Editorial

DUMBING DOWN

Way back when I wrote an editorial in which I mentioned the late Isaac Azimov's classic science fiction Foundation trilogy. And now I'm going to write another. The earlier one came about when I drafted something for the magazine concerning my research on the 2nd Illinois cavalry. I mentioned talking to a ninety-one-year-old woman in Wessington Springs, South Dakota, the grand-daughter of one of the 2nd's troopers, and how she had been dandled on his knee when she was two years old. "Dandled," said my then editorial assistant, Terry Johnston, "you can't say that!" "Why ever not," I said, somewhat taken aback. "Because they won't understand it," he replied, referring to the readers. "On the contrary;' I said. "Most of them will. And if they're not familiar with the word, the context makes its meaning plain, and if it doesn't they can look it up:' Dandled stayed in.

The point I'm making is that we do no-one-and certainly not our civilization-a favor by dumbing down language. I well remember (and mentioned in the editorial) the first time I read Azimov's Foundation trilogy-probably around 1960. There was a reference to a ci-devant aristocracy. Ci-devant? I had no idea what it meant. So I looked it up. And thus added a word to my vocabulary. A few years later I would not have been able to do that, for the editorial staff at Ballantine eliminated the word, recasting the sentence to read "aristocracy of the last century." Which brings me to the present.

My sixteen-year-old daughter Spencer (the one who drew the cartoon in issue 11.2) is just now getting into science fiction. So I bought her the Azimov trilogy in paperback. I hadn't read them for several years so naturally I exercised parental privilege and polished them off in the course of the next three evenings. And as I did so I noticed a disturbing pattern-changes had been made in the text. I didn't check them all, but it seemed that in at least half-a-dozen places Azimov's text had been changed, and in every case for the worse. One example will have to suffice.
In the first volume Azimov wrote, so far as memory serves, a piece of dialogue in which one character refers to "commerce that sparks in crimson and gold." "A compulsory religion?" responds the other character. In the current edition the phrase "crimson and gold" has been edited out, so that the exchange now reads as follows: "My people will not take a commerce which carries with it a compulsory religion." Response: "A compulsory religion?" The new passage is clumsy (and uses "which" when it should use "that") and repetitious, and also makes the respondent sound like a slow-on-the-uptake halfwit. I could also mention the typos and other errors the new edition comes up with -"burgler", for example, and the substitution of "horror" for "honor:' Yes, I know, North & South has had its share of typos (though I hope they are now largely a thing of the past), but I'm just one guy putting out a magazine; book publishers have whole staffs devoted to editing.

In any case, it's not the errors that I'm worried about-to err is human, as they say. It's the deliberate dumbing down of the language I object to. "Crimson and gold" is apparently considered too obscure for the hoi polloi. So a perfectly good piece of dialogue is dumbed down. My point is this. This is Azimov. This is perhaps the greatest science fiction classic of all time. Go on dumbing it down for another fifty years and future generations of readers will wonder what all the fuss was about-"Who was this guy, Azimov? Yeah, the plot's okay, but not much of a writer.. ." And if publishers can do this to a classic, what might they not do to a lesser work?

Of course, it may be that Azimov's widow, or his estate, gave the publisher permission to bowdlerize the books by deleting any word or phrase that might tax the mental capacity of a ten-year-old. But I very much doubt it. I suspect it was the publisher who took the decision to dumb the books down. Which is especially ironic, in that the theme of the books is the decline of the Galactic Empire! I know next to nothing about the law as it applies to publishing, but I very much doubt the publisher has the right to arbitrarily alter the work of an author after publication. I don't have time to do anything about this myself, except to write this editorial and send a copy to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and ask them to take up the cudgels. For starters they should demand that Azimov's work be restored to the way he wrote it.

Anyway (he said, taking a deep breath) all this is not only by way of uttering a cry for the rights of authors and against the general dumbing down of literature, but also of assuring readers of North & South that you will continue to read some of the best prose in the field in these pages-I respect our readers, and this magazine will never be dumbed down.