I was looking over some of the older episodes of NXE last night, refreshing my memory as to the sequence in which certain events happened, and I ran across something that has been bothering me all day.

Most of you probably know that I have a sort of ingrained resistance to revising things too heavily after the fact. This is largely an artifact of the way EPU stuff used to come out first on USENET, a medium which only allowed for posting new copies of things and not making edits to the versions that were already out there. It was like broadcast TV—once the product was out on the airwaves, you were stuck with what people had seen until and unless you transmitted it again.

I've made some headway in my off-and-on efforts to move past that since going to web-only distribution, but I still feel like making big edits to things that have been declared finished is kind of cheating. Also, it's a dangerous hole to jump down. I mean, if I tried to rewrite all of NXE to reflect my present-day authorial sensibilities, that would take forever, get in the way of anything new getting written (which happens slowly enough nowadays as it is), and probably anger as many people as it pleased. And ultimately it would probably turn out differently!

(Come to think of it, the people who make the actual Evangelion basically did that. So at least there would be symmetry, I guess?)

Anyway, I mostly try to reserve the revision beam for big things that I just can't abide now that I've noticed them, and the glaringly terrible nuclear science in Exodus 2:3 made that list. It's funny, because that episode is chock-full of completely made-up science and technology that I'm perfectly fine with the hokiness of, but the way I described Jet Alone's reactor working was so wrong I couldn't stand to leave it that way.

So this evening, instead of accomplishing anything useful, I have rewritten that entire sequence so that JA's reactor works the way nuclear power reactors really work—something about which I evidently had no clue whatsoever in 1997.

I am indebted, if that's the word, to James Mahaffey, author of Atomic Accidents and Atomic Adventures, for the significantly improved understanding of nuclear power technology that caused me to trip over that scene and fall straight into the edit hole, but which also enabled me to rewrite it into something that doesn't make me want to slam my face against a window.

The revised edition replaces the one linked on the series index page, or you can get it here you're burning to check out the edit right now.

--G.
and yes, this does mean I'm trying to get somewhere on Exodus 5:2 right now; ye gods, at this rate real life will pass the story setting soon and it'll turn into a period piece
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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