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What are your thoughts about authors revising their older works to make them more modern? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by Melenduwir@alien.top to c/books@metacritics.zone

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Probably the best example I can think of is Diane Duane reworking her Wizards series to make it modern-day, but there are others, including owners of a literary estate altering books left to them to make them compatible with current standards.

What do you think? Does it matter if it's the original author or an inheritor?

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[–] Shevek99@alien.top 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's not a new trend.

It's called 'bowdlerizing' due to an editor, Bowdler that did it with Shakespeare plays in 1818.

Wikipedia gives some other examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation

A student edition of the novel Fahrenheit 451 was expurgated to remove a variety of content. This was ironic given the subject matter of the novel involves burning books. This continued for a dozen years before it was brought to author Ray Bradbury's attention and he convinced the publisher to reinstate the material.

The video game South Park: The Fractured but Whole was originally going to have the name The Butthole of Time. However, marketers would not promote anything with a vulgarity in its title, so "butthole" was replaced with the homophone "but whole".[24][25]
In 2023 new versions of Roald Dahl's books were published by Puffin Books to remove language deemed inappropriate. Puffin had hired sensitivity readers to go over his texts to make sure the books could "continue to be enjoyed by all today”.[26] The same was done with the James Bond novels.[27]

[–] Videomiso@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I like "Fractured but Whole" it actually has some cleverness to the pun.