"Make it New" or Go Retro? (The Experience of the Bond Continuation Novels)

Working through the history of the James Bond franchise one point of interest for me has been the ways in which that history anticipated the problems of other franchises that likewise just keep going and going and going in the course of its doing just that before many of them had even hit the market.

One of them is the dilemma of whether to forget the past and try to make the new installment in the series as contemporary in tone as possible; or to cleave to the past, evoking it ceaselessly and hewing to the old pattern and giving the audience "more of the same" as much as the need to avoid intolerable repetition or the appearance of being ridiculous or offensive will allow.

If the franchise goes on long enough, as the Bond franchise has, not least in print, one is likely to see the series swing back and forth between these extremes, and maybe stop at every detectable point in between. Indeed, both John Gardner and Raymond Benson displayed the pattern within just their own phases of the continuation books.

John Gardner's Licence Renewed was an attempt at making James Bond over as an entirely contemporary figure, the agent of a thoroughly post-imperial Britain fighting a Carlos the Jackal type against the backdrop of the energy crisis, while the follow-up For Special Services went in the other direction of an attempt at "Ian Fleming for the '80s." Icebreaker ended up in somewhere in the middle, and so did it generally go ever since, if with particular books tacking this way, others that.

Raymond Benson had much less room to attempt anything like For Special Services, but in his first, Zero Minus Ten, it was clear that he wanted to keep something of Fleming (in the long gaming sequence, in the torture scene, etc.), but then went as contemporary as could be with Never Dream of Dying reading like a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movie on paper.

Some of the results were more entertaining, others less so--but the task was ultimately impossible. There could be no going back to Fleming, really, while there could also be no 100 percent update that would leave anything of Bond intact--with the problem underlined both by the works which tried to take Bond all the way back to his '50s-era point of origin (at its most extreme in Anthony Horowitz's Goldfinger "sequel" Trigger Mortis, and Jeffrey Deaver's giving us a James Bond born in 1979 in Carte Blanche). Still, especially considering the failure of these later efforts to register on the bestseller lists it seems to me that the intent of these books is less to "get it right" than to help keep James Bond in the zeitgeist in the ever-longer spells between the Bond films that are the real backbone of the franchise.