Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
'Censorship' is used too often in place of 'edited' or 'bowdlerized'. The government didn't force changes to the book.
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Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the changes made. Only an individual purchaser can decide if the changes are too egregious:
A 1997 edition of the book advances all the dates by 31 years (thus running from 2030 to 2057). (This change counteracts a problem common to near-future stories, where the passage of time overtakes the period in which the story is set; for a list of other works that have fallen prey to this phenomenon, see the List of stories set in a future now past.) This edition includes "The Fire Balloons", and replaces "Way in the Middle of the Air" (a story less topical in 1997 than in 1950) with the 1952 short story "The Wilderness", dated May 2034 (equivalent to May 2003 in the earlier chronology).
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I personally don't like these sorts of changes, Science Fiction from the 1950s should be read as Science Fiction from the 1950s. All any fiction can do is tell us more about ourselves by following someone else. If the actual age of a work is obscured by editorial changes, we lose all perspective of what the author was trying to do. It weakens the story as a work of art.
We wouldn't want the painting, The Mona Lisa, "updated" with acrylic paint would we?