On Wings of Song/Editions
Sources include ISFDB, WorldCat, and UNESCO Index Translationum.
US
UK
Translations
E-book
Chu Hartley Publishers, 2016. No cover art.
Textual differences
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction serialization is slightly shorter than the full novel. Most of the cuts are of incidental flourishes without much effect on the story or the ideas, but one bit stands out in its absence: the paragraph in chapter 3 where Daniel, at the movie theater in Minneapolis, is both shocked and intrigued to notice two men sharing a bathroom stall.
The epigram doesn't appear in the serialization, nor in the first British hardcover from Gollancz.
Editing in this book has been inconsistent. I haven't seen the first US hardcover (St. Martin's), or the latest trade paperback, but both of the other US editions (Bantam and Easton Press) have a variety of errors—the same ones in each, suggesting that the St. Martin's one was the source, since the British hardcover doesn't have them. Most are minor copyediting issues, but at least one passage (the paragraph in Chapter 4 that ends with "hope was part of the punishment") is fairly garbled by a piece of out-of-place text.
Footnotes
- ↑ The back cover says it's about "America, a generation from now. Not as it should be, but as it will be."
- ↑ Morrissey's artwork for this edition consists of three black-and-white scratchboard drawings, one color frontispiece painting, and (I assume) the Art-Nouveauish line drawing that's embossed on the cover. The illustrations aren't entirely my cup of tea, but I appreciate that it has some. This was one of many books in Easton's "Masterpieces of Science Fiction" series.
- ↑ The book jacket text starts like this: "Beneath this highly diverting tale lies the seemingly preposterous proposition that the human spirit might fly out of its physical body propelled on the waves of its own singing voice—literally borne on wings of song. It is Disch's zestful skill which has us swallowing this possibility, hook, line and sinker." One might expect this somewhat defensive attitude toward an SF/fantasy premise from a mainstream literary fiction publisher or critic, but by the 1970s Gollancz already had a heavy focus on SF, so I'm not sure what was going on there.