I had a shower thought last night that it would be cool if Dune or some of those older classics had a modern ramake applied across the books to revamp them and update them with what we know now in terms of technology, our ability to imagine and make the style of writing more palatable to younger/new audiences.
I had a couple of friends try read the dune books and said they really struggled with the style of writing and English.
Is this a dumb thought lol
I recently started reading E.E. “Doc” Smith’s highly influential book, The Skylark of Space. I looked up the original publication date, and found it was serialized in 1928. That felt right at the beginning of the book, but then more and more terminology crept in that sounded too modern. When he expressed explosive power in megatons, I knew something was wrong. I went on archive.org to look up scans of the original magazines where it was published, and sure enough, it had been heavily rewritten. When it was published as a book in 1946, he adjusted a bunch, and apparently changed and modernized even more in subsequent 1950 and 1958 editions. Unfortunately it looks to me like he was also under pressure to shorten it, and in the process left some scenes so curtailed as to make little sense compared to what happened in them in the original.