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| James H. Schmitz |
In addition to copyright (the right of the author to receive a part of the profits from the sale of his work), other rights should also be guaranteed. The most important is the right to the integrity of the work, recognized by the Berne Convention:
The author shall retain the right ... to object to any deformation,
mutilation or other modification of his [work].
The downside is that dead authors can hardly object.
Unfortunately, this right is less protected than the copyright, as a few examples will show:
·
In 2000
and 2001, Baen Books published in four volumes several short stories and novels
by James H. Schmitz, a 1960s science fiction author. Eric Flint, another
science fiction author, prepared this edition. In addition to selecting
Schmitz's work, Flint decided to "improve" it. To do this, he reduced
the size of the novel Legacy,
with the following justification: ...Schmitz
[made] two big mistakes in the way he wrote the novel. Both of which mistakes
can be readily fixed by good editing. Which were Schmitz's
mistakes? The fact that Flint finds certain parts of the novel boring, so he
decided to remove them. And there are other changes: in Chapter 5 one of the
characters offers a cigarette to the protagonist. This offer has disappeared in
the 2001 edition, for Flint considers it outdated. Three chapters later, when
the protagonist says: I think I'd like
that cigarette now, the phrase also had to disappear. When
readers protested, Flint answers: Get a life! That's
rude, I know, but I find it hard to suffer fools gladly. (Trigger & Friends, Baen Books, 2001,
Editor’s commentary, Part II).
·
In the
same compilation, Flint and his collaborator Guy Gordon made another kind of attack
against the author's right to the integrity of his work. When Flint lamented
that one of Schmitz's characters (Heslet Quillan) only appears in a short story
and a novel, Gordon suggested to solve that "deficiency" by renaming the
main character in the short story Planet of forgetting
and adding some of Quillan's favorite expressions to his conversations. The
corrected story was published in the compilation under a different title: Forget it.
The above two examples make reference to
changes made to adapt the work to the editor's personal preferences. The next,
on the other hand, are just a small sample of the changes due to the dominant
political ideology, which, taking advantage of the growing ignorance of the
population, has become a suffocating form of censorship:
·
As is well-known, since its publication, [Mark Twain's work] has been
subjected to censorship of all kinds in the United States (Marisa Fernández López, Publications of the
University of the Basque Country, 2008).
·
In the
1988 edition of Hugh Lofting's The
story of Doctor Dolittle, the publishers and the author's son decided
to change several sentences in the book, originally published in 1920, for in light of current sensibilities, they were considered
disrespectful of ethnic minorities.
·
In 2011 a lawsuit
for racism was presented against the comic Tintin in
the Congo, recently brought before the Belgian courts.
·
The short
story Little
black Sambo, published in 1899 by Helen Bannerman, has recently
undergone various revisions, in text and illustrations, due to political
correctness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Black_Sambo).
If we go on like this, rather than changing or forbidding the books, we'll soon be burning them, as predicted by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
The defenders of this suffocating and oppressive ideology not only forbid us to speak our mind when it does not suit their tastes, but dead writers are also affected. Furthermore, they defend materialism and try to reduce man to the level of a mere animal, or even lower, to do with us whatever they want. As a consequence, they already have more deaths under their belt than the Nazis and Communists combined. But nobody is shocked by this, for the victims are either unborn children or old people. The former no longer concern most of the population, and in their ignorance and folly, many believe that they will never be affected by the latter.
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