Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 17:41:47 -0400
From: Steve Smith <sgs at aginc.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: The World Turned Upside Down - and changes
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

N Lynch wrote:

> That's good question - how do post-computer readers
> feel about stories written in the pre-computer era?  I
> know I find it jarring to read a story where the main
> character pulls out a slide rule to make calculations
> for his whiz-bang machine.  It seems odd to have a
> machine that can do wonderful things, but the data to
> run it has to be manually entered.  And I remember
> slide calculators!  What if you've never had that
> experience of no computers, cell phones, and the like.
>
> Not that those stories should necessarily be updated,
> but would the stories be too unusual for those
> readers?   Seems to me that if people can relate to
> Jane Austin's era, they might be able to find
> pre-computer days comprehensible.
>
> Nicki

I think that "updating" stories indicates a profound disrepect for both
the author and the readers, as well as an Orwellian lack of concern for
history.  That's the way it was, folks.  And the technical details are
the easy stuff -- attitudes and prejudices are the really hard ones to
deal with.

As an example of this kind of disrespect, Ted Turner defended
"colorizing" classic movies ("Topper" is the classic Horrible Example)
on the basis that kids nowadays couldn't interperet black and white
pictures.  Unless they were colorized so that kids could "see" them
properly, they'd be lost.

On the topic of Flynn's editing of Schmitz, I didn't notice any glaring
bloopers, and I have most of Schmitz's Telzy stories in the original
magazine versions.  Somewhere (rasff?) Flynn defended his edits on the
grounds that what he did was basically take out a couple of paragraphs
of description that were repeated verbatum in each story.  It's OK in
the magazine version as a memory jogger, but irritating when you read
the stories straight through.  Not as bad as some make out (he didn't
really "rewrite" anything) but still disrespectful.

--
Steve Smith                                           sgs at aginc.net
Agincourt Computing                            http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."