In the name of true geekyness, I am turning off the NWN, I am putting aside Stamping Butterflies, and going typo hunting.

What does one use for Typo hunting anyhow? I feel the 30 bore elephant gun may be over the top for this beast <g>

I believe the traditional weapon is a pygmy blow-pipe firing rose thorn darts dipped in the blood of a virgin opium addict. They're tough to find...

LOL - you guys had better do a good check for those typos on The Family Trade because I have it ordered along with the hard cover of the Hidden Family :-)

Ahem: now I'm out of hospital again, if any of you find any typos I can get back to abasing myself appropriately ...

"What does one use for Typo hunting anyhow? I feel the 30 bore elephant gun may be over the top for this beast <g>"

Let's see.... flamethrower, hard drive crash, paper-craving dog... all of those will definitely eliminate any and all typos. With, of course, certain 'false positives'. Otherwise known as 'collateral damage'.

I can personally vouch for putting the typed pages on top of one's car, getting in and speeding off...

Won't pry - not sure why you were in Charlie; hoped the ol' NHS removed the right whatever. Just hope you're feeling better sir.

"What does one use for typo hunting?"

A sub-species of demons called "junior lawyers". I have heard that in New York law firms there are dungeons full of these creatures who are put to work 24/7 proof reading...

Kind regards
mcdill

Aaargh! I just finished reading Family Trade three days ago, and noticed several typos while doing so, and was considering being annoyingly anal by sending them in, but decided not to be so geeky. And now you declare open season! I'm going to have to re-read straightaway to refind them...

Yes, please. (I've got until the 18th to notify Tor of any changes in order to fix the paperback; they just re-flowed the existing file, so any typos in the hardcover will be replicated unless someone spots them. And I'm not physically up to proof-reading a book right now -- I'm more or less under orders to take a few weeks off work.)

It's probably technically copy-editing rather than proof-reading, but:

Page 290: "Not on the twenty-second floor". It was the 24th floor earlier on in the book. Also "We're twenty-two floors up", lower down the same page. (Which might be technically correct for what's called the 24th floor in a US hotel, if they skipped 13, but is unlikely as dialogue.)

Thank you, oh most estimable keeper of the moose! I grovel in your general direction.

My English isn't so great, so this might not be a typo, but I'd never forgive myself if it was and I didn't submit it.

P.32 -

Why does this always happen what I'm in a hurry?

Should that be "when I'm in a hurry"? If this is a mistake, I hope it isn't coming too late (it's the 18th?).

Anyhow, I've bought all 3 of your hardcovers so far, and I love them. Generally I wait for paperback but your stuff is too good.

Jose, you're right! That's a typo. (How in hell they slipped it in I have no idea, but it's coming out of the paperback.) Thanks!

It's officially 21 Special Air Service Regiment (The Artists' Rifles). To its friends, it's always 21 (pronounced Two One, not Twenty-one). I've never heard anyone refer to it as the Artists' Rifles.
Great book. Waiting impatiently for The Jennifer Morgue.

Edited by author 09-09-2005 03:36 PM
Right, that's going to be a fun one to fix ...

(TJM passed 90,000 words an hour ago, so it's about 90% done, FYI.)

 Then again I've heard an ex-SAS sergeant call the 21 SAS(TA) the Artist's... He was running the Artist's Rifles Club at Bisley at the time though. I was a member way back in the 80s.

 Hmmm, ISTR a Glasgow fan who was actually a member of 21 SAS(TA) also back in the 80s. He was into reenactment, one of the Vike hangers-on, can't recall his name.

And on or about p120: Wannsee, not Wansee conference; Adolf Eichmann, not Eichman; Rijksmuseum, not Reijksmuseum.

Fair point about 21, nojay - maybe some people do talk about the Artists' Rifles. I've just never heard it - Two One seems to be the standard. But in the book they are called 21st Battalion Territorial Army, which is not right.

There is not a lot that scares me more than the idea of a Glaswegian SF soldier impersonating a Viking. Maybe if he was radioactive...

Good news on TJM. Keep it up.

 The terminology might have changed over the years -- G. the ex-SAS sergeant (for real, no shit, as in involved in the Iranian Embassy siege real) mustered out in the early 80s. Occasionally he would have odd visitors at the club and we barflies would be asked politely to piss off for an hour or so.

 As for the Glaswegian Vike guy, I remember him as being short and chunky, incredibly strong. He got barred from the Sealed Knot for being a bit too enthusiastic as I recall (his side was supposed to lose the battle. Ermm...)

Typo -- page 167, two paragraphs down, in the description of the H-bomb, you mention a "plutonium rod". At the top of the page you describe it as a core, later you use the term "pit". Rods were used in the first uranium bombs but not since then, never in Pu warheads.

 I'm not sure a small-yield H-bomb (250 ktonnes you said, I assume based on the W-177 dial-a-yield weapon) like the one in the book will have depleted uranium in its structure; that's (as I recall) part of a fission-fusion-fission enhanced yield bomb, up in the megatonne region, the sort of freefall bombs B-52s used to carry a la Dr. Strangelove. Such bombs and missile warheads tend to be smaller and lighter than the multitonne superbombs of yore, with better targetting and more of them carried on smaller platforms to spread the joy around.

 Page 197, _Concrete Jungle_: I'm not sure if this is just an extraneous comma or what... About three-quarters of the way down the page.

 "Eyes up, front: Can you hover over that roundabout?"

 Should that comma be there?

 More superfluous commas, page 218, as Josephine reads out the list of her existing cases "...string of car thefts, and a persistent pisser, who breaks into..." I'm no Hugo-award-winning author but I think both those commas could come out.

 The Range Rover's numberplate BY 476 ERB on page 221 doesn't look legal, should be two letters, two digits, three letters and the two digits should start with either a 0 or a 5 unless you want to call this alternate-history.

 Page 228 -- What's a SIMM card, anything like a SIM card? More later.

Skimming for typos is a very "surely that one's been caught already" activity for me. Anyway, I had a few minutes:

p. 6, para. 4: Rottweiler, Schwarzenegger.

p. 16, para. 4: Nietzsche.

Think I've got a few more. Or not. You be the judge.

I'm assuming that British English instead of American English is used, so I've gone with the Oxford instead of Merriam-Webster. So, armed only with a HB copy and an internet connection...

I had a blast re-reading it. I'm also assuming that the PB version will include 'The Concrete Jungle' too along with the foreword and afterword. So I've included possible typos from them too. :)

Here goes:
Pg 6 Para 4 Line 2: "...Rottweiller attack dogs..." should be 'Rottweiler'.

Pg 103 Para 5 Line 1: "The Reijksmuseum has...". It's spelt 'Rijksmuseum' everywhere else (Pg 98, Pg 104 & Pg 110)

Pg 125 Para 5 Line 2: "The very same; my complements on your search criteria." should be 'compliments'.

Pg 132 3rd to last line: rain check. Not a typo, more a question about usage. Oxford uses both 'rain check' & 'rain cheque'.

Pg 191 Para 6 Line 2: "Andy is a slightly built, forty-something guy; thin, whispy hair..." Is deliberate use of variant spelling of 'wispy'?

Pg 204 Para 5 Line 1: "This matter should be escallated..." should be 'escalated'.

Pg 205 Para 1 Line 6: "...allied retalliatory deployment..." should be 'retaliatory'.

Pg 227 Para 2 Line 3: "...not planning on escallating..." should be 'escalating'.

Pg 236 Para 7 Line 2: "You need to escallate, I'll get you..." should be 'escalate'.

Pg 247 Para 3 Line 1: "... just standing there, looking supercillious.." should be 'supercilious'.

Pg 259 Para 4 Line 3: "...quiet, diligent, punctillious..." should be 'punctilious'.

Pg 261 Para 3 Line 9: "... alienation overlap in alegory..." should be 'allegory'.

P.S. About 'Call of Cthulhu'. The game uses 'Insanity Points'. You get them everytime you experience/see things 'wot men are not meant to know'. Accumulate enough Insanity Points and those nice men with extra-long-sleeved-jackets will take you away.

Wow, that's thorough!

Many thanks, Soon, I'm grateful for that lot. (You too, RobertH.) And they're going to be fixed in the trade paperback.

(Don't suppose you fancy reading the sequel in manuscript, when I finish it in the next week? :)

Woohoo!

(You will need to poke me via the email feedback form on my blog so I know where to send it.)

Damn my complete lack of non-study time!

Will admit though - Soon, that's some quick reading whilst checkin!

Not a typo in AA, but gulp! a factual correction to Accelerando...

"Aberration of starlight skews the color toward violet around the doorway, brightening in a rainbow mist over the tables, then dimming to a hazy red glow in front of the raised platform at the back. The Doppler effect has slowly emerged over the past few months as the ship gathers momentum"
The effect you describe isn't that of aberration of starlight - it's redshift due to the Doppler effect, as you say correctly in the next sentence. Aberration of starlight is a spatial distortion of light, which would skew the apparent position of the stars, but do nothing to their colour.
At last, my Physics degree comes in useful!

Thanks, Phil. NB: I know about Amber suddenly being called "Wednesday" (oh, the embarrassment!) at one point in "Elector". Anyonne got any other bloopers?

In Curator:
"Of course, the growth rate will slow toward the end, as it takes longer to fractionate the metal isotopes out of the gas giant's turbid depths, but before that happens, the first fruits of the robot factories on Ganymede will
be pouring hydrocarbons down into the mix."

Given that you're discussing Saturn, shouldn't that be Titan, not Ganymede?

Ding! Thanks, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for.

In Elector:
"It's a ten-meter-diameter metal globe, spiral staircases and escalators connecting it to the seven spheres at the corners of an octahedron that make up the former centerpiece of the 1950 World's Fair."

An octahedron has eight faces but only six vertices.

Also, is "octahedron" a correct description of the Atomium? According to what I've found on-line (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomium) the Atomium is a cube with a central sphere connected diagonally to 8 spheres at each corner. It's supposed to represent a "body-centered cubic" iron crystal.

According to Wikipedia, the Atomium was built for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair (not 1950).

A minor inconsistency:

Router: "By converting all the nonstellar mass of the solar system into processors, they can accommodate as many human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten billion humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy."

Elector: "The intelligence bloom...won't stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brainpower as you'd get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy."

(ten billion vs. six billion)

Good stuff! I'm going to have to close this out soon ...

Lobster lib date?

Lobsters: "Well, if you hadn't shafted them during the late noughties ... " (implying that the chapter is happening no earlier than the teens)

Router: "Back in the teens," says Ang. "When Amber's father liberated the uploaded lobsters."

But...

Elector: Decades ago, back in the dim wastelands of the depression-ridden naughty oughties, the uploaded lobsters had escaped. Manfred brokered a deal for them to get their very own cometary factory colony

Fuzz "apparatchiks" date?

Lobsters: "Russia has been back under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarchocapitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme and Putinesque puritanism.... Russia has re–elected the communist government with an increased majority in the Duma...."

Because a formal return to communist rule in Russia hasn't happened thus far, adding fifteen years to (at least) mid-2005 puts the events of the Lobsters chapter in 2020 or later, rather than the teens (as would be consistent with most of the rest of Accelerando). Thus, you may want to fuzz the "fifteen years."

Gutter years of which century?

Halo: "Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens.... Their parents, born in the gutter years of the twenty-first century, grew up with white elephant shuttles and a space station that just went round and round, and computers that went beep when you pushed their buttons."

The Halo chapter takes place in "the fourth decade" or 2030s, probably early in that decade given that (in Tourist) Amber was "about 160 million seconds old" on "the eve of the third decade" (i.e., just before 2020). Isn't it at least as likely that the parents would have been born in the 1990s - the gutter years of the twentieth century?

The entire final sentence of the Tourist chapter should probably be italicized (at present, the middle portion is not).

In Lobsters, there should be a hyphen between "pre" and "Great War" in the paragraph beginning with "The permanent floating meatspace party...."

Router: "Huh." Amber stares at the cat. "So. You've been carrying this lump of source code since when ...?"
"At the signal, for precisely two hundred and sixteen million, four hundred and twenty-nine thousand, and fifty-two seconds," Aineko supplies, then beeps smugly. "Call it just under six years."

i. 216,429,052 seconds = 6.86 years (just under seven years).
ii. Assuming that Aineko began to "carry the source code" when he picked up Annette's alien download package at the end of Tourist, that occurred on "the eve of the third decade." The beginning of Router takes place in "the fifth decade." This seems inconsistent with six or seven years.

Tourist: "Anyway, the first SETI signal came from a couple of degrees off and more than hundred light-years out...." (should be "a hundred")

Tourist: "I think he did this in Amsterdam eight years ago when Bob first met him."
           but...
           "[t]here's only one logical thing to beam backward and forward out there, and you may remember I asked you to beam it out about, oh, nine years ago?" "The lobsters."
(eight vs. nine years since the events in the Lobsters chapter)

Halo: "There are twenty-nine Jovian moons and an estimated two hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of rock, and bits of debris crowded around them...."
According to NASA, there are now 63 known Jovian moons (see http://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cf...piter&Display=Facts ).

Curator: "...a complete archive of human experiences, from the dawn of the fifth singularity on up."
To reduce reader confusion, I suggest replacing "fifth singularity" with "fifth Kurzweil evolutionary epoch" (if that is what you meant). See pp. 20-21 of Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Near. His "Epoch Five" is the coming "merger of human technology with human intelligence."

Halo: "High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by SETI."
But the Halo chapter takes place in the "fourth decade" (2030s), and the world situation report near the beginning of the Tourist chapter (which takes place at "the eve of the third decade," or just before 2020) indicates that the alien signals were detected two years earlier. Thus "eight years" seems too short.

Router: The first of the world situation reports in this chapter describes "the fifth decade" (2040s), and refers to "the well-known extraterrestrial transmission received fifteen years earlier." As in my comment just above, this seems too short a time.

Router: "We are the Wunch," announces the first lobster, speaking clearly. "This is a body-compliant translation layer. Based on map received from yourspace, units forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?" "He means twenty years" ... "You accept our translation?" asks the leader. "Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty thousand trillion light-kilometers behind?" asks Amber.
i. At 300,000 km/sec, it would take light about 4228 and 3171 years respectively, not 20 and 15 years, to travel these distances.
ii. Presumably this refers to the lobsters' transmission into interstellar space and the alien signals that were picked up by humans in the late 2010s. See my comments above re time intervals.

Curator: "the starwhisp passes the one-light-year mark, almost twelve trillion kilometers out beyond Pluto."
Suggest changing to "more than nine trillion kilometers."

Survivor: Unclear whether New Japan is in the vicinity of the Hyundai +4904/-56 brown dwarf or elsewhere in the 100-light-year span of refugee quasi-human civilization. The second paragraph places it "a hundred trillion kilometers from the wreckage of Earth" (i.e., about 10.6 light years), whereas the first world situation report (in boldface) could be interpreted as placing it at Hyundai (but Hyundai is about 3 light years from Earth).

Router: Most of the novel's references to Hyundai place the brown dwarf at just under 3 light-years from Earth, but at one point Su Ang refers to being "in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from home."

Router: The first world situation report (in boldface) refers to "the solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers — just short of three light-years — behind the speeding starwhisp," but at this point the ship is still accelerating and will continue doing so for another 2 megaseconds (ship time). Thus, the distance needs to be cut in half (at least).

Survivor: The first world situation report indicates that 10 gigaseconds (about 320 years) have passed since the lobster starships arrived at Hyundai. But Sirhan later says that it has been "a hundred and eighty years since we emigrated. Although correcting for general relativity adds another decade or so."
How did Sirhan and his associates survive in the Vile Offspring-infested solar system during the 100+ years between the events of Elector and his emigration?

Too late -- the final changes went in on Friday!

(When I said I needed them soon, I wasn't kidding -- often I have no more than a week to proofread a galley before it's needed back in production.)