Adventures in editing

A couple of items from the hard drive's vault.  There are lots of editorial mistakes in printed books.  I can't help but see them.  I don't hold it against professional editors for missing them; I myself am terrible at finding these sorts of things when I purposefully set out to find them.  It's just that every once in a while, I have to write down a particularly awkward passage.

Just to the south of them, the new Socket was like a titanic concrete bunker, the new elevator cable rising out of it like an elevator cable, standing alone as if in some version of the Indian rope trick, thin and black and straight as a plumb line dropping down from heaven - visible for only a few tall skyscrapers' worth of height, at most - and, given the wreckage they stood in, and the immensity of the volcano's bare rocky peak, as fragile-looking as if it were a single carbon nanotube filament, rather than a bundle of billions of them, and the strongest structure ever made.  "This is weird," Art said, feeling hollow and unsettled.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, pg 99 of the Bantam Books 1995 softcover

Not only does this have a horrible run-on sentence of simile and metaphor, Robinson appears to be asserting the reflexive property of space elevator cables, just in case we weren't sure.

She was particularly interested in the activities of the World Court, which was trying to establish itself as an arbitrator in the growing conflict of the Subarashii metanats and the Group of Eleven against Praxis, Switzerland, and the developing China-India alliance - trying to function, as Art had put it, "as a sort of world court."

Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, pg 556-557 of the Bantam Books 1995 softcover

Again with the reflexive comparisons, this time applied to world courts.  I suppose the World Court could have been trying to function like a kangaroo, or perhaps Margaret, Court.