Ian Fleming is the latest author whose work will face revisions once his ‘James Bond’ novels are edited to remove racist language: report
- The company that owns Fleming’s work hired sensitive readers to review his novels.
Ian Fleming’s famous James Bond novels are being edited to remove racist language before being published, reports The Telegraph. Fleming’s series is set to be relaunched in April to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the collection’s first book, Casino Royale, according to the outlet.
Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the company that owns the rights to Fleming’s work, has hired sensitivity readers to review the spy series ahead of its re-release, the outlet said.
The Telegraph reported that the updated novels will include a disclaimer promising readers that the changes will remain close to the original text.
“This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes that modern readers might find offensive were commonplace,” the disclaimer reads, according to the outlet. “A number of updates have been made in this edition, keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.”
Fleming is the youngest author to undergo such edits. On February 17, The Telegraph reported that Roald Dahl’s children’s books were being edited to remove words like “fat,” “ugly,” and “crazy” from recent editions.
On Friday, Puffin UK announced they would be releasing an uncensored collection of Dahl’s work alongside the revised collection after receiving backlash over the changes.
The major revisions to Fleming’s text concern depictions of black people.
In the updated version of his novel Live and Let Die, the discussion of African criminals is edited to remove comments on alcoholism. The Telegraph reports that the lyrics changed from “I should have thought pretty law-abiding guys, except when they’ve been drinking too much” to “I should have thought pretty law-abiding guys”.
In the same novel, when 007 visited Harlem, Fleming used the n-word frequently when describing black people. The sensibility changes removed most uses of the n-word in the text, replacing it with “Black man” or “Black person,” according to The Telegraph.
Racist language used to describe other ethnicities is unaffected in the updated text, according to The Telegraph. Terms for East Asian people and comments about Oddjob, a Korean henchman in the series, as well as sexist and homophobic language were not removed from the text.
According to The Telegraph, before his death in 1964, Fleming allowed editors to edit sex scenes and racial language for American markets.
“Borrowing Ian’s approach, we looked at the occurrences of several racist terms in the books and removed a number of individual words or replaced them with terms that are more accepted today but correspond to the time the books were written,” Ian Fleming Publications Ltd in a statement to The Telegraph.