The word "censored" was meant in jest, but in essence Diane Duane kinda was censoring her work to comply with the (then and then again) current canon of Trek.
As I said, that is a misinterpretation of the purpose of the revisions. It wasn't about complying with current canon, it was about making the series
internally consistent. There were three different sets of chronological assumptions among these different books, and since they were being reissued, the decision was made to ensure they were all consistent with
each other -- something that is often done when a series of books is republished in a new edition or omnibus form.
Wasn't Nurse Chapel cut out of one of the versions?
No. A reference to her pursuing her doctorate was removed because it was inconsistent with the chronology that was ultimately settled on for the series as a whole.
See, even aside from modern canon, the books were chronologically inconsistent with each other.
The Romulan Way is explicitly set after
Spock's World (because McCoy is already familiar with K's't'lk), and
Spock's World is set after TMP. But TRW is also stated to be about one year after
My Enemy, My Ally -- and we know from TMP that Kirk was not in command of the ship for 2.8 years. Therefore, putting ME,MA before TMP is inconsistent even by the standard of the books'
internal chronology, given what was known about Trek chronology
at the time they were written. This wasn't about conformity to modern canon, it was simply about correcting an inconsistency within the book series itself.
I interpret the saga's movement from a pre-TMP second 5YM to TOS (in Swordhunt) as making it "canon friendly" - by then the Star Trek Chronology had established that there was no second 5YM prior to TMP (admittedly, TMP itself mentioned it too). Thus the story was moved, right? To make it conform?
As I said, when the books were reprinted as an omnibus, the opportunity was taken to correct their mistakes, including textual errors and internal inconsistencies. Duane and her editor had to choose what timeframe they wanted to go with, and they chose a post-TMP timeframe. That makes sense even by the series' internal logic, for the reasons I discuss above, and because even
The Wounded Sky and ME,MA read like post-TMP in every respect besides character ranks and uniform colors.
(Although actually I found that a number of errors in the original text were not corrected in the omnibus, a number of new errors were introduced, and a number of things were changed arbitrarily, such as decapitalizing a lot of terms capitalized in the original and excising all references to "Powers" in
The Romulan Way in favor of "Elements." I actually prefer my original editions of ME,MA and TRW over the ones in the omnibus, though I prefer the omnibus version of
Swordhunt.)
)
