JAMES BOND novels will be reissued with “a small number” of racially offensive references removed while “keeping as close as possible to the original text”.
Racial words “likely to cause great office now” have been altered in the rewritten version of the thrillers in line with modern sensibilities, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd said on Monday (27).
The publisher said the British author, Ian Fleming, who had approved the removal of “racially troubling” references from the American edition of his second novel Live and Let Die, would have approved these edits too.
A Telegraph report said the offensive ‘N-word’ used to refer to black people will be dropped from the new version of the novels to be made available from April this year.
But racial terms for east Asian people and Bond’s disparaging views of Oddjob, Goldfinger’s Korean henchman will remain, it said.
References to the “sweet tang of rape”, homosexuality being a “stubborn disability” and “blithering women” failing to do a “man’s work” will also stay in the spy novels.
The news comes after another publisher, Puffin UK, last week announced it would release the original versions of Roald Dahl’s children’s books following a wave of backlash over their re-editing for a modern audience.
Novelist Salman Rushdie led the condemnations of changes to Dahl’s books describing them as “absurd censorship” by “bowdlerising sensitivity police”.
In the case of James Bond novels, Ian Fleming Publications said the “changes will be small in number,” while some books including the author’s first novel Casino Royale will remain completely unaltered.
“We are certain Fleming would approve these edits just as he approved the change to the American edition of Live and Let Die”, the Fleming family company that owns the literary copyrights on his books said.
The writer’s fictions featuring Bond with his codename 007 rank among all-time best-seller series and movies based on the spy novels have become popular worldwide.
