While I haven’t read the entirety of David Marusek’s short-story collection Getting to Know You, I have read most of what’s between the covers, since eight of the ten stories reprinted there first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, which I read religiously. So I can recommend the book wholeheartedly.

In fact, since there’s still time to do some holiday shopping, go order copies for your friends right now. (And actually, now that I think of it, that overlap is probably a good reason for you to buy them subscriptions to Asimov’s as well.)

Last night, as I was dipping into some of my favorite pieces, I happened to notice something about the cover which intrigued me. Nothing leapt out at me from the back cover, which contained quotes from Cory Doctorow, Locus, and Publishers Weekly. But something about this blurb on the front cover nagged at me:

Marusek [has] the potential to make an indifferent audience care about [science fiction] again.

I assumed that this quote was plucked from David Itzkoff’s 2006 New York Times review of Marusek’s debut novel Counting Heads, a piece which proved quite controversial at the time and set off much debate throughout the blogosphere. What intrigued me were the two brackets contained in such a short quote, but what I was most interested in was the the bracketing of “science fiction.”

If Itzkoff hadn’t written that Marusek would make the world care about science fiction, what had the critic thought the writer was going to make us care about? The Great American Novel? Reading itself? Peace, love, and understanding?

So I had to track down the entire unabridged passage from which the words were plucked. Here it is:

And that would be a shame, because I think Marusek could be the one sci-fi writer in a million with the potential to make an increasingly indifferent audience care about the genre again, and he could do it without compromising his voice or dumbing down his subject matter.

So it turns out that what “science fiction” was swapped in for was “the genre,” which on the face of it seems to make sense, as the average reader would have no idea what “the genre” means. It’s an insidery word, not useful when you’re trying to sell books to non-fans, which was much of the point of Itzkoff’s original review. And so I don’t mind it. Though I do wonder whether Itzkoff would, seeing as how earlier in the original sentence he used the word “sci-fi,” a hot-button word itself, over “science fiction.”

I did notice, however, that those two substitutions were not the only edits made to trim the quote for the book’s cover. The word “increasingly” was also omitted, which means that to follow all the rules which would inform a reader as to any cuts or substitutions, the blurb should have appeared like so:

Marusek [has] the potential to make an … indifferent audience care about [science fiction] again.

Of course, if I really wanted to be a pedant about it, I’d have to say that the edited quote really needed ellipses at both ends, since cuts were made there as well, and so it should have been printed like this:

… Marusek [has] the potential to make an … indifferent audience care about [science fiction] again …

But I won’t go that far. It’s probably unnecessarily, since according to blurbing traditions, I think we all understand that there may have been text both before and after any edited quote. But as for that internal ellipsis, my copyeditor’s mind feels it necessary, even though it would have led to a messy and busy blurb.

But I’ll let you decide. Am I being accurate? Or just anal retentive?

Whatever you think—buy the book!