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08/12/2001 Archived Entry: "The Happy Prince"

I had an interesting discussion with a scifi author the other day, which started off with Harry Potter and the 'His Dark Materials' series of books, then ambled slowly onto the fact that I'd read some American publisher wanted to re-release the Narnia books (to capitalise on the whole Harry Potter phenomenon) but they wanted to de-Christianise them.

I'm not religious but I do find it astonishing that someone could even consider doing that. As it happens, it turns out that they probably weren't going to do that anyway - they'd just conveniently forget to mention the religious overtones in the re-release publicity. There were also plans to release a sequel to the Narnia books, which I suppose could be done, but it'd be very, very easy to completely mess it up.

So anyway, the point is that after hearing this, the author came back with his own literature horror-story. Apprently one day while he was reading some literary magazine or whatnot, he noticed they reprinted The Happy Prince (a children's story) in it. However, they omitted the last two paragraphs - on purpose - which changed the entire tone of the story such that it wasn't the same as what the author originally intended.

We both shook our heads sorrowfully at the state of the world today, and then carried on.