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| Original text, or expurgated? |
In 1953, Ballantine Books published Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451,
a novel set in a near future in which books are banned and burned. Twenty five
years later, in 1967, in an effort to capture the “school market,” Ballantine
published an expurgated version of the novel. The words “hell,” “damn,” and
“abortion” were deleted. A “drunk” man becomes “sick.” A man cleaning his navel
becomes a man cleaning his ear. Seventy-five passages (in a 150 page novel)
were changed.
The expurgated edition was sold in U.S. schools, with no indication in
the book that it had been altered. Six years later, Ballantine tired of
marketing two different versions of the same title, so they discontinued the
original. From 1973 through 1979, only the expurgated edition was available in
the U.S.
All of this was done without the knowledge of the author, or pretty
much anyone else.
In 1979, Bradbury learned of the hacking and raised the Fahrenheit on
Ballantine. In 1980 the original was restored.
Happy ending? Perhaps, but suppose Bradbury had been dead, or had
remained unaware of the literary vandalism? There have been similar
“sanitations” of books such as Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young
Girl, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry
Finn. Expurgated versions of Shakespeare’s plays have been widely used in
schools.
To younger readers, this may seem like ancient history from the dark
ages. I assure you it is not. Many authors, including myself, have had their
works translated into other languages, or digitized and made into ebooks. Have these
books been expurgated, bowdlerized, or censored without the author’s—or the
public’s—knowledge? Almost certainly.
Today, an increasingly large percentage of our reading is electronic.
Nothing is easier than for an individual censor to alter a text (one could search
and replace “damn” with “darn,” for example) then disseminate it. All sorts of
documents, from the Library of Congress to publishers’ catalogs, are vulnerable
to attack.
I was thinking about that when I wrote The Forgetting Machine.
The Forgetting
Machine is set in the near future, when cloud-based ebooks have mostly
replaced printed books. How far in the future? I dunno. Most of the story is
about a machine that can directly input information into the human brain,
although for every bit of info inserted, some other bit gets deleted.
This
creates serious problems for the heroine, Ginger Crump, whose boyfriend learns
a great deal of American History, but forgets her.
At the same time, as Ginger is reading Charlotte’s Web on her
e-reader, the book’s files are globally hacked to eliminate any mention of
talking animals. Ginger and her memory-impaired boyfriend set out to discover
the identity of the hacker and restore Charlotte’s Web to its original form.
The Forgetting
Machine will be published on September 20.
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