Censorship Of The Dead: The SciFi Writers Warned Us

Last week The Telegraph reported that Agatha Christie’s novels are being sanitized for re-release. HarperCollins, their publisher, is removing references to physique, race and ethnicity in new editions of Miss Marple and selected Poirot novels. Christie joins Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming on the list of dead literary icons whose works have met similar fates in recent weeks. Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss and Mark Twain have been curbed in other ways. If it seems like small potatoes, you may be missing the big picture. When publishers defile literature, you know the writing is on the wall.

These rewrites are not censorship, at least not in the legal sense. Governments don’t need to order it. Publishers are choosing to sanitize their literary icons on their own. Anyone who holds copyright can alter a work as they please, especially when dead authors are not around to object. Just as Christie had no obligation to write her books in the first place and no publisher was required to print and sell them, so these publishers today have no legal duty to reprint them in their original form.

Why would they want to change them? After all, Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time. Which is precisely why her books are ideal for such treatment. Literature, along with other popular arts like music and movies, is called “culture” for a reason. It expresses narratives that tell societies who they are. In 2023, we are social justice nihilists, driven by cultural self-hate and morally panicked about any representation of historical prejudice. Read more»

Bruce Pardy | “Agatha Christie Revisions Are Writing On The Wall” | Apr 5, 2023


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One comment

  1. Pardy quotes in his article, “….If we are willing to acknowledge it, the road we are travelling is no mystery. As Christie’s Hercule Poirot said, “The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.” But you can’t make people see. “They have to come round in their own time,” Bradbury wrote in Fahrenheit 451, “wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them.”…”

    And this is exactly the same problem the “church” is having. Having been inspired to re-read Machen’s “Christianity and Liberalism” by RSC’s Heidleminicast snippets, I decided to by a couple of copies, one for the book shelf in my office and another to give to someone in a mainline denomination who thinks everything he’s being told is golden scripture. BUT there are two problems with this idea, first they actually have to read it – preferably with an open mind. And secondly, even if they’ve read it I would expect a reaction like, “well, that’s just his/your view/opinion.” Happens all the time, which is why our culture is in the shape it’s in.

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