Originally published on eve.gd on 9 August 2016, last updated 6 September 2026.
Read this post on the web (with images, PDF and citation details)
Today, my peer-reviewed journal article on the publishing history of the two substantially different versions of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was published. You can read the full article in all its open access glory at the Open Library of Humanities. There’s also a press release about the work on Birkbeck’s main site. The Guardian has also run a great article with additional comments from David Mitchell.
read the full article in all its open access glory at the Open Library of Humanities
a press release about the work
a great article with additional comments from David Mitchell
What actually happened here, then? To cut to the chase: in 2003, David Mitchell’s editorial contact at the US branch of Random House moved from the publisher, leaving the American edition of Cloud Atlas (2004) without an editor for approximately three months. Meanwhile, the UK edition of the manuscript was undergoing a series of editorial changes and rewrites that were never synchronised back into the US edition of the text. When the process was resumed at Random House under the editorial guidance of David Ebershoff, changes from New York were likewise not imported back into the UK edition. In the section entitled ‘An Orison of Sonmi~451’ these desynchronised rewritings are nearly total at the level of linguistic expression between UK and US paperbacks/electronic editions and there are a range of sub-episodes that only feature in one or other of the published editions.
The full article is also available to download from BIROn (the Birkbeck, University of London institutional repository) and MLA CORE.
If you wish to download the article and its supplementary files directly from this site, please also find a set of links here:
Article full text
Appendix A: Textual Variants of Cloud Atlas
Appendix B: A note on the Cloud Atlas variant JSON data and question/response mapping
Appendix C: Cloud Atlas variant JSON data
The software that I wrote (derived from D3.js) that produced the Sankey visualizations in the article is available on Github.
This reference list has been generated, in many cases, through an automated process and may therefore contain errors or incomplete metadata. It is provided purely as assistance for finding the items mentioned within this post.
1. Cloud Atlas article MLA CORE repository <https://commons.mla.org/deposits/item/mla:849/>
2. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘“You have to keep track of your changes”: The Version Variants and Publishing History of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas’, Open Library of Humanities, Open Library of the Humanities, 10 August 2016 <https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.82>
3. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘“You have to keep track of your changes”: The Version Variants and Publishing History of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas’, 10 August 2016 <http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/15857>
4. Flood, Alison, ‘Cloud Atlas 'astonishingly different' in US and UK editions, study finds’, The Guardian, 10 August 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/cloud-atlas-astonishingly-different-in-us-and-uk-editions-study-finds>
5. ‘Visualise textual variants across editions using modifications to D3.js and its Sankey plugin’, GitHub <https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/SankeyTextualVariant>
https://commons.mla.org/deposits/item/mla:849/
https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.82
http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/15857
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/cloud-atlas-astonishingly-different-in-us-and-uk-editions-study-finds
https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/SankeyTextualVariant