It’s an oddly scarce aspiration amongst Bond villains, most just want money.
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You´ve got to think bigger, darling.
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Live and Let Die has not aged well, but it reflected the world as seen by Ian Fleming in 1954. Hindsight is always 20-20, but it shouldn’t allow us to airbrush out the bits we don’t like.
Has not aged well?
Granted there were some SMALL bits that were questionable but in reality it’s not a bad read.
Honestly, it’s just fiction. Fiction is subjective after all but when you poison it with identity politics then you’re doing it a major dissevice. If Fleming were alive he’d tell all you naysayers to get a life, or hopefully something harsher.
But he’s not here. And I bet alot of us here weren’t born before 1954 to actually experience that world and those times. But them again this comes from the same woke ‘scholars’ who think Trigger Mortis and Forever and A Day were masterpieces.
None of us have any right to say this or that book shouldn’t be sold because of ‘your viewpoints of racism.’ It was just a damn story. It made Fleming alot of money and helped build his career as a writer. Live and Let Die helped build a storied franchise and legacy that’s lasted close to 70 years.
What have any of you done to even try to match that?
You keyboard warriors need to shut it with your sjw rhetoric.
It is not poisoning fiction to critique and analyze a work’s racial presentations.
We have many records of what the reality of 1954 was. Fleming gives voice to the racist ideas which were prevalent then, while others presented alternative outlooks. By reading widely, we can understand the variety of that time.
It says something that such a racist work could make a writer a great deal of money.
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I was born before 1954, and I agree with you. So please stop getting hot under the collar. It’s not worth the candle.
Suspending the sale of the book will just make my antique copies more desirable and valuable.
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The use of the words „woke“ and „keyboard warriors“ does not reflect well on your methods to argue your standpoint.
Racism is racism. That it wasn’t pointed out in earlier times does not make it less dangerous. See, it does creep into people’s thoughts even decades later, so much that they think they need to defend it as harmless.
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Who actually argues to suspend sale? As far as I followed the argument the majority of Live and Let Die’s critics call out the racist parts but are well aware of their documentary function. The argument is not so much about pulling it from publication but whether we are allowed to call these parts racist.
And we are. These parts were racist even back in the day. That’s why many of them were bowdlerised back when the book was published in 1954.
What a woke bunch of keyboard warriors, eh?
On a related note, I’d vastly prefer the tone to be a bit less shrill. I think we need not carry on a dummy discussion.
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Quite.
Let people see it for what it is and empower more than a binary posturing.
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And Why, surely, it wasn’t slated for filming ahead of Doctor No
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It helps to get an insight into the cultural context when we look at the fact Fleming was closer to 1899’s Heart of Darkness than to anything even remotely close to our society. And that was already controversial before Fleming was even born - some might still argue its refusal of bestiality and violent oppression gives the glory of imperialism a bad name. Most of them though tend never to have been on the receiving end, so…
Fleming’s views were widespread but already considered debatable, even anachronistic in his time - and some of the dialogue reflects that he was aware of it, if perhaps not of the deeper implications. Fleming was only out to entertain not educate, least of all himself. By reading his and other works in context we can do both at the same time.
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WIth respect: SHUT IT
We’re talking about censorship, and it clearly shouldn’t happen. It’s fiction. It’s in the past. If you’re upset about it today then you’re simply a thin skinned moron.
People were upset with it in the past. To be upset with it is to object to racist depictions, which is not at all a moronic or thin-skinned thing to be.
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Regardless of what it’s all about, the reason for reheating an old argument after two and a half years (sic!) is exactly WHAT?
For what it’s worth and with all due respect, here’s an old and long-standing CBn advise: stay away from the blended stuff. 
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We are in a cultural moment where many old and seemingly settled arguments are being reheated, rehashed, and even discarded (at least in the United States). The established verities are not as established as was believed.
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Perhaps one thing that would solve this (I for one do not believe in censoring history, we learn through our mistakes, albeit very slowly as a species) Maybe a time will come when books are age rated like movies, so books like Bond are for adults or over say 15, you aware that perception of things was different back then. With an advisory sticker like when we went to buy our music from Andy’s Records or HMV and there was an Explicit label on the case.
I don’t think we should deny people the right to read a document of history, which is what all books are.
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During it’s initial run, American Psycho was shrink-wrapped in certain markets (I think Australia was one of them). That’s a possibility. I, for one, am 100% against censorship. I’m fine including a rating or a disclaimer and then letting the consumer decide if they want to consume the content.
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At the end of the day, since this thread was started the arguments in it have essentially become irrelevant because the only version now available is the censored one.
Yes, the Folio Society exists but that’s sort of its own thing.