[Keith Bailey]

I was wondering if Mr. Korman, or anyone else in this forum, could answer these Korman-related questions I've been pondering about for years:

(1) When Gordon Korman started writing books, he seemed very proud of his Canadian heritage, setting his books in Canada with Canadian characters. But eventually, I started to see a reduction of things that would be considered "Canadian" in his books, whether it be Canadian locations or Canadian characters. Eventually it got to the point where his new books (save for the MacDonald Hall series) had nothing that would be considered Canadian in them. Why did Korman go down this avenue? Did he and/or his publisher Scholastic conclude that being Canadian would be less lucrative than being American? Another reason?

(2) I read "This Can't Be Happening at MacDonald Hall" and "Our Man Weston" several times as a youth. However, I noticed that with each novel, when I read a reprint of it while still being pretty young, there had been odd edits. Originally in "Our Man Weston", at the end of the book, one of the two spies gets a plane ticket to Libya. However, in a subsequent reprint, the location was changed to (I believe) Iceland. With "This Can't Be Happening...", in the original version, Bruno or Boots at one point is thinking fondly of the movie posters that used to hang in his original dorm room, reflecting that one of them was "crude" enough that it had to be safely hidden during dormitory inspections. However, in the reprint I read, the word "crude" was changed to "scary". I know this novel was subsequently reprinted more times in subsequent years, though I don't know if this edit stuck, or the text was returned to how it was originally. Does anyone know about these edits, and why these edits were done?

[Gordon Korman]

Hi, Keith. Thanks for writing. I'm flattered that you've paid such close attention to my books over the years.

To your first question, I was a pretty young kid back then, living in the Toronto area. I hadn't traveled much, so most of my references were Toronto-centric. I guess that makes those books more Canadian - although I'm not sure if a reader from Vancouver would recognize any more than one from Houston or even Oslo would. And as I've gotten older, my experiences have broadened and so have the settings and references is my writing. 

As for the "odd edits," my publishers have encouraged me to tweak certain details as the books have been reprinted over the years. A lot of these have been technology updates - computers and cellphones, which wouldn't have been part of Macdonald Hall life in 1978 when Bruno and Boots first appeared. We also tried to avoid references to places that had become geopolitically charged. During my high school years when I wrote OUR MAN WESTON, Libya was just a distant country. Years later, it had become a global hot spot, so the idea of buying someone a plane ticket there meant something substantially different than what I'd originally intended. Does that make sense?

--------Gordon Korman--------

[Asher]

The reprints have occasionally lost some details due to space considerations. 

 

I personally have tracked down first editions of all the early works. Most books are essentially the same, but I highly recommend it for The War With Mr Wizzle, which is far funnier before the update.