The James Bond novels have been rewritten to purge them of all racial references as Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the company that owns the literary rights to the author’s work, prepares to reissue the thrillers featuring 007 in April to mark 70 years since the first book in the series was published.
A report in The Telegraph on Saturday revealed that the company commissioned a review by sensitivity readers of the texts, and the changes result in depictions of black people being reworked or removed.
The report comes days after Puffin Books said it will retain the original texts of Roald Dahl’s books following severe backlash over a similar sanitisation exercise.
Dated references to other ethnicities remain, such as Bond’s racial terms for east Asian people and the spy’s disparaging views of Oddjob, Goldfinger’s Korean henchman, The Telegraph reported.
References to the “blithering women” failing to do a “man’s work”, and homosexuality being a “stubborn disability” also remain, it said.
Another altered scene features Bond visiting Harlem in New York, where a salacious strip tease at a nightclub makes the male crowd, including 007, increasingly agitated.
A derogatory word which Fleming used to refer to black people when he was writing in the 1950s and 1960s has been almost entirely expunged from the revised text, being replaced with “black person” or “black man”. In some cases, racial descriptors have been dropped entirely.
According to The Telegraph report, the reissued texts will be published with a disclaimer: “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 publisher said that following the review, racial references were removed or swapped “for terms that are more accepted today”.