You can never read the same story twice. Some of us complain about returning to earlier favorites only to find they’ve been rendered unreadable by visits from an imaginary being called “the Suck Fairy.” The Suck Fairy brings to our attention the unfortunate assumptions our favorite authors made as they created their fictional worlds: the racism implicit in Tarzan’s superiority over Black Africans, the antisemitism running rampant through Georgette Heyer’s invented version of Regency England, and so on.
And those of us who write as well as read? We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against, as the title of a popular book from the 1960s proclaims. We are the authors making tomorrow’s mistakes today, just like we made today’s mistakes yesterday when failing to take into account evolving social norms.
Mostly we can’t avoid making those kinds of mistakes. Science fiction, in particular, is prone to aging ungracefully, but, really, any genre’s bound to have some sort of cringe-worthy legacy laced all through its literary corpus. We live and learn—as you may have noticed when reviewing your own personal backlist.
Some of your characters will hit differently in today’s context than they did when they were written. Same with settings, plots, dialogue, etc. Particularly when it comes to what’s been labelled DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) content, standards have changed. Over the last decade or two they’ve changed enough that mid-career and older writers may be wondering if all the riches we have to offer will be truly accessible to newer readers.
How do those writers want to respond to this challenge?
Here are some techniques to use and ideas to consider—together or singly—as you look over your backlist and decide whether or not it’s compatible with DEI principles.
Analyze
Your first task will be to figure out what has become problematic. This means you’re going to be rereading your own books. For some that’s bad news: there are authors out here who love reading what they write, but there are plenty of authors for whom reading their own writing is torture. The good news for those authors is that they don’t have to do this part of the job alone. You can ask for help.
Consult
Ask somebody (or somebodies) you trust to read the book in question. If you wind up with more than one reader, super! Collate their results, factor in your own thoughts and feelings, and develop that mix into your plan (or plans—different books call for different tactics).
A full-on sensitivity read/cultural consultation may or may not be within anyone’s means. Try to at least get a vibe check: When did your reader want to throw your book at a wall? What made them nod and smile inside?
If you and your assistant or assistants have the time and energy for a checklist, here are a few things to consider in your assessments:
- Are the characters who don’t match your demographics isolated from their communities and from each other?
- Are the cultures you show these characters belonging to homogeneous and static?
- Do any of your descriptions, dialogue, characterizations, etc., align with stereotypes such as “saintly blind child” or “blood-guzzling Muslim terrorist” or some silliness less extreme than these examples but still deplorable?
- Have any of your words’ generally accepted meanings changed in ways that change the impact of what you’ve written?
- Are you invoking unwanted resonances because of intervening events?
Afro-Canadian fantasist Charles Saunders ran afoul of that last point when republishing his novel-in-stories Imaro. Similarities between a novella included in its original edition and the real-life Rwandan genocide led him ultimately to drop that story. The original novella, “Slaves of the Giant Kings,” is replaced in later editions with “The Afua.”
You may be faced with a similar challenge.
Revise
On the other hand, you may be able to simply substitute a few words in and out, adjust for a verb that has lately acquired an embarrassing new meaning, spell and capitalize a religious title the way you really should have, and give the text what Octavia E. Butler calls “a comb-over.”
Or maybe you’ll feel the need to do something more substantial that still falls short of outright deleting objectionable content, such as updating potentially offensive lines the way the creators of the romantic comedy Love Hard did in their famous “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” scene, or cutting an entire ableist subplot as Diane Duane did with her revision of A Wizard Alone.
However you contemplate approaching your backlist’s revision, keep in mind that there are additional updating options open to you that leave your original words intact.
Add more stuff
Texts appended to republished stories can prepare your readers for socially unacceptable elements they’re going to encounter. Forewords and afterwords are useful in all sort of situations, including the eruption of second and third thoughts about your own writing. And they’re a favorite approach among readers who like knowing what’s going through authors’ minds.
You can also add content warnings to your republished backlists. These will help readers figure out when they need to bypass a story or get some sort of remedial healing or emotional support in place.
Both tactics leave the first edition’s main text unaltered.
You may also want to follow in the footsteps of Ursula K. Le Guin and add a completely new piece which addresses infelicities you’ve learned to perceive in your past work.
For example, though Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness challenged gender norms prevalent at the time, it also promoted the gender binary and heterosexuality. She acknowledged and apologized for this in her 1986 essay “The Left Hand of Darkness Revisited.” In another example, a more ambitious effort, she wrote an entire novel, Tehanu, which can be seen as a sequel to the male-centered culture of the books of the Earthsea trilogy. If you do something similar, you’ll be creating work in conversation with itself.
Estate planning
Authors have forbidden publication of certain pieces during their lifetimes, and even during the lives of their descendants. By comparison, forbidding the alteration of your text after your death seems like a mild condition to put on the managers of your literary estate. Even milder, of course, would be to allow unconditional alterations because you trust that those you’ve chosen will choose to make the changes you yourself would have made.
Roald Dahl’s estate approved revisions to his oeuvre that some dispute he himself would have made. In the case of Vonda N. McIntyre, who bequeathed her literary estate to Clarion West, this care for posthumous reputation maintenance extends beyond the text itself to include its context, the setting in which her work is published. Though broader, this application of DEI perspectives is less controversial—perhaps due to the preservation of the work’s original text, or perhaps simply because McIntyre’s not as well-known as Dahl.
Keep these points in mind as you consider how you want your literary legacy to continue through the ages.
This side of history
There are good reasons why you will want to examine the impact of evolving cultural standards on the practical task of keeping your backlist accessible to all. DEI, as I pointed out earlier in this article, is an acronym for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. None of these concepts are alien to good storytelling, and, in fact, all three add depth and plausibility to your writing. Whether you choose to smooth over low-DEI rough spots, or to keep them and mark them out with content warnings, or to use some combination of these tactics and similar strategies outlined above, know that the fact that you’re conscious of them counts. Your willingness to see how a changing world can reshape the way your writing gets read puts you on the side of history where you want to be: the side rooted in social awareness.
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Nisi Shawl is the multiple award-winning author/editor of more than a dozen science fiction, fantasy, and horror books, including the Nebula finalist Everfair. They’re best known for Writing the Other, the standard text on respectful representation. In January 2025, Aqueduct Press released their space opera-in-short-stories novel Making Amends.