When I was a kid, I loved reading all the reissued novels in the late ’60s that featured the adventures of Doc Savage and other pulp heroes. One of the things I liked the most was that sense of time travel; that is, experiencing a story from another era. Which is why when I came across a Spider reprint that had been updated—I think the vintage of a bottle of wine was of a date which had come after the original story had been published—I felt cheated.

Didn’t the publisher realize it was eliminating one of the things that had attracted me to the book in the first place?

Based on how Wikipedia recounts what happened, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way:

It seems likely that these four books were edited and modernized reprints, one of several reasons why they may have never caught on with their intended audience. In one, Death and the Spider, with an original publishing date of 1940, Nita Van Sloan is shown driving an Jaguar E-type X-KE, a sportscar not created and on the streets until 1961, some nineteen years later.

I was even more offended when I learned that James Schmitz had been edited in rerelease to eliminate numerous references to smoking, which later came up at a World Fantasy Con panel I was on during which I, without realizing it, ended up sitting next to the guy who was responsible for that expurgation. (You can check out the discussion—and see the flabbergasted Nancy Kress—starting at 11:56 here.)

So you can imagine how I felt when I read the following in a review of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants in the September 19 issue of Publishers Weekly:

Pohl has attempted to make this classic novel relevant to modern readers with new references to Wal-mart, Enron, and Reagan, but the revisions only throw the 1950s attitudes and gender stereotypes into sharp relief, resulting in a dated, muddled mess.

It’s been years since I last read that 1950s classic, so I can’t speak to the palatability of its attitudes. I only know that this type of updating is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.

Please, kids … don’t do this at home.

Let’s leave this sort of thing to George Lucas … agreed?

I dreamt this morning that I had wandered into a huge auditorium in which all the chairs were arranged in a circle, planetarium style. In the center of the room, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were sitting in a circular pit, which, at the proper time, would be covered by a dome, onto which at the right time they’d project one of their favorite films.

They said they were going to screen Lassiter, a title which in the dream meant nothing to me, but which upon waking I see is a 1984 movie starring Tom Selleck. I’ve never seen it, but based on reading about it, I can’t imagine it being anyone’s favorite film. In the dream, however, that’s exactly what Spielberg and Lucas were going to show us, only they never explained why, and I never questioned their choice.

A handsome man was sitting on the lip of the pit, dangling his feet. As I looked at him, I somehow knew he was an actor, but I couldn’t quite recognize him, perhaps because his features kept morphing. (more…)