Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are set to be re-released in April to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Casino Royale, but the books will look a little different: They have been altered to remove potentially offensive language at the recommendation of “sensitivity readers.”
The Telegraph reports that each book will now feature a disclaimer that reads: “This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.”
The change comes after Ian Fleming Publications Ltd commissioned a review by sensitivity readers.
Fleming used the n-word repeatedly throughout the books he published during the 1950s and ’60s to describe black people. Now, the word will be scrubbed from the texts and replaced with “Black person” or “Black man.”
Other edits include a change to Live and Let Die, in which Bond previously said Africans in the gold and diamond trades were “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much.” The edited version axes “except when they’ve drunk too much” from the text, according to the report.
Another part of the book, which takes place during a striptease at a Harlem nightclub, was changed from “Bond could hear hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry” to “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.”
A portion of the book that described accented dialogue as “straight Harlem-Deep South with a lot of New York thrown in” was removed altogether.
The news comes one week after the publisher Puffin announced that it had removed language deemed “insensitive” and “non-inclusive” from the works of Roald Dahl, the classic children’s-book author. The edit altered references to characters’ physical appearance, removed some gendered references, and made other changes.
The edits to Dahl’s works were suggested by the U.K.-based consultancy Inclusive Minds, which is dedicated to “inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature.” News of the changes, however, prompted a backlash among free-speech advocates, including some in the literary world, and the publisher later said the classic texts would continue to be available alongside the new, edited ones.
In the Bond books, meanwhile, many mentions of ethnicity have been removed from several of the novels, including Thunderball, Quantum of Solace, and Goldfinger. Controversial references to other ethnicities will remain, however, including the racial terms Bond uses to refer to East Asian people and Bond’s mocking views of the Korean character Oddjob, according to the report. References to the “sweet tang of rape” and a description of homosexuality as a “stubborn disability” will also remain.
“We at Ian Fleming Publications reviewed the text of the original Bond books and decided our best course of action was to follow Ian’s lead. We have made changes to ‘Live and Let Die’ that he himself authorized,” Ian Fleming Publications told the Telegraph. Fleming died in 1964.
“Following Ian’s approach, we looked at the instances of several racial terms across the books and removed a number of individual words or else swapped them for terms that are more accepted today but in keeping with the period in which the books were written,” the statement added. “We encourage people to read the books for themselves when the new paperbacks are published in April.”