Substituting As You Go
Where reading science fiction shows why we don't need books to be censored.
Having spent a long Thanksgiving week re-playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my xBox for way too many hours, I had to grab a copy of Neuromancer since this game has about a million call-backs to the original cyberpunk novel. It was one of those books I read over and over as a teenager then culled from my library as I felt I had outgrown it.
With a fresh new copy I sat down to read it, making it a cyberpunk Turkey Week. Cyber-turkey.
In the edition I picked up, being a recent re-print ,William Gibson included a new forward in which he talked about the aging of the book, including some oddities to modern audiences such as payphones and software on cassette tapes. All perfectly normal for 1984 but ancient technology in 2023. Gibson asked our forgiveness for the old devices and hoped that today’s readers could enjoy the story regardless.
Which, of course, we can. It’s still a mind-blowing book, astounding in its prose, prescient in the decaying society buried within a surface glamour of technology, predicting the domination of corporations into every aspect of our lives and the great split between the haves and have nots. Neuromancer is well worth a fresh read if its been a while.
Those old-fashioned technologies? No hindrance at all. Every time a character used a phone, I substituted a cell phone for what was assumed to be a wired phone in the book, in the theater of mind. Software on a cassette? Just a brushed aluminum block now with sockets. It wasn’t even really consciously done. Since our operational moment to moment awareness resides in the present the mental model of reality is always up to date. Reflexively we reach for our cell phones and never stand up to walk to a phone mounted on the wall even if we grew up with that technology. Doing the same while reading is no great trick.
This unconscious habit of updating your inner movie while reading makes old science fiction accessible. Imagine if every time you read in some golden era science fiction about a mainframe computer the size of a building you stopped in your tracks, unable to continue reading because it just didn’t make sense by contemporary standards. Every piece of literature in the past would be inaccessible. The ability to substitute a description or gloss over an anachronism is an essential reading skill. It’s your imagination at work.
So let’s apply this to those bad things they (“they”) want to censor. Not too long ago I re-read Goldfinger, the original uncensored version. Were there awkward moments by today’s standards? Of course. One of Bond’s temporary acquaintances mentions keeping Jews out of his hotel, which struck me as an oddity as late as 1959 when the book was published. Casual sexism, normal for Fleming. Oh, and that whole thing with Pussy Galore. Groan.
(Also, as an aside, it was plain that half way through the manuscript Fleming just ran out of ideas. You can picture him at his home Goldeneye, typing on the patio in the Jamaican sun, leaning back from his typewriter. He pulls his martini closer with one hand, then draws a cigarette from his case. He lights it. “Well, hell.” So he solves the plot by, um, having Bond tape a message to the bottom of a toilet seat in an airplane and hoping the cleaning crew finds it and gives it to the CIA. It’s like an episode of Archer.)
But what happened when I read it? The odd bits, the things that are not acceptable by contemporary standards, are dealt with in real time by the process of reading. It either became information (banning Jews from hotels in friggin’ 1959? Hunh. Didn’t know that), silly (Pussy Galore) or the mind just goes over it like a hovercraft over spiky rocks. What’s left? Fleming’s tight prose, the action scenes, and his mastery of description with few words. It’s still remarkable writing and a lot of fun to read despite the aging of some of the elements.
This is what the modern Left censors get wrong. They think readers are just sponges who, when reading something racist, sexist, whatever, just go “ah jeez ok I guess I’ll do that then.” What they won’t admit or acknowledge is that morality is internal. It is up to us how to react to anything we encounter. And morality runs deep. It starts almost before you are conscious of yourself, observing the world when you are barely able to walk. Your family, your surroundings, your early encounters with the realities of life in this existence, those make you. And with this strong base of morality you decide how you react to that which does not appeal to you morally. You read it, you process it, re-form it, and leave behind the bad but keep the good.
This is skilled reading. We don’t need censorship because the reader is in charge, not the text. Readers know better. We have the skill. Let us use it.