Updating fiction

I don't think books generally need rewriting, most people can read the book in its original context. I suppose putting out an updated version essentially resets the copyright: the new version remains under copyright even when the original enters the public domain.

What concerns me is sanitizing a book. A couple years ago, there was a sanitized version of Huck Finn published. I was upset by it, but later I realized that the sanitized version didn't make so much as a ripple. Now, if a copyrighted book is sanitized, that's a problem. I watched a Hallmark TV movie adaptation of Animal Farm that was sanitized. I detested it, it was just a movie rather than the book. On the other hand, if the copyright holder had tried to replace Animal Farm with a sanitized version, readers simply wouldn't stand for it.

I'm okay with correcting mistakes. I'm also okay with cases where the author later reinstates scenes that were cut or changed at the publisher's orders (e.g. Burroughs' A Princess of Mars had a whole chapter cut from it, which was reinstated in later editions, A Clockwork Orange famously has a different ending in the US and UK, and one historical romance author here at KB cut a rape scene the publisher wanted her to write), because such changes bring the book closer to the author's vision. I understand changing really offensive things like racial or homophobic slurs, though in my experience those slurs either have a point, e.g. illustrating the all-pervading racism of the pre-Civil War South in Huckleberry Finn) or the general attitudes displayed in the book are so problematic that cutting a few slurs doesn't help. At any rate, I think a foreword - This work is a work of its time and contains things which may offend - is probably better in such cases.

What I flat out hate are attempts to update an older book with contemporary references like the OP described, because it's mostly unnecessary and annoying. I always check the copyright date anyway, so I'll know when a book was first published and I'll adjust my expectations accordingly. I ran into a situation as the OP described with the reissue of a Janet Evanovich category romance from the late 1980s. Somewhere, right in the middle of a novel with a copyright date of 1988, the heroine was described as wearing a Spongebob t-shirt. This confused me mightily and threw me right out of the book, because Spongebob clearly wasn't around in 1988. To this day, I remember next to nothing about the book except for that anachronistic t-shirt and that I wondered what had been on the original t-shirt.

Of course, this early Janet Evanovich book was a romance and writers of contemporary romances have been told for years not to include any details that might date the book. The result isn't timelessness but blandness.

Books are artefacts of their time and offer a snapshot of life at the time in question. The little tidbits about daily life during the Regency or Victorian eras are a large part of what makes Jane Austen or Charles Dickens so appealing. Never mind that it's never possible to update a book completely to a later era. For example, the Janet Evanovich romance was set in a world with no cell phones, so the heroine had to go in search of a payphone at one point and at another, a news headline about the conflict between the US and USSR was mentioned. Evanovich probably thought she was on the safe side with that one - though it would be outdated a year after the novel was published. So the book was clearly a product of the 1980s, so Spongebob stuck out like a sore thumb, much sorer than Garfield or whatever other 1980s figure was on the t-shirt ever could have.

As for those dreadful Spider updates from the 1970s, again there were lingering anachronisms such as people shooting at each other with revolver from the cockpits of jets. Besides, the Spider novels are still thrilling more than seventy years after they were first published and never needed an update.