one striking story where a human socialised only by robots meets another...although to be honest I'm not quite sure what happens. I don't think it ended well.

What's fascinating however is to have access to an author's body of work, rather than the cherry-picked 'best of'. Really interesting.