I’m a science fiction geek and a free-speech advocate with an interest in Canadian law and policy, so the tweet from Tor,com could have been designed to get my attention:
Douglas Adams’ HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY was once banned in Canada for the use of a single word…
The tweet directed readers to this lovely essay about Douglas Adams, which contains a bit of history I’d never heard:
Here’s a tidbit for your next pub quiz: H2G2 was banned in Canada for using the word “whore.” As in Eccentrica Gallumbits, the Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon Six. Yep, that’s it. That’s really it. As a person who thrives on controversy and poking the bear in the zoo, I find this rather pathetic.
I found it pathetic too, and wondered why I’d never heard of it. It also didn’t fit very well with what I know of Canadian law. I asked the writer, Alex Brown, for the source on Twitter and received a prompt response:
All I could find was that a school in Canada banned it for “whore.” Wish I could find a primary source on that.
Later in the day, Tor.com (to it and the writer’s credit) changed it to “at one school in Canada” but I can’t find any evidence even of that. I googled a bit and came up with only a few vague and unsourced references online. This seems to be the main one, but the writer also seems to appear in the comments below acknowledging a lack of sources. I asked the people who run Freedom to Read Week here in Canada, and they got back to me right away. They received a similar request for information a couple of years ago, and looked into it then:
We partner with the Canadian Library Association, who produces an annual list of all reported challenges towards library materials in Canada. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is not on this list. If Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was banned in Canada, then this banning was not reported to the CLA. We performed a further investigation two years ago to see if we could find evidence of this banning, and we could not. This does not necessarily mean it didn’t happen. Plenty of book challenges remain unreported in Canada. It does mean that we don’t have any information on this alleged banning, and unfortunately cannot be of much help.
If you visit our website you will see that many books and magazines are confirmed as being banned or challenged in Canada. It just so happens that HHG2G isn’t one of them.
So, the trail seems to end in a dead end. As a free-speech advocate myself, I hasten to emphasize that there have been plenty of disturbing examples of books being challenged in Canada, and school boards seem particularly susceptible to this kind of stupidity. It is entirely possible a school library or board pulled this book from the shelves at some time, somewhere in Canada.
But I know, from looking into a few of these cases, that sometimes the story goes like this: Zealous parent challenges a book, school or library investigates, and school or library politely declines to remove book from shelves. Sometimes, the book actually is “banned”, but sometimes it’s a case of one person launching a complaint or a challenge. Bans and challenges are both dangerous but they’re not synonymous. I can see how a challenge could morph into a “ban” in fallible human memory.
Or, this could all simply be a case of someone being mistaken — getting the book or the country wrong — and that mistake propagating on the Internet.
I’d really like to know whether that’s what happened here to create this meme, or whether one of my favourite books really was once “banned in Canada” — or a small part thereof. If anyone knows, please leave a comment.
