James Bond books rewritten to remove ‘offensive’ references | Hacker News Reader

James Bond books rewritten to remove ‘offensive’ references

independent.co.uk

24 pointsKhaine11 comments

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

-1984

It's kinda funny that in the end it wasn't a political party or the government that led to this, but instead capitalism and market forces.

To me, this desire to rewrite old media and pretend that the bad/offensive stuff didn't happen is fairly detrimental. It feeds a bunch of issues as I see it:

  * It removes the evidence of historical injustice, allowing the kind of person who wants to, to pretend it wasn't real - it was Sherlock Holmes that first introduced me to Italians not being white enough.

  * It diminishes the injustice: "the problem is just words in a book/play/movie" rather than the society that made that acceptable

I think that _much_ better is what Disney did: preface the media, bet it a film, a book, or whatever with a "hey, this says some shit that is clearly offensive and we've realized is wrong, but changing that is tantamount to pretending it didn't exist".

[edit: that said I can't wait to see how they eventually try to CGI away the horror in the "you only live twice" film :D ]

Seems like a good argument against long-duration copyrights. The sooner we can freely exchange electronic copies of works the better.

Unless all the cheap versions after copyright expires are edited to remove the offensive content, which copyright can protect (I recall some case where a copyright holder was going after people for editing stories).

If it's on the internet, sure people can edit it, but other people can freely exchange the original.

This is just commerce. They want to continue to sell the books.

No one is purging anything, and no one is removing evidence of historical injustice. If you're finding out from a James Bond book that we have historically treated Black people awfully, you need to read more books, preferably non-fiction.

It's a translation through time. If you don't want your characters to come off as racist shitbags, they probably shouldn't use the n word in 2023.

If you want more people to buy your book, rather. I doubt the publisher cares beyond that.

What if I want them to come off as Ian Fleming characters that authentically reflect his voice and choices as a genre-making spy thriller writer in Cold War Britian?

It’s not like these are real people who will be voting in the next election. They’re just brushstrokes in a painting.

Then you should probably leave them alone. But that seems like a pretty dubious goal.

Almost any reader today will be unable to see characters as they were meant to be seen, or as someone would have seen them at the time of writing. Language and society has changed too much for that to make sense.

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