Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language | Hacker News Reader

Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language

theguardian.com

45 pointslangitbiru71 comments

"[T]he Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising."

-- George Orwell, 1984.

Keep on editing the past, lest someone be offended or see reality as viewed by those who lived then.

It was always funny to me how people seem to focus so much on the 24/7 surveillance in 1984 while I always found the rewriting of the past and the shrinking of language so much more terrifying. Admittedly, the constant surveillance is what enables everything else.

It shouldn't be legal to sell these as though they were the real book. There needs to be an asterisk next to the author's name on the front cover.

I think some reasonable cigarette packet style warning and plain labelling should be used as well. Let's say covering 80% of surface.

Something like "reading this version can make you boring" and showing a picture of Phil Collins.

> Though this is the first time the content of Christie’s novels has been changed, her 1939 novel And Then There Were None was previously published under a different title that included a racist term, which was last used in 1977.

A little confusingly worded. They mean that the title was last used in 1977, and not, unfortunately, the term (for a few seconds I was trying to think of what racist term was so archaic and/or offensive that no-one had used it since 1977, but then I remembered that book's rather unfortunate original title...)

Wikipedia, incidentally, pegs the change at 1985(!). And as I wrote in another comment, it's definitely false it was only a title change.

In the UK, in the US it always had the more modern title from the time it released there in 1940. Not sure about content differences in the US version though.

For anyone else wondering what this is about:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None

> In the new edition of the 1964 Miss Marple novel A Caribbean Mystery, the amateur detective’s musing that a hotel worker smiling at her has “such lovely white teeth” has been removed, the newspaper added.

This is absurd, if the reason was to avoid using the term white.

The original is based on a stereotype of black people having shining white teeth.

Stereotype? Or observation?

Oh I see, I didn’t realise the character in question was Black. I any case, I think it’s still absurd to change. It’s the character’s observation at the time.

But in this case it’s about a specific character, is he not allowed to have white teeth?

You might want to read about the history of Asia's popular toothpaste brand Darlie:

https://www.goldthread2.com/identity/origins-colgate-darlie-...

Didn't we just establish with Roald Dahl's books that people don't think this is a good idea? Why are we doing this again?

These edits don't seem nearly as contentious, arbitrary, or destructive to the original prose as the ones in Dahl's works.

They are not what the author wrote.

Whether or not someone finds them to be 'contentious, arbitrary, or destructive' really shouldn't matter, as the author was the one that chose the words that they put to paper at the time that it was written.

Society changes, but changing a work to conform to new and/or different societal norms should be frowned upon.

> They are not what the author wrote.

I'm begging you to learn how the editing process works.

I'm well aware of how the editing process works.

These changes are post publication... after the author's approval.

Agatha Christie had no input regarding these changes.

So what?

We translate books to different languages all the time, or edit original works for reasons of clarity with modern day prose.

Just label the book as edited in the forward and there ought not to be a problem, right?

The reason for this edit is similar to that of a modernization: to make it more accessible to a present day audience.

This isn't a translation. It's a change based on malleable societal norms.

Instead of saying that changes were made in a forward, perhaps it should have a forward that discusses how societal norms have changed since the book was written.

Changing the author's original text is not modernization, it is not clarification, it's destructive.

The meaning of words change over time. Sometimes this means words that weren't too derogatory in the past become known as heinous insults in the modern day.

I don't think these authors meant to be insulting and evoke bitter feelings in their readers. So this change better aligns the story with it's original intent so the mere mention of a word doesn't obscure everything else.

> The meaning of words change over time. Sometimes this means words that weren't too derogatory in the past become known as heinous insults in the modern day.

That doesn't give anyone the right to change someone else's writings without their approval.

People need to be capable of understanding the context of the situation/time when something was written. They don't need to be pampered to because something might hurt their feelings.

> That doesn't give anyone the right to change someone else's writings without their approval.

You keep saying this, but it's not a realistic view of how publishing has ever worked. Entire books get posthumously published based on a few scenes or character sketches or even mutually contradictory drafts.

> They don't need to be pampered

Right, so this is just moralizing about what you assume readers need, not some real full-throated defense of authorial moral rights.

Post publication re-editing isn’t all that unusual; virtually certain to have happened for anything more than a couple of centuries old, if only for legibility, but also with more recent stuff.

Fun fact; versions of Sam Pepys’ Diary with the naughty stuff were not available to the general public until the 70s.

The editing process is a collaboration with the author. This is entirely one-sided.

you don't think removing the racist internal dialogue is destructive???

We definitely disagree on that!

Surely even if you think both are "very" destructive you can see the case of Dahl is far more extreme? Both his general style and as children's literature the prose often relies on lyrical or metrical effects which weren't preserved in the changes. And some of the changes (e.g. the infamous wigs line) were totally inexplicable. Neither is the case for Christie's work and the edits - some of which were so subtle they were apparently done in 2020 but not worthy of comment until the Telegraph decided to weaponize them in the culture war in 2023.

I think it falls somewhere between faux woke outrage, and some person who was "triggered" and demanded change. Nasty words were probably used.

…who is “we”? Randos on HN?

Public opinion: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/roald-dahl-censored-gbr-sc...

Reading the comments have made me wonder: how much editing can one do and keep the author's association?

How does reusing the author's name, changing their work, work? Are groups able to republish under an author's name because the author sold their name rights? Or is it something else?

If so, how much can the owner change and still attribute to the author? Could they write a whole new book and put Agatha Christie as the author? What if they just "edit" the current book with 100% new contents? Or 50%? Where does editing end and writing begin?

> Reading the comments have made me wonder: how much editing can one do and keep the author's association?

> What if they just "edit" the current book with 100% new contents? Or 50%? Where does editing end and writing begin?

What percentage are they suggesting changing here? Do you think it's 0.1% — 60 words out of 60,000? 0.5%, that would be 300. 1% would be 600 words, that seems unlikely.

Irrelevant to my question. I am not asking anything specific to this particular change.

I agree you weren't asking anything specific about this change, but I wanted to make that fact clear. The publishers are talking about a change, the discussion here inspired you to ask where the threshold is, and you floated numbers like 50% or 100%, and I wanted to make clear that in the situation at hand, the change is closer to 1% or (most likely significantly) below.

Though this is the first time the content of Christie’s novels has been changed, her 1939 novel And Then There Were None was previously published under a different title that included a racist term, which was last used in 1977.

This is false; the 1940 US printing and 1985 UK printing edited similar contents of the book, and probably several other times because when I read it it was "Indians" and today it's apparently "soldier boys".

In the future when offensive will be violence, meat eating, hurting feelings, aristocracy etc they might probably sell as empty notebooks.

Worth noting that both Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl accepted some editorial changes to their own works when they were alive, and in the latter case I think he was involved personally. The Oompa-Lompas were changed from being dark-skinned ("He's made people out of chocolate!") to being orange-skinned, and the original title of Agatha Christie's "And then there were none" was considered too offensive in the US even in 1939.

Also worth noting that Roald Dahl worked with a small team of people he collaborated with, as his work was being written.

A one-off edit to remove a slur is a lot more justifiable than the drastic PC overhaul that appeared to be happening to Roald Dahl's work - which seems to have included purging every reference to the word 'fat', along with many others such as 'ugly', 'rotting teeth', and even 'female' (while gender-neutralising references to mothers/fathers)

It's like they've done a mass search+replace for a long list of 'bad' (descriptive!) and/or gendered words, and what's left is no longer the writing of Roald Dahl.

They weren't just dark-skinned. They were African Pygmies. https://archive.org/details/charliechocolate0000unse_u3w0/pa...

> “Right!” cried Mr. Wonka. “Pygmies they are! Imported direct from Africa! They belong to a tribe of tiny miniature pygmies known as the Oompa-Loompas. I discovered them myself. I brought them over from Africa myself—the whole tribe of them, three thousand in all. I found them in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before.

(BTW, an archive.org search doesn't find the phrase 'people out of chocolate'.)

The movie - and after threats by the NAACP and others to boycott the movie - portrayed them as orange.

Dahl's revision depicts them as white. https://archive.org/details/charliechocolate0000dahl_x9u4/pa...

> The Oompa-Loompa bowed and smiled, showing beautiful white teeth. His skin was rosy-white, his long hair was golden-brown, and the top of his head came just above the height of Mr. Wonka’s knee.

> (BTW, an archive.org search doesn't find the phrase 'people out of chocolate'.)

I read it in translation as a child, so I guessed it wasn't verbatim. But it's on the same page you linked, that Charlie thought Wonka had made people out of chocolate.

Given the progress of the large language models, the news is almost irrelevant now: "Produce me Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but more offensive to everyone". "Make Catch 22 version, but make higher officers less dumb". "Rewrite Winnie the Pooh, but make Eeyore less offensive, in general".

So the censorship overlords are on the rise it seems.

The blue pencil is back. :(

Is it me being so insensitive or are these edits mostly overzealous?

Honestly this insults the intelligence of readers and it's nothing less then cultural vandalism. Not to mention historical revisionism.

My cynical take is that it's outrage bait to get some old books into the news cycle while having a chance to sell them to people who already own them. They're not removing words for any puritanical reasons, but rather because they know it pisses people off and it's a sure way to get people talking about their books.

I think that's actually a more hopeful take than the reality.

Instead, I think it's just a stuffed shirt bureaucratic box checkers who knows that no one ever got fired for sending a book to a sensitivity reader engaging in some busy work to pad out their annual review accomplishments. The extremely low quality and incoherence of the bowdlerization shows their total indifference to both the book and any conceivable external agenda of the sensitivity edits.

If it was being done to generate controversy at least it would stop when it stopped making them money.

I can't decide if this possibility is worse, but I'm leaning towards yes.

It's almost like a variation of Poe's law, where it's impossible to tell whether they're doing it out of some memetic bureaucratic desire to remove all the entropy from the universe, or if they're just trolling.

Always consider the possibility the "por qué no los dos" principle applies: for the actual implementers it's an opportunity to work towards the glorification of the new faith, for their bosses it's an opportunity to market through controversy.

Poe qué no los dos?

For another example of this lazy marketing strategy see the garbage live action remakes Disney has been putting out there over the past few years.

They're "vandalizing" their own book. It's not our book. It's theirs to do with as they please.

You're allowed to rewrite your own books, too--and even leave the same title on them. At least in the US, the government isn't allowed to stop you.

The publisher's reasons are certainly straightforward:

1. Generate controversy/awareness to make more money.

2. Get last-minute books sales of the "old" version to make more money.

3. Get new book sales of the "new" version to make more money.

I'm guessing this is more about clickbait marketing to spur sales of books, and nothing to do with modern moral standards.

That said, it reminds me of a years ago controversy over some social conservative group selling "family friendly" edits of movies.

"Both sides" do this, hence, much like most headline controversy, why I believe its marketing ruse to sell more stuff

Presumably the ones up on Project Gutenberg are all untouched: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Agatha+Christ...

We can just completely axe the idea of there being "no gatekeepers".

They are moved to the post-publication area, and you no longer get to understand why they changed what they changed, and you won't know if they approve of your work before you release it.

Yay.

instead of creating something great, they edit and censor great pieces of the past

Are we going to do this to every literary work? I get the idea, but I personally find thi Absolutely ridiculous.

Whoever owns the rights to the book can absolutely change the book. Period. All this talk about "should" or "woke" is completely irrelevant. The owner does what the owner wants.

The publisher is clearly doing this so they can make more money just like any other good capitalist.

There are a lot of calls for this to be "illegal" in the comments. That would be a ludicrous level of government oversight on the publishing process and certainly a violation of the First Amendment in the US.

The owner of the rights to the work is free to change the work in whatever way they want, and they don't have to ask our permission or the government's (thank Christ!). This isn't a case of some sneaky leftist changing the content behind the owner's back. The owner of the content is doing it, actively and knowingly, for bigger profits.

They know a certain demographic doesn't like it, but they've done the math, and know where the best money is.

I don't think that most consumers of these books will know that modern changes have been made. And I think that most of them would be less willing to pay for copies with these changes. So they're being mislead for increased profit.

Even in the US, the First Amendment doesn't protect false advertising. I don't think making these changes without informing the buyer would be illegal under current law, but I don't think it would be unconstitutional to make it illegal, not would it contravene the spirit of free speech.

> I don't think that most consumers of these books will know that modern changes have been made.

Indeed, one never knows what changes have been made without an itemized list, which is rarely provided and certainly not required by law. And I'd argue it shouldn't be.

> And I think that most of them would be less willing to pay for copies with these changes.

The publishers clearly disagree, or at least they disagree they'd make more money without the changes. And maybe they're wrong, but it's entirely their prerogative.

What mechanism do you propose to use to notify a reader of the particular changes in a printing?

An fb2 diff tool

Asterisk after the author's name on the cover, leading to some brief explanation of what kind of changes have been made. There doesn't need to be an exact list.

And this will happen on every edition of every book?

Just the ones with changes to later editions not made by the author.

What a joke, this should be illegal.

Hilarious that this is flagged

Shall we do the Declaration of Independence next? ... This is so silly.

anonymous flagging without provided reason should be gone on HN yesterday

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