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 was at a summit meeting of sorts. Only this wasn’t the high-end kind taking place in an oak-paneled boardroom with plush carpeting. Instead, it was rather low rent, being held under the bright lights of a gymnasium. There were ten of us there, five on either side of a long, narrow formica table. On one side, the elder statesmen of science fiction. On the other, some young punks. Well, call them not-so-young punks, since one of them was me.

This was a dream which immediately began to evaporate upon waking, so I can only remember that Jack Williamson and Fred Pohl were among the giants on the opposite side of the table. It didn’t strike me at all odd that Jack was there, even though he died two years ago. Unfortunately, the only writer I can remember from my side of the table was … me. I’m sad that this particular dream happened to evanesce; I’d love to know which writers my subconscious thought should be joining us!

Anyway, as this meeting of the minds took place, Fred kept hogging the conversation, and Jack, who was shuffling through papers while this was going on, finally had to tell him to keep quiet. “I want to hear what the kids think,” said Jack. Only to someone Jack’s age—he died at 98½—could I possibly seem like a kid!

With Fred quiet, the writers on my side started to share their thoughts about science fiction, but then, with the limberness of a teenager, Fred vanished under the table. He began to pull some sort of prank having to do with my feet, but as to whether he tied my shoelaces together or stuck matches in my shoes to set them on fire the way you only see in old movies and comic books, well, that’s another detail that’s been lost to me, and I vaguely remember both.

I woke as the writers on my side of the table were speaking, and immediately began to scribble down the dream, but these details were gone, all gone.