The one-volume omnibus editon of the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, which I suspect is the one we will have to use for our upcoming discussion group, has considerable cuts in comparison to the original three books that were published separately. The Wikipedia article references the cuts, but the best detail I can find is in Eric Wagner's very useful An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson.
Eric's book (in the Lexicon section, in the entry "My favorite Wilson book," says, "The one volume Schrödinger's Cat has about 212 pages cut, plus some slight revisions." So the cuts are considerable.
While there has been a lot of discussion from Wilson and Shea about the cuts made in Illuminatus!, I would like to know more about the cuts in SC. Why was the omnibus edition cut so much? Did Wilson himself make all of the decisions on what to cut, and what did he think about having to make the cuts? Was there any principle about the sorts of cuts that were made? I regard SC as a major work of fiction, and I am baffled that I know so little about these questions. Can anyone help?
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I, sadly, do not own the original three volumes. But I shared a house for a little while in my early twenties with someone who did, so I read the cut parts, and my view (at the time, at least) was that it was a much better work of fiction with them than without them.
I just realized I phrased that ambiguously. I mean I thought it was better with the extra material included, not that it was better with those sections cut.
Wagner and I briefly discussed the cuts on a podcast. As I recall, asking "why didn't Wilson bitch about the cuts in SCT the way he did for IT?" and Wagner's response was, "he made the cuts himself."
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