Reflections on the Dirk Pitt Series

I first encountered Clive Cussler circa 1993 through Sahara, which was then his latest novel. I went right through it and subsequently tracked down every other novel Cussler published before it, then went on to follow his career closely for a good many years afterward. I enjoyed virtually all of his books, a good many of the earlier ones nearly as much as Sahara (especially 1986's Cyclops and 1988's Treasure).

With their big, exciting plots encompassing wild historical theories and high-stakes geopolitical games, their abundance of gimmicks (like cool high-tech toys), their plenitude of over-the-top, cinematic action, their unflappable James Bondian protagonist and colorful James Bondian villains, and their sense of humor, I found Cussler's novels a lot of fun--and also, a model for the kind of story I was then aspiring to write. (Matthew Reilly would be an even closer fit in many respects, but he hadn't even published his first book yet.)

The inelegant, often cliché-ridden prose, the one-dimensional characters--these things only started mattering to me later on, by which time the author's tendency to repeat himself to diminishing returns would have been enough to reduce my interest, even at a less discriminating point in my history as a reader. Of course, this may have been inevitable. As of the time of this writing, Dirk Pitt's adventures have been in print for thirty-seven years, and despite the use of a rather large bag of tricks, Cussler's hero's aged enough that Pitt's grown-up kids now get in on the action. Far from letting go gracefully, or at least taking a break every now and then, Cussler kept the books coming, despite his declining enthusiasm for them (Cussler himself confessing to boredom with his creation in at least one interview).

Indeed, Cussler stepped up production sharply--through a turn to literary sharecropping on a massive scale.1 Where action thriller writers are concerned, only Tom Clancy compares with Cussler's prolific involvement in "co-authored" books to which his principal contribution seems to be his brand name. This includes not only every Dirk Pitt novel to follow 2001's Valhalla Rising (the byline of which is shared with his son Dirk), but the NUMA File series cowritten with Paul Kemprecos, the Oregon Files novels written with Craig Dirgo and Jack DuBrul, the Isaac Bell novels (cowritten with Justin Scott from the second book on) and the Fargo Adventures written with Grant Blackwood (who also "co-authored" Clancy's latest, Dead or Alive)--some twenty-five novels in five series, a considerable output even before counting his foray into nonfiction (like the two-book Sea Hunters series, also cowritten with Dirgo).2 At this point co-authored books account not only for virtually all of Cussler's output in the past decade, but for a majority of the books he has published in his four decade career (27 of 46 books of all sorts).3

That others keep on buying the books, being disappointed, complaining online and then buying the next book, again and again and again (enough to keep Cussler on the bestseller lists), astonishes me. Rather than nostalgia, I find the whole phenomenon a depressing sign of the times.

NOTES
1. From the 1970s through the first half of the 1990s, Cussler published roughly one novel every two years (twelve from 1973 to 1994), where now two to three new books appear bearing the Cussler name annually, a staggering 400 percent rise in production.
2. As might be expected, I found the 1999 Numa Files novel Serpent--the first of the coauthored novels--lackluster, and while I still read Atlantis Found (2000) and Valhalla Rising, 2003's Trojan Odyssey was simply unreadable, and haven't bothered to return to the Cussler brand since.
3. The release of two more co-authored books (the Oregon Files novel The Jungle, the Fargo Adventure The Kingdom) has already been announced for this year, further increasing their share of the total (to 29 of 48). This should be considered a low estimate, however, given that not all "co-authored" books are announced as such.

Clive Cussler's Dragon as a Novel of the '90s

From the standpoint of politics Clive Cussler's contributions to the thriller form tend to be of the "orthodox" kind, where all is pretty much well in and with his country and its system save for the nasties, usually foreigners, trying to muck it up. For many years these were usually KGB types (as in Raise the Titanic!, Deep Six and Cyclops), but, with the Cold War drawing to a close, and with Japanaphobia booming, it was for a Japanese plot that Cussler opted--with this the more conspicuous as, while militant anti-Communism and anti-Soviet sentiment can appear so much the background noise to American life as to be easily overlooked, simply accepted as the inevitable even by those not eager to hear more of it, the issue at hand was more novel and controversial for the mainstream.

Rather than merely choosing enemies for his hero according to those politics and then getting on with the story, Cussler is quite emphatic about the view that the economic challenge from Japan, and the Japanese, characterizing Japan as engaged in economic warfare against a United States whose leaders and people consistently failed to see that they were in fact in a war and act accordingly. Indeed, in a piece of particularly striking symbolism (not a word one uses often when discussing Dirk Pitt novels) the villains use as a critical component of their scheme for blackmailing the United States into political and economic submission Japanese-made cars imported into the U.S.--American commentators at the time regarding such vehicles as key symbols of Japanese industrial success and American decline.1 Similarly pointed is the reference Cussler makes to Japanese theft of American aerospace secrets, another then-significant but long since forgotten fear, as the furor over the FSX fighter program demonstrated--which program, incidentally, Cussler references more than once (on one occasion, informing them that a squadron of FSX fighters escort the villain's aircraft back to his home country). Meanwhile all these acts lead up to the villains' proceeding beyond economic warfare to the other kind, with their superiority in robotics becoming a key basis for their subjecting the U.S. to a latterday equivalent of the "Twenty-One Demands" the Japanese government attempted to impose on China during World War I.2 However, long before that point Cussler repeatedly made his view explicit in the remarks of the good guys, be it Pitt's longtime girlfriend Senator Loren Smith grilling a Japanese financier in committee, or the normally cool Pitt's own uncharacteristic political rant when they are alone together that prompts from her the joking suggestion that he follow his father, and her, into the U.S. Senate.

In the process, as was customary in Japan-themed thrillers of the early ‘90s like this one, Cussler retailed the stereotypical and simplistic cultural comment about Japanese society of the approved, "Establishment," experts to whom the mainstream media loves giving a vast platform, and then never calls out when they prove disastrously wrong. Thus we read here plenty about how the Japanese have always been and always will be a closed, culturally homogeneous, individuality-stifling society of ultra-conformists who "know their place"; follow harder, more ruthless leaders who brook no nonsense about rights, egalitarianism and democracy; and cheerfully sacrifice themselves on demand at their leaders' behest; in contrast with open, free-wheeling, diverse, tolerant, liberal, democratic America--such that many an American conservative, if deeming the Japanese irreconcilably Other and threatening, still seems to deep down envy them their model. (Thus does Pitt's rant at one point accuse Americans of "overconsuming" and preferring the "fast buck" over the foundations of prosperity and sovereignty as against the Japanese opposite--with the implication that some fault of the American culture evident in its people as a whole is the cause of the matter, and elite interests had nothing to do with the "fast buck" mentality and the supposed overconsumption. Thus does a different character, surveying a fully robotized Japanese workplace, think to himself of the "workers" operating "twenty-four hours a day without coffee breaks, lunch, or sick leave," and gratuitously add the cheap shot that such a setup would be "inconceivable to an American union leader"--implicitly endorsing the right-wing scapegoating of the '80s that held the "coddling" of the American workers whose unions were at that time being squashed to be what was holding the country back.)

It was a less than one-dimensional view of Japan that (a few token remarks about the villains not representing their country's people aside) overlooked the reality that all societies are complex, divided, conflicted, with Japan's no exception--as the "experts" should have better appreciated at the time, and would have appreciated at the time, had they bothered even to pay attention to the (Japanese) cartoons and (Japanese) video games their own children and grandchildren were growing up on. Now it all looks still more foolish. (After all, what a far cry this image of a hyper-dynamic but overcrowded superpower intent on acquiring Pacific Rim Lebensraum is from our contemporary image of a stagnating country in danger of being unable to keep itself peopled, as its supposedly ultra-conformist young people are now derided as NEETs, hikikomori, "parasite singles" in what the more prominent social commentators belatedly realized was not a purely Japanese trend!)

Cussler's espousal of these ideas to the point of building a thriller around them can seem the more significant in that, if Japanaphobia had been a theme of American popular culture for years (with Black Rain a hit and a grown-up Marty McFly being fired by his caricature of a Japanese boss the year before Dragon hit bookshelves), Cussler was still probably ahead of the curve, his book preceding by years other bestsellers emergent from that mood such as Michael Crichton's Rising Sun or Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, and so not just a sign of the times, but a likely influence on them. Indeed, I got the feeling that Clancy (whose applause for Cussler's novels I see in the front matter of my paperback copy of this book) not only read this one, but was considerably influenced by it as he wrote Debt of Honor--in the care he took to dissociate the villains from the Japanese government and the people, behind whose backs they for the most part operate; the attempt at nuclear blackmail in defense of the country's economic position; the Japanese-American intelligence agent key to exposing the villains' plans; and even the assault by vengeful Japanese villains on American legislators (the kidnap of Congressman Mike Diaz and Senator Loren Smith, perhaps, the germ of the idea for Debt's finale).

These days any attempt to make a movie of Dragon seems unlikely in the extreme--given how Hollywood has twice attempted to launch a Pitt franchise, and each time seen it end in very costly failure, while I suspect that, addicted as the studios are to sequels and prequels, reboots and remakes, Hollywood these days is less prone than before to adapt material that has appeared in book than in other forms (for the simple reason that fewer and fewer people read books these days, the interest of yesteryear's bestselling thrillers have a short half-life, and the Pitt franchise being rather a less hot "property" than it was in the early 2000s).3 Still, we are hearing reports of plans for a Debt of Honor movie.

I suspect that if such reports have any substance to them, and the movie actually gets made, it will bear no resemblance to that book in this respect, not least given the present attitude toward Japan in the U.S. press. Cussler's book is heavy on evocations of Japan's wartime aggression and atrocities; of the fact that that Japanese Establishment responsible for them never lost power (war criminals' remaining in power, and seeing their descendants follow them to the same high places) or ceased to defend its crimes; and of the equally factual reality that that Establishment hypocritically attacks Western racism and colonialism while denying its own racism and insisting on the "uplifting" character of its colonialism. By contrast today the American press can seem more eager to see Japan rearm than the Japanese people themselves, with that people's anti-militarism leaving American commentators scratching their heads--ever obtuse toward how people actually feel in Japan, and the neighboring countries, where memories of the war do not line up neatly with what seems convenient to American neoconservatives.

1. One might add that Cussler and his characters repeatedly compare the brown paint job of the cars in question to the color of "fertilizer," and at at least one point, more directly compare it to the substance “fertilizer” is intended to evoke.
2. As it did of China, Japan demands of the U.S. concessions of strategic territory it regards as particularly significant to its interests and ambitions (outright cession of not just Hawaii but California, just as Japan had demanded the cession of the Fukien province on the opposite side of the Strait of Formosa); and cession of control over government finances and the direction of its economy, not least by demanding accept Japanese administrators in key government positions. As Cussler makes no reference to the 1915 demands I have no idea whether they were a model for him here or not. (Cussler displays little interest in Japan's imperialism prior to World War II, and is all too reflective of the kind of comment available to most Americans at the time in that the experts tended in general to have no knowledge or interest in Japanese history, about which little was available in English--as many an anime fan learns when their interest is stoked in, say, the Shinsengumi and tries to read up on them.)
3. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels had been around for three decades in the early 2000s, but this particular action-adventure series, like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, weathered the end of the Cold War and the broader collapse of the action-adventure fiction market rather better than most of the competition. Moreover, the coincidence of its release with one of the twenty-first century's most catastrophic events would seem to have helped make 2001's Pitt novel, Valhalla Rising, a stronger than usual seller; while the success of Doug Liman's adaptation of The Bourne Identity seems to have strengthened the interest of Hollywood in the rights to comparable thriller series (like Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series, which got a movie version in 2007, and the Pitt novels, which got their second crack at the big screen in 2005's Sahara). No such inducements to Hollywood's giving Pitt another chance have been seen since.

Clive Cussler's 1993 in Dragon

From quite early on Clive Cussler got in the habit of setting his Dirk Pitt novels a few years ahead into the future, so as to offer some latitude for the political and technological changes without which his scenarios would not be as plausible, especially in the case of novels like Night Probe! (1981)--or Dragon (1990). Part I of the latter novel incorporates in Cussler's version of 1993 undersea mining stations 16,000 feet down with all their apparatus and vehicles, and satellites with sensors which can render the oceans effectively transparent to investigators, with these things not merely interesting gimmicks but indispensable to the unfolding of the plot--while the technology gets only more exotic from there, not least where the robotics are concerned.

Of course, not only did we not have that stuff in 1993, we do not have it in 2023, and at this much later date are unsure that we ever will. (This applies even to another technology critical to the unfolding of the plot of Dragon, autonomous cars.)

Considering the fact it seems to me reflective of the line between "techno-thriller" and "science fiction" having been thinner for '70s-era techno-thriller writers like himself, or his contemporary Martin Caidin (who like Cussler, was fond of writing in not just imaginary technology but cryptohistory and cryptoarchaeology, as seen in The Messiah Stone, or the third of his Steve Austin novels, High Crystal).

The differentiation of the two genres also seems to have gone with the techno-thriller writers becoming more intent on persuading the reader that their fiction was in fact well-grounded. A Tom Clancy, for example, who did read Clive Cussler, and in some cases seemed to follow his footsteps (I suspect Cussler's influence when I look at Debt of Honor), never expected his readers to take seriously anything like Dragon's undersea mining station, or presented his spy satellites as able to peer through the sea that way--and while some of what he envisioned has since come to seem science fiction-al (as with his conception of anti-missile defenses in The Cardinal of the Kremlin), these were lapses, in this case a product of the wildly overblown '80s-era hype about them by which Clancy was taken in, even as he generally strove to "get the details right" to a much greater degree than Cussler did. (Clancy generally purported to write about real technologies, while Cussler, especially in his earlier books, did not hesitate to make things up even when he did not have to do so. Thus in Deep Six an "F/A-21" fighter plane launched "laser-guided" anti-ship missiles at a key part of the narrative. The U.S. did not have, even on the drawing board, F/A-21 fighter planes or laser-guided anti-ship missiles that would have been launched from such, and such would never have appeared in a Clancy novel.)

However, it seems to me there may be more than the care to "keep things grounded" and "get the details right" differentiating them--especially from the standpoint of a reader looking back. They might scoff at Cussler's seaQuest-like undersea mining station, or the advanced robotics of the tale, but such stations were supposed to be a near-term possibility when Cussler began writing his books, while there was a lot of hype about robotics, and the artificial intelligence controlling them, back in the '80s, and especially what Japan was supposed to be accomplishing in that field. (Remember, fifth-generation computing was going to change the world!) Expectations in both these areas (like the expectations in regard to anti-missile defense) have become more modest as we became habituated to the generally lowered expectations of an era of technological stagnation in which the "techno" became less thrilling than it seemed just a short time earlier.

Review: Trojan Odyssey, by Clive Cussler

New York: Putnam, 2003, pp. 496.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Clive Cussler's Trojan Odyssey marks the end of an era in many ways. Not only is it the case that this is the last Dirk Pitt novel on which Clive Cussler's name appears without a coauthor. It is also the first novel to include Dirk Jr. and Summer in the adventure, just as the single, adventurous Dirk Sr. puts that part of his life behind him, marrying his longtime girlfriend Loren Smith and taking over the directorship of NUMA from Admiral Sandecker. These changes of life will pretty much keep him out of the field (in both those ways), and pave the way for the principal "Dirk Pitt" of the novels to be the son from this point on.

Naturally, I would like to be able to say that the sequence of "Dirk Pitt Sr." novels goes out strong. Alas, the first time I tried to read it I didn't make it past page one hundred and fifty. I suppose that part of the problem was that I had become less forgiving of Cussler's literary weaknesses in the decade since I started the series. However, it is also the case that this part of the book--which consists mostly of an ocean resort and the Pitt twins being inconveniently in the way of a hurricane--comes across as both overfamiliar to readers of his previous books, and agonizingly slow.

Hoping that the rest of the book would be better I later returned to it and pressed on. Having done so I can say that the pace and interest do pick up in the second half of the story. Still, while the story gets better, it does not get very much better. Despite being shorter than many of the preceding Pitt epics, ending on just page 485 in the hardback edition, it felt overlong, with many later bits excessively drawn out.

Moreover, that sense of overfamiliarity remained. Cussler's previous novels are not merely referenced (as would be appropriate in a transitional work like this), but recycled. There is a lot of Sahara here in particular--for instance, in the spread of conspicuous, rapidly spreading, ocean-killing pollution from a mysterious source ("brown crud" in the Caribbean), and the dispatch of Pitt, Al Giordino and Rudi Gunn aboard a disguised high-tech vessel to check it out early in the story. Same as in that other novel, the subsequent adventure involves a river journey, an old colonial fortress, an ecologically destructive high-tech facility incorporating cutting-edge energy technology, action underground, and a party of foreigners enslaved by the baddie.

Where the book does not reuse familiar elements it is often simply hokey--as with the holographic pirates Pitt encounters off the coast of Nicaragua, which as a deception intended to keep people from the area would embarrass the clumsiest Scooby-Doo villain; or the unmasking of a major villain in the middle of a Congressional hearing, which likewise comes across as something out of a Scooby-Doo episode. One does not expect, or usually get, much logic in the schemes of supervillains in novels like these, but the connection of their revolutionary technological breakthrough with a plan to change the climate of much of the Earth seemed especially shaky. At the same time, while the novel's exercise in fringe history is one of Cussler's more intriguing--an alternative explanation of the true history behind the legend of the Trojan War based on the work of Iman Wilkens--we never quite get clarity on the meaning of of the revelations (like why a Druidess is buried in an elaborate tomb in the West Indies).

And the vigor of the handling leaves much to be desired, Dirk and Al's Central American adventure paling next to what we saw in earlier installments (not least, the West African adventure Cussler recycled so much of here). When the narration remarks Pitt and Giordino feeling more tired than they can remember ever being, this comes across as a reflection of their aging bodies, rather than the author's topping his earlier efforts. Perhaps advancing age is also the reason for the painful slowness of the protagonists to grasp what became obvious to the reader--the secret the villain conceals behind the unusual attire, the source of the brown crud.

Meanwhile, NUMA's next generation--Dirk Jr. and Summer--have little interest in themselves, and what Cussler does with them this time around, at least, is not terribly interesting either. Nor does it contribute meaningfully to the sense of transition the rest of the book seems to strive for. Rather than their being given a chance to come into their own, which would give us a sense of the torch being passed, they come off as marginal and hapless in the tale's bigger events.

Cussler partially redeems himself in the final chapter, which manages to be suitably charming, and takes some of the sting out of the disappointment in what came before--but just as Loren Smith may feel that she has waited longer than she should have to make her longtime relationship with Dirk legal, the reader may come away feeling that this should all have happened a few novels earlier.

Review: Deep Six, by Clive Cussler

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984, pp. 432.

Clive Cussler's Deep Six (1984) can be thought of as something of a transitional work for the author, occupying a space in between his early, tightly focused, short novels like Raise the Titanic (1976), Vixen 03 (1978) and Night Probe (1981), and the later, sprawling, epic action-adventures which began with Cyclops (1986).

Even though I usually read right through Cussler's books after picking them up (back when I did read them), I started this one a few times before making much headway in it. This had much to do with Cussler's handling of the book's two main plot threads--the first, an investigation of a marine disaster in the northern Pacific, and the second, the mystery following the disappearance of the presidential yacht (with the President, Vice-President, Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate all aboard). The first mystery engages Pitt and his friends from NUMA exclusively for the first third of the book or so. They only become involved with the second mystery in the book's middle, and play only a minor role in that investigation until the last third of the story, when the connection between the two series' of events finally becomes clear.

Filling the gap in between is a great deal of inside-the-Beltway intriguing among officials of the National Security Council and the Secret Service--which at times left me with the impression that I'd put down Cussler's book and picked up one by Tom Clancy instead. As is usually the case with these novels, Cussler's included, the portrait of D.C. struck me as simplistic and inauthentic, devoid as it is of the sausage factory-like quality of real-life politics. This is a Washington without lobbyists and political action-committees and revolving doors between industry and government, where politicians who take campaign contributions from shady special interests are "bad apples" and the "power elite" is described as "elected"--in short, a sanitized civics class textbook's version of governance (much as seen in other Cussler novels, admittedly, but more problematic here because of the foregrounding of this part of the story). The foreign politics are equally lacking in nuance, down to the foreign villains, who are, not unexpectedly, one-dimensional clichés that occasionally cross the line into racism, with the unsurprising result that the Soviet strategy comes off as astonishingly clumsy in stark counterpoint to the tactical and technological genius the KGB and its partners display in executing the scheme.

In short, others have done this stuff before and after and in many cases better, and it is poor compensation for what is missing in the earlier parts of the story, where in their limited appearances Pitt and company merely contribute to a couple of underwater searches (the second of them treated rather briefly), and engage in some mostly stationary detective work. We are more than halfway through the book before Pitt has his first brushes with the bad guys, and it is some time after that before he gets up to his usual antics. The result is a story that gets better as it goes along, with the last third providing exactly the kind of thing for which Cussler's readers come to his books, especially in the action-packed finale full of over-the-top heroics, flashy military hardware and creative anachronism as the clock ticks down to disaster. But getting to that point is occasionally a slog.

Characterizations and Prose in the Popular Thriller: Clive Cussler's Dragon

Recently reviewing Clive Cussler's Dragon I considered the book as a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novel from the period I associate with his best. Thus I had much to say of the book's structure and incidents, pacing and action, focus and flow (which had me concluding that even if other entries in the series were stronger in various ways, the book as a whole works, in cases quite impressively).

I did not raise the matter of literary qualities such as characterization and prose--which were pretty much as expected for Cussler novels, and for popular thrillers generally.

That is to say--they were, are, pretty bad in certain specific ways that were outside my concerns as a reviewer at that time, but of which something may be worth saying.

One may as well start with the most conventional of expectations, as laid out by that most conventional of critics, James Wood. Far from the author's "maintain[ing] an unsentimental composure and know[ing] how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary" as Wood says, such that the "author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible," in the Dirk Pitt novels Cussler's voice erupts into the narrative so often and blatantly and melodramatically (for instance, to hint at some doom the characters did not yet expect) one could be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a Victorian-era book for a not particularly sophisticated audience. Thus it is not enough that almost everyone is a superhuman Gary Stu, but we are beaten over the head with the fact by the chunky character sketch he presents at each introduction of one of his principal dramatis personae. The artlessness of the presentation annoys me less than the triteness and falsity of what was being presented, affirming innumerable, quite stupid social prejudices. Still, the artlessness reflects a broader and very frequent tendency to overdescribe that constantly undercuts what Cussler is actually achieving by pouring out more words past the point at which he ought to have stopped. (Pursuing villains Pitt believes have kidnapped his longtime girlfriend Cussler tells us that "if they harmed her, they would die, [Pitt] vowed ruthlessly." Was there an un-ruthless way to vow that?) Quite naturally, this is the kind of novel where characters "shake their heads" every time they utter a negative (perhaps not so much as in Larry Bond's books, but not much less either, this quirk popping up scores of times in Dragon). The narration is also replete with comparisons that use up a good many words in distracting and confusing rather than enlightening. (We are told that the villain's dining hall recalled those of "the most palatial castles of Europe" and then almost immediately told that almost everything in the chamber was "distinctly Japanese," from the paper lantern lighting, to the bamboo carpet, to the paintings by Japanese masters on the walls. So, basically, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to its counterparts in European castles.)

I find myself more sensitive to such failings all the time, which do not improve the reading experience. Nevertheless, grating as they could be the story did more than survive them--much more. It is a reminder that those aspects of literary craftsmanship that middlebrow critics tend to emphasize are only part of writing, not the whole of it, and that like all writers and works which excel according to one measure or another they do so not because they get everything right, but because what they got right mattered more than what they got wrong.

Review: Pacific Vortex! by Clive Cussler.

New York: Bantam Books, 1982, pp. 266.

Clive Cussler's Pacific Vortex! occupies an interesting place in the Dirk Pitt series. While the first book he wrote, it is only the sixth that he published, actually appearing after 1981's Night Probe!1

As all this suggests, the book is evidently an early effort. Certainly many of the elements for which the series are well-known are present in this tale of Pitt going on vacation in Hawaii and getting caught up in the deadly intrigue surrounding a missing U.S. Navy submarine - the James Bondian adventure, particularly heavy on maritime action; the over-the-top villains with their nautically themed conspiracies. Yet, as Cussler himself acknowledges in his foreword, the plot is rather less intricate than in later books (let alone epics like Cyclops). The events of the story are limited to the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands, while the narrative is much more closely focused on Pitt's person and actions.

The writing also tends toward the thin rather than the lean. Ideas, descriptions, scenes are less thoroughly fleshed out than they would be in Cussler's later work, and in some cases, less fleshed out than they should be. The rationale for the villain's actions seems underdeveloped, as does his organization. The underwater complex that is the scene of the final confrontation, while adequately portrayed for the purposes of the climax, feels like an eccentric's hideout rather than the site of a community of hundreds it is supposed to be. Pitt's romance with Summer Moran is likewise underwritten, all the more so given the crucial event in Pitt's life that later novels have made it out to be.2 And Cussler's comparative casualness with technical detail gets to be a bit much. The story's MacGuffin, the submarine Starbuck, is held to be capable of a hundred and twenty-five knot speeds, without a single word offered as to what revolutionary technology enables this incredible performance.

Pitt's world also seems less fully "peopled" than it would later become. The fictional version of the National Underwater Marine Agency (NUMA) is less fully realized than it would be in his later work (though admittedly the organization plays a smaller part here than in most of his stories), and the entourage of characters readers are accustomed to seeing surrounding Pitt still only in development, and used in only limited ways. Admiral Sandecker puts in just a brief appearance at the start, while Al Giordino turns up only in time to take part in the finale. Rudi Gunn is merely mentioned, while Hiram Yeager, Julien St. Perlmutter and Loren Smith do not even seem to be a notion as yet.

Still, if the book comes off not only as a rough prototype for what Cussler would later write, but more generally displays many of the weaknesses common to authors' early efforts (as well as editing that would, in spots, make reviewers scream for blood if it appeared in an indie book), it also displays many of the virtues of those efforts. The action and plotting, while less inventive or elaborate than those of many of the later Pitt novels, nonetheless feel fresher. The same economy with prose that makes this shortest of Pitt's adventures feel thin in places also gives it a brisk pace that compares favorably with later works, like the flabby Trojan Odyssey. And the appeal of the essential concept, the talent of the author for telling this kind of story, are equally evident. The result is not the grandest or best of Pitt's adventures (I remain fondest of Cyclops, Treasure and Sahara), but one I found reasonably satisfying nonetheless.

1. That the first Pitt adventure written was not the first published is not unusual, many an author producing not just several books, but several in the same series, before getting one through the publishing industry's gauntlet - invariably kinder to the repetitive hackwork of an over-the-hill pro than the more original work of a first-timer. To cite but one example, Iain Banks' Consider Phlebas was actually his fourth Culture novel.
2. Those who read the more recent works will also be left wondering when Pitt could possibly have conceived the twins with her who figure so prominently in the novels from Valhalla Rising on. I understand that Cussler has admitted to "goofing" on this score.

Who's Reading Clive Cussler?

Once again it occurred to me to go to Goodreads to check out the evidences it offered of interest in one of those authors I so often find myself writing about, Clive Cussler in this case.

As I expected (because it seems to have been particularly popular with fans--it was certainly my personal favorite--and because of the movie version) Sahara headlined the list with regard to the number of ratings.

What I should have expected, but didn't, was the fewness of those ratings--the book having fewer than 58,000.

I also didn't expect (though I should have) that the next most popular book was the other one with a movie made out of it (and the word "Titanic" in the title) Raise the Titanic!, with less than half Sahara's unprepossessing number of ratings--a mere 26,000, with the number falling from there. Next on the list was the follow-up to Sahara, Inca Gold, followed by Atlantis Found--boosted by the Atlantis theme, I guess--and then Valhalla Rising, which because of its uncanny coincidence with the horrific events of September 2001, got a sales bump that gave it the only place any Dirk Pitt novel enjoys on the Publisher's Weekly top-ten-of-the-year lists, standing at #8.

Where the main-line Clive Cussler (and not Clive and Dirk Cussler)-authored Dirk Pitt books were concerned it seemed that older books tended to do less well than newer ones. Treasure and Cyclops (two books I held in particularly high regard as a fan) trailed the later (I thought, repetitive and tired) Shock Wave and Flood Tide and even the particularly disappointing Trojan Odyssey. Still, it struck me that the more recent, Goodreads-era continuations and tie-ins, the latest installments of which one still finds on grocery store paperback racks, did not better them. (The most “successful” of the post-Trojan Odyssey books was The Treasure of Khan, the most successful of the tie-ins the Grant Blackwood coauthored Spartan Gold, with about half of what Raise the Titanic! got.)

Altogether the pattern seems to me to fit what I saw with Robert Ludlum not so long ago, the biggest hits generally outdoing the less successful ones, later books doing better than earlier ones, and the books that got adaptations to other media doing better than those that did not, all of which combined to put a particularly popular later novel that got a major twenty-first century film adaptation far and away at the top--and almost everything else in the range of 20,000 ratings or less. Given that they were both roughly contemporaneous authors producing broadly similar fiction (writers who came along in the '70s and quickly made their mark with espionage stories of the more action-adventure-oriented type) the parallel may not be so surprising, but I also find myself thinking of how different Cussler could be from Ludlum. Cussler's novels were, generally, more simply plotted and more simply and plainly written than Ludlum's, and especially by the time of books like Cyclops, rather more summer blockbuster-like in subject matter and feel--more accessible, more fun for most, I would imagine. Certainly Cussler had his politics, same as the other genre authors did, but it probably mattered that, if probably not too different from those of his colleague Tom Clancy's, treated relatively casually in comparison with Clancy's stridency in such matters, and because the way the whole was put together one did not take him so seriously (because the plot points revolved around things like secret bases on the moon)--with the result that the books still dated, but perhaps less bothersomely for many who do not necessarily agree with him (so long as they do not look too closely--as one is reminded when recalling the furor over Sahara). Nevertheless, to go by what I see here, the fact would not seem to have helped him quite so much where his readership was concerned.

Review: Vixen 03, by Clive Cussler

New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 364.

The real point of transition in Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt series from the small-scale novels of the early years (like The Mediterranean Caper and Raise the Titanic!) to the large-scale plots of his later books (like Sahara) was Deep Six, but the much earlier Vixen 03 still represents a tentative step in that direction. It is much more compact, but has something of the later book's divided plot structure, starting with two different threads that eventually tie together - Pitt's happening upon mysterious aircraft wreckage while on vacation in Colorado's Sawatch mountains with his girlfriend Loren Smith (introduced here for the first time); and the battle of the South African government against African-American expatriate Hiram Lusana's anti-apartheid guerrilla group African Army of the Revolution, in which each seeks the support of the United States.

The story has its share of implausibilities, particularly at the levels of geopolitics and technology. The D.C. hijinks, a frequent weak point of technothriller writing, have members of the House of Representatives making American foreign policy in a simplified, sanitized near-vacuum. (The soap operatic sleaze of the blackmail attempt against Loren merely underlines the absence of the real sleaze of practical politics from Cussler's portrait of the Beltway.1) The prospect of the U.S.'s supporting Communist-backed South African guerrillas against their government in the midst of the Cold War seems more like a rightist fear of radical (or radical chic) influence over American foreign policy than a plausible extrapolation. (We see Hiram Lusana lobbying in D.C. - with the help of Hollywood starlet Felicia Collins - but no Jack Abramoff-type making Pretoria's case, with the help of the Hollywood connections that brought us Red Scorpion.2) The Quick Death virus that ends up playing a key role in the plot is a rather convenient and casual creation, as its very name indicates. (It kills exposed humans in minutes, and renders infected areas uninhabitable for centuries - but while being unkillable by anything else, is totally and instantly neutralized by immersion in water.)

In fairness, though, authorial rigor in these areas (let alone insight into the great affairs of the day) is rarely the attraction of the Dirk Pitt novel. Rather what compels is the adventure Cussler spins out of them, and this book certainly provides its fair share of undersea exploration, nautical mystery and over-the-top action. It is the South African plot line which initially supplies the last, but the relatively tight writing and fast pace soon enough bring on the convergence. And this culminates in a climax that may have lost something of the retro appeal it had at the time of the book's publication, but which is sufficiently intricate, inventive and spectacular to remain one of Cussler's more memorable thirty-five prolific years on.3

1. One can also see the blackmail plot, like the heavier accent on sex in Cussler's '70s-era work, as a concession to the fashions of the period (and perhaps, the influence of a certain British predecessor), preceding our era of celibate action heroes.
2. It is worth remembering that Vixen 03 appeared the very same year as Graham Greene's classic spy novel The Human Factor, which offered a very different, and much more realistic, take on the situation.
3. This would be a matter of certain Defense Department procurement decisions which will be immediately apparent to any reader familiar with the 600-Ship Navy program initiated in the 1980s.

Returning to Sahara: The Dirk Pitt Novels On Screen

Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt series has had an exceptionally unfortunate history on the big screen, each of the two attempts to film one of his novels--1980's Raise the Titanic and 2005's Sahara--ending up a notoriously expensive critical and commercial flop.1 Raise the Titanic has been blamed for killing ITC Entertainment, while Sahara resulted in a loss of over a hundred million dollars for the producer, as well as a spectacular legal battle that, as far as I can tell, has continued to this day.2 The latter is strongly connected with the more active role Cussler got as part of the terms on which the movie was made, and which he claimed the producers never honored.

Looking back it seems that there was never any question of the script closely following the book. Sahara's images of a Third World country where everyone is either a villain or an anonymous victim, its scenes in which Africans turn cannibal and attack foreign tourists, in which Pitt threatens to bury a Malian antagonist with bacon in his mouth, its climax in which a handful of Western heroes hole up in an old colonial fort and fight off a siege by vastly more numerous native soldiers they kill by the hundred, before their rescue by the cavalry (literally, a U.S. Army cavalry unit)--one doesn't have to be trained in post-linguistic turn literary theory or more than ordinarily given to approaching popular fiction as "cultural text" to see that these elements could have been problematic for a twenty-first century audience (a point highlighted by the film's producers when discussing Cussler's input on the scripts).3

The plotline about a United Nations commando team reflected the anticipations in the early '90s that the United Nations would be a more powerful, independent entity after the Cold War's close, which have long since become passé. The heavy weaponry on the Calliope probably seemed a bit over the top, like the pre-reboot James Bond--and perhaps a bit pricier than the producers wanted to go--much like the siege at the end (an idea that had already been used quite heavily in movies during those years, as with the Lord of the Rings and Matrix series, though frankly it would have made for a good set piece). Ditto for the plotline about the end of Abraham Lincoln's life (the principal bit of historical-archaeological interest the novel had).

All that makes it seem an unlikely candidate for an adaptation, but all this is the sort of thing that only seems obvious when one has actually read the material. The more casual glance that likely decided the issue simply noted that the Dirk Pitt novels were a bestselling series of globe-trotting action thrillers, a natural enough object of Hollywood's interest, especially with the surprising success of the Jason Bourne series--the film versions of which also jettisoned most of the stuff of the books--apparently encouraging the tendency to seize on such work.4 And there certainly were some reasons to think the Pitt novels would be worth a shot. The fast-paced plots and rapid-fire action of Cussler's novels are very cinematic in feel. The element of historical mystery that is a prominent feature of the series probably looked like a significant plus at the time. (After all, these were the years when Dan Brown became a full-blown pop cultural phenomenon, and the National Treasure films became the biggest success of Nicholas Cage's career.) And Sahara, which certainly had these two traits going for it, likely seemed easier to adapt than some of Cussler's other books. Its plot is a bit more grounded than lost continent tales like Atlantis Found (2000), for instance. It doesn't require nearly so much updating as the apartheid-era Vixen 03 (1978) or Cold War intrigues like Deep Six (1984) and Cyclops (1986). And for all the political difficulties mentioned above (perhaps more obvious when one starts thinking seriously about the conversion from page to screen), adapting it remained less awkward than Night Probe (1981), with its plot about the United States struggling with Britain for possession of Canada, or the Sinophobia and xenophobia-laden storyline of Flood Tide (1998).

And so it seemed like a good idea at the time--just as bad ideas usually do when people get it into their heads to act on them.

1. Those who have not seen the film might want to check out a fair review of it at the Den of Geek, written retrospectively just last year.
2. The film has in fact been taken as an object lesson in Hollywood's mismanagement of large budgets--the production budget doubling from $80 to $160 million (in part, because of script problems), and the distribution costs coming to a preposterous $81 million more. The Los Angeles Times published a special report on the matter including exceptionally detailed figures for expenses (specifying everything from the $102,884 spent on walkie-talkies, to the $48,893 Matthew McConaughey's personal chef received in compensation--more than Rainn Wilson got for playing Rudi Gunn--to bribes to various Moroccan officials).
3. Alas, such elements are common throughout Cussler's work, perhaps more so than in most thriller fiction--as with the Japanaphobia of Dragon (1990) or the treatment of immigrants as instruments of a Chinese plot for the conquest of America in Flood Tide (1998)--but his books still seem like a font of citizen-of-the-world cosmopolitanism next to the writings of John Ringo, Thomas Kratman and a good many others who have come to prominence in the past decade. Say what you will, this is certainly not a case of "now we know better."
4. The Bourne Identity (2002) dropped the plotline about 1970s-era international terrorism and the hunt for Carlos the Jackal--both long passé by that point, with that era's groups all but vanished and Carlos himself sitting in a French prison. (Since the third book, The Bourne Ultimatum, was "round two" for the Bourne-Carlos fight, the 2007 film also used a plot developed from scratch.) The element of jet set sophistication, and the edgier aspects of Jason and Marie's relationship (like his kidnapping her at gunpoint) were similarly dropped. The result, in my view anyway, was pretty thin stuff since the writers didn't really bother to replace what they removed.

Review: Dragon, by Clive Cussler

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

As a reader of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels I have long felt that Cussler hit his peak with his early 500-pagers--his first cracks at what book critics in the '70s were, in the wake of bestsellers like those of Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum and Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, calling "super-thrillers." Those books were specifically 1986's Cyclops, 1988's Treasure, 1990's Dragon, and 1992's Sahara.

Of the four I have tended to think Dragon the weakest. In fact, where I read the other three straight through, cover to cover, on first picking them up, I remember skimming long stretches of Dragon--and only recently picked it up again.

I think I still like the other three better. But my impression of this one is more favorable than before--even if looking at the book again I am reminded of what I did not like about it so much. If there is vigor, briskness and ingenuity here, Cussler had also been very productive for two decades at the time he wrote this one and, like most writers at that stage of things, was reusing significant elements of his older work. The derelict ship in the book's opening sequence, the associated marine disaster, the involvement of Asian shipping in it, very obviously recall the plot of Deep Six. So does the structure of what follows--not least in its failings. The opening incident has a very great deal to commend it--a robust combination of suspense, action and gadgetry that includes the book's finest "set piece," with the manner of Pitt's involvement in the disaster giving a stronger than usual dramatic edge to his desire to get the culprits (it isn't just "Someone killed my favorite second cousin" this time), while also laying key groundwork for the finale. Still, at bottom the kind of thing that in a Bond film would probably be packed into the few minutes of the pre-credits scene, here it takes up almost a quarter of the book before the investigation and associated adventure properly begins. Moreover that adventure has a comparatively disjointed feel. An early display of self-assertion on Pitt's part apart, the book consists of a weary Pitt time and again being told to take a long flight out to some scene to perform some incredibly unlikely and hazardous task by government officials previously unknown to us who are the ones actually managing the crisis and solving the mystery as they send Pitt off after this clue or to perform that task. (Indeed, I could not think of any prior Pitt adventure which was not only so scattershot--a quality epitomized for me by the junket to Germany--but in which Pitt was so passive.)

Moreover, where such disjointedness in thrillers of this type is so often a matter of a writer trying to cram in more action than the frame of the narrative can hold, the book, while offering plenty of adventure, danger and violence, is relatively light on "action," if one thinks of this as physical confrontation, and especially interpersonal combat, between hero and villain. The good guys have their first proper brushes with the enemy only a third of the way in, and Pitt his first contact with enemy agents after page 200 of my 542 page paperback edition, after which there is still less than we tend to get in the bigger Pitt books. The principal car chase has Pitt pursuing a vehicle with no human inside it, while there is just one proper shootout, and that shoehorned in that action-cramming way (the villains electing to send what feels like a platoon of ninjas to take Pitt out, just because he seems "a threat," resulting in a set piece that could have been easily excised without doing the slightest damage to the narrative). Indeed, if Pitt's personal motive for "getting to the bottom of things" are stronger than usual, the way in which things play out mean that there is no final face-to-face confrontation with any of the villains, these in the end destroyed impersonally or left to others with which to deal. (The final fate of the figure set up as "the big bad" is very anticlimactic, particularly given that Cussler gives us a suitably Bond movie-like capture-the-hero-and-then-chat-with-him-over-a-luxurious-dinner scene before that.)

From the standpoint of flow and of focus the result is a far cry from what we got in, for example, Sahara, once the Calliope gets upriver. Still, if it does not work in every way on the whole it tends to work very well indeed. Disjointed as the narrative was, I still kept turning the pages, in part because Cussler keeps the pace brisk (helped in this by the frequent changes of scene the structure allows), while if feeling like a collection of bits the bits, even the shoehorned bits, tend to be very good (as with that shootout with the ninjas), such that the reuse of old elements is often to superior results (Dragon never dragging the way Deep Six often did). If that still does not quite put it on a level with favorites like Sahara, Treasure or Cyclops, it pleasantly surprised me again and again by reminding me just how good these adventures were at their very best, and still beats just about anything else in the Dirk Pitt series for sheer entertainment.

Dirk Pitt Returns?

Recently reviewing the stats for this blog, I was struck by the number of web surfers who found their way to it looking for information about the possibility of Hollywood making more Dirk Pitt movies, whether sequels to Sahara (2005), or a new, "rebooted" series which starts with a clean slate (to judge by the frequency with which search keywords like "dirk pitt movie 2" and "any more dirk pitt movies" turn up in the section titled "traffic sources"). This seems to be mainly because of my earlier post, "Returning to Sahara: The Dirk Pitt Novels on Screen."

That post considered the pitfalls involved in translating Clive Cussler's novel Sahara from the page to the screen, rather than any plans for more Dirk Pitt films, about which I have heard, seen or read absolutely nothing – which is exactly what I would expect. The fact that Sahara was a commercial disappointment ordinarily would not rule out the studios taking another shot. After all, Hollywood has proven nothing short of fanatical about trying to squeeze every penny it can out of any and every established IP, and as fans can attest, the Dirk Pitt novels sure look like obvious source material for big-budget action-adventure films – especially as this franchise remains very much alive, new entries continuing to regularly appear on bestseller lists. Of course, as I pointed out in my previous post, adapting Pitt's adventures to the big screen is trickier than it looks, given how dated some of the plots have become (in light of changes in world politics, and industry sensibilities), but Hollywood has never been averse to seizing on a brand name and a few other select trappings (a character, a gimmick), and dispensing with everything else, and in the process launching a commercially viable film sequence, even as it leaves the purists unsatisfied. (They did it with James Bond, after all. And Jason Bourne. And Star Trek. And others far too numerous to list here.)

However, it is worth remembering that Sahara wasn't just a disappointment, but could be described without any hyperbole whatsoever as one of the biggest flops in movie history – and that this came on top of an earlier production of a Dirk Pitt film (1980's Raise the Titanic) which could be described in exactly the same terms. Indeed, one might say Cussler was lucky to see his series get a second chance, even if it took twenty-five years for this to happen. The way that extraordinary opportunity went has left the material seeming almost cursed – and silly as that may sound, one should not overestimate the rationality of this business. (In fact, when so much money is at stake, the factors to be weighed in the decisions regarding its use are so intangible, and every facet of commerce has come to be seeped in a casino mentality, one should bet on Hollywood's irrationality every time.) Perhaps even more frightening than any such curse, Cussler himself did not manage to have a good relationship with the producers, with the result a protracted, grinding legal battle in the aftermath of the film's financially ruinous shooting and release – and that is something that will frighten the least superstitious of Suits.

All that being the case, it may be a long time before anyone takes another crack at this series, if ever. However, for what it's worth, you can be sure that I will have something to say about any new developments in that story here.

Dirk Pitt, an American James Bond?

The James Bond franchise has been global success, but has also had a very particular niche in postwar British culture: the lone hero as a source of salvation for a power in decline, and validation for the idea that Britain could still matter in the world. When the United States sought such heroes in the 1970s it looked not to spies, but to cops like Dirty Harry and commandos like Rambo. At the same time, the other characteristics for which Bond is known, his combination of high life and adventure, and the extravagant quality of his adventures (with their colorful villains, gadgets and the like), has its best-known American counterparts in comic book tycoon-vigilantes like Batman and Iron Man, who face off against figures like The Joker and The Mandarin with the help of quirky high-tech arsenals.

Yet American pop culture, too, has produced its share of spies, for which James Bond has been a reference point, and sometimes more. Of course, few approach those figures named above as cultural icons. Derek Flint and the screen version of Matt Helm were fairly obvious and not very substantial imitations, which at any rate parodied Bond much more than matching or reinterpreting him, and have hardly been the most enduring of creations. One might say the same of the more recent Harry Tasker or Xander Cage, the latter a generational update already in need of updating again, were the envisaged XXX3 to get off the ground.

Some might suggest Jason Bourne as America's James Bond, given his clear cachet in recent years - but the Bourne of the films is a cipher (the whole idea is that he doesn't know who he is), the Bourne of the novels an academic who was sucked into a bizarre game by a personal catastrophe. Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan might seem another possibility - but he is an analyst dragged into the field on a few brief if wild adventures before his meteoric rise through the national security hierarchy (ending with the Presidency of the United States!) made that all out of the question. And at any rate, Ryan's being a family man of working-class origins and simple tastes (unchanged by the money he made and married) makes him rather a different figure, less glamorous, less urbane, the fantasy the character lives out of a much less hedonistic, much more socially conservative sort. So too his more field-oriented counterpart, Jonathan Clark. The characters mentioned here also happen to star in much more grounded tales than the Bond novels, let alone the Bond films (certainly Ryan has no dramatic showdowns to compare with Bond's face off against Hugo Drax or Goldfinger or Ernst Stavro Blofeld), with Clancy's books often seeing the good guys fail to avert some catastrophic attack against the U.S. - and then struggle with the aftermath (as in The Sum of All Fears, Debt of Honor and Executive Orders).1

Indiana Jones - the answer of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to the Bond series - comes much closer in the style of 007's adventures (the travel, the involvements with women, the feel of the action, the villains, etc.). However, Jones is also a much bigger divergence from the pattern given his being an archaeologist first and secret agent second, the setting of his adventures a half century back, and the heavy paranormal element (the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, aliens). One might add, too, that despite the undisputed place of the films in pop culture, the franchise was largely of the '80s, which saw the release of the first three films (in 1981, 1984 and 1989), and a fourth only two decades later in 2008, rather than being a vigorous going concern over a lengthier period in various media - the way Bond has, and for that matter, the way Jason Bourne and Jack Ryan have been.

Still, where the big screen is concerned, he probably comes closest, though if one considers print characters which have been less conspicuous in other media, Dirk Pitt seems rather a plausible candidate. Granted, like Jones, Pitt is not primarily a spy, his job title instead "Special Projects Director for the National Underwater and Marine Agency," which makes his bread and butter salvage jobs rather than espionage. Yet, in the books NUMA is not the small private organization Cussler founded, but a large government agency with five thousand employees, making Pitt a government operative in his own right, all the more so as he came to NUMA a military officer - an Air Force Major (eventually promoted to Lieutenant Colonel), just as Bond is a Commander in the Royal Navy. Like Bond he is also a war veteran (of Vietnam, where he flew combat missions) who takes his orders from the very head of his agency, who, appropriately for an organization so concerned with the sea, happens to be an Admiral, just like the original M. Also like Bond, Pitt combines a privileged background (his father, George Pitt, is a United States Senator) with a rather un-aristocratc ruggedness (while incidentally happening to be tall, visibly athletic, dark-haired and light-eyed, with a whiff of the exotic about him).

More importantly, the plots of the Dirk Pitt novels typically have him doing battle with international conspiracies and chasing high-stakes MacGuffins in globe-trotting adventures packed with over-the-top action in the present or very near future. In those battles Pitt's position permits him considerable personal initiative, while giving him all the benefits that come with the backing of a large government agency - much like what Bond enjoys. His enemies are typically wealthy individuals intent on reshaping the world in line with their personal ambitions or ideals, often through the use of futuristic technologies - while Pitt frequently employs the same (the yacht Calliope in Sahara, which unleashes its hidden weapons in a river battle, a gadget right out of the adventures of 007). And like Bond, Pitt is attractive to and attracted by women, getting involved with a new one (sometimes more than one) in each adventure - with one of those women (Summer Moran from Pacific Vortex!), who just so happens to be exceptionally close to the sea, later turning out to have borne his only offspring (just as Kissy Suzuki became pregnant with Bond's son in the novel You Only Live Twice).

Nonetheless, there are important differences as well as similarities, not least the works' use of setting. Bond himself is quite outdoorsy, and certainly has his share of adventures out in the wild, diving in the Caribbean or skiing Alpine slopes, but when I think of 007 I think of cities: London, Paris, New York, Istanbul, Tokyo. By contrast, Pitt is a character I usually think of as being in the mountains, the desert, and especially the sea, which Cussler from the start envisioned as his milieu. (As is so often the case, the author himself described his thinking best in a note included in the foreword of Pacific Vortex! (the first Pitt novel he wrote, though it was the sixth to appear in print): "I cast around for a hero who cut a different mold, one who wasn't a secret agent, police detective or private investigator," whose territory, rather than "a gambling casino, or the streets of New York . . . [was] the sea.")

Strongly connected with that difference in milieu is the element of historical mystery in most of the adventures, something the Bond novels and films generally eschewed.2 There is also what might be thought of as Pitt's more "populist" quality, the character not lacking sophistication in such matters as food and drink, but less ostentatious about the fact, and certainly never giving the impression of a man accustomed to a bubble of luxury, as Bond's screen incarnation does. (As Cussler wrote in the same note, for all Pitt's "rough edges" he had "a degree of style" that made him "equally at ease entertaining a gorgeous woman in a gourmet restaurant" as "downing a beer with the boys at the local saloon," with the latter scene the more typical - and I must admit, more natural.) And of course, Cussler drew on his own experiences and tastes in creating Pitt to the same extent Fleming did in crafting Bond, such things as his Californian background and penchant for collecting antique cars finding their way into the tales, further distinguishing the two characters from one another.

The result is that Bond might not implausibly be thought of as a precedent to or even influence on Pitt, but it would be a mistake to think of Pitt as simply a Bond knock-off. Rather he is an original creation whose evolution simply came to parallel Bond's - which may be one reason why Pitt has endured so much longer and better than the uncounted carbon copies of 007.

1. In The Sum of All Fears, terrorists detonate a nuclear bomb at the Super Bowl in Denver, while attacking American forces in West Berlin, tricking the U.S. government into thinking a Soviet assault is underway; in Debt of Honor, much of the Pacific fleet is disabled and the Marianas Islands occupied by Japanese forces, in conjunction with a carefully engineered crash on the American stock market; and in Executive Orders a united Iran-Iraq starts an Ebola epidemic in the U.S. that kills thousands, while invading Saudi Arabia.
2. A notable exception is the novel Live and Let Die, the plot of which involved the resting place of Captain Henry Morgan's treasure.

My Five Most Important Science Fiction Novels

Here are what I think of as the five most important science fiction books (and in some cases, series' of books) that I have read. By that I do not mean that I regard them as the most important books where the history of the genre is concerned. This particular list is more personal than that, presenting instead those books that did most to shape my ideas about what science fiction is, and what it can be, by demonstrating significant possibilities, and in most of these cases, leading me to whole stretches of genre territory of which I had previously been scarcely aware.

1. Frank Herbert's Dune (1965).
I thoroughly enjoyed Dune as a space opera full of adventure and intrigue, capped off by the most soaringly triumphant finale I had ever read. However, there was also the sheer richness of his fictional universe, not only the much-praised invention of Arrakis and its Fremen, but the galactic empire of which it was a small part, which staggered with its complexity (this novel is far more impressive than most fantasy in giving a sense of the complexity of feudal life) as well as its scale. There was, too, a sense of great depths--of uncounted lives being lived over uncounted years on uncounted worlds, of emergent, species-level developments--just beneath the surface of his prose, at times frustratingly out of reach, and yet, unapproachable any other way (reminiscent for me of many an experience reading German philosophy).

When I turned to the sequels, both scope and depth extended through the stories' time horizon, itself extraordinary. Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, for instance (which I only got to later), went to the end of the universe and beyond, but it was written as future history, one that got progressively less detailed as it moved further and further away from our time. By contrast Herbert offered fully fleshed plots and characters living out a story unfolding over tens of millennia.

And the sense of verisimilitude through it all was extraordinary. The interplay of multiple ambitions and agendas and forces; the victories that prove Pyrrhic, or fleeting (the soaring triumph of the first novel followed by the crushing defeat of the second and third); the inevitability with which reaction followed action; the incompleteness and ambiguity of the tale's turns; give it the same sense of mess as real history (admirably captured in Willis E. McNelly's Dune Encyclopedia, and conspicuously lacking in Brian Herbert's many sequels and prequels).

In all these respects, it seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, everything that an epic work of science fiction should be.

2. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992).
I regard Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age as a richer, more polished work than the novel that made him a star. I might also add that among the cyberpunks and post-cyberpunks I find his writing exceeded in zaniness by Rudy Rucker (as in his Ware Tetralogy), and conceptual density and audacity by Charles Stross (check out Accelerando). Paul di Filippo is funnier. And where social and political vision are concerned, Stephenson has always struck me as playing it quite safe, which I suppose has something to do with the extent to which his pronouncements command respect in business fora and other such places. (Picture Forbes doing an interview with Ken MacLeod--more on whom later.)

Yet, Snow Crash was also my first exposure to contemporary (post-1980) hard science fiction, and the tradition of which all these authors are a part, and I think of it as having been a gateway to all of these other works. This was, in part, a function of its accessibility; my early attempts to read cyberpunk greats William Gibson and Bruce Sterling led only to frustration with what seemed to me their overstylized and underplotted writing, and it was years before I was able to appreciate their genre-defining books--but I got into Snow Crash right away, and stayed with it to the end. That reconciliation of concept and flash with sheer readability is a significant accomplishment, one which has likely gone a long way to making him one of the few writers of recent decades to enjoy something like household name status, while all these years later I still smile at the remembrance of such quirks as the author's naming his main character "Hiro Protagonist."

3. Michael Moorcock's Byzantium Endures (1981).
Prior to encountering Colonel Pyat my impressions of the New Wave were based primarily on a couple of Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius short stories, and a bit of J.G. Ballard.1 The J.C. tales, which utilized cut-up technique, seemed to me a waste of time for both author and reader, while, heretical as it sounds, Ballard's writing left me cold and annoyed. It seemed to me that the celebration of these authors, and the larger New Wave, was merely another exercise in that particular form of intellectual snobbery which equates a work's value with the extent to which literary experimentalism renders it unreadable.

Byzantium Endures changed that. I had never before seen an author make such compelling use of an unreliable narrator, from the standpoint not just of entertainment value, but the development of a theme, and there is no question that it made me more open to Modernist and postmodernist approaches. These books also led me to the rest of Moorcock's work, like his heroic fantasies (not just the adventures of Elric, but tales like The Eternal Champion and The War Hound and the World's Pain), and his proto-steampunk (The Warlord of the Air making a far stronger impression on me than Gibson and Sterling's mostly frustrating The Difference Engine), which did much to give me a deeper interest in both those genres. It also led me to a reevaluation of the New Wave, and so to writers that I have since come to admire enormously, like Brian Aldiss, and Norman Spinrad, and John M. Harrison.

4. John Shirley's Eclipse (1985) and Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction (1995).
At an early point in my explorations of cyberpunk I happened upon Nicola Nixon's essay "Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?" Nixon held that in spite of its radical pretenses, cyberpunk was "complicit in '80s conservatism." At that point I had seen little in the writing of Gibson, Sterling and Stephenson to dispute such a reading, and much to affirm it. Reading older science fiction (Olaf Stapledon, George Orwell, Frederik Pohl, for instance) I had been impressed with the ways in which earlier generations of authors had used their work to explore political and social ideas--but now wondered if the genre had lost that capacity, if it had not, in fact, become incapable of doing anything but repeating the orthodoxies of the moment.2

John Shirley's Eclipse put paid to that notion. Instead of the playful irony of Stephenson, and the thoroughly privatized, thoroughly head-gamed detachment of Gibson, and theDavos Man conservatism of Bruce Sterling, here was a writer who could be very funny (as the short fiction gathered in Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories demonstrates), but who could also feel something for people and take politics seriously, and actually be angry and sad and scared; who could imagine them fighting for things worth fighting for. (I do not think I will ever forget Rick Rickenharp's peforming A Song Called Youth atop the Arc de Triomphe as the war machines of the Second Alliance ground it into dust.)

Of course, Shirley did differ from other cyberpunks in this respect, but he still finished the cycle in the late Cold War, and while he continued to publish striking political tales (like his rebuff to the dispensationalism of the Left Behind series in The Other End), I still thought of Eclipse as belonging to the past--perhaps not as much so as Stapledon's work, but still on the other side of the great divide that was "the end of history." However, that was not the case with Ken MacLeod's post-Cold War The Star Fraction, which did not have Eclipse's dramatic intensity, but offered a more crisply sophisticated take on twenty-first century politics which would even have outdone it in audacity had it been published in the '80s, with its Balkanized Britain and Trotskyist resolution. The Star Fraction was also my introduction to recent British science fiction, in which I found authors like Iain Banks and Charles Stross, each in their way a game-changer for me.

Hence the tie between the two books for this spot on the list.

5. Clive Cussler's Sahara (1992).
Clive Cussler, of course, is never discussed as a science fiction writer, but his works do qualify, regularly including as they do near-future political scenarios, futuristic technology, and other such speculative elements. (In Sahara we have the United Nations deploying in-house commando forces, solar-powered toxic waste processing facilities, a world-threatening red tide that has the incidental effect of turning people into psychotic cannibals, a high-tech superyacht which is a combined scientific research vessel and warship, and the rewriting of history with a wildly different explanation of President Lincoln's assassination.)

This book showed me that it is possible to write a novel that actually feels like a Hollywood blockbuster, and for a long time I regarded Cussler as the standard when it came to this sort of writing. Matthew Reilly, who writes in a similar vein, has since pushed the envelope further, something David Williams also does in his own more futuristic novels, but again Cussler was first, and for many years his works were an important model for my own efforts--with Sahara remaining my favorite of his books.

I suppose much of the list (Dune, for instance) seems rather obvious, but then that is only to be expected. The most well-known, widely available books are the ones that a newcomer to the genre is likely to encounter first, and find comparatively accessible--while the first books one encounters are also those most likely to make the strongest impression, especially when they have become classics for good reason.

I suppose the list also seems rather weighted toward action-adventure (and I imagine a few people reading this are appalled by the importance I accord the lesson that books can be written like blockbuster movies), but then my pop fiction tastes had, once upon a time, run mainly to spy novels and action thrillers (books like Sahara), and my earlier selections naturally reflected that taste.

I suppose my list does not seem especially highbrow (excepting Byzantium Endures). Where, one might wonder, is Vonnegut, for instance? It may seem impious, too. What about legendary Grand Masters like Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein, one might wonder? Wells? Philip K. Dick? And, and, and . . . I read them, of course, and enjoyed and admired much of what I found, and like to think that I learned from them as critic and writer. But this is the order in which things played out, and it should hardly be a surprise that the pivots in our personal literary histories do not tidily match received opinion and its hierarchies.

What about you? Any surprises in your own "top five?"

1. I had some contact with a few other works by a few other authors, and actually rather enjoyed Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Tick-Tock Man," but it was still Moorcock and Ballard who loomed largest in discussion of the New Wave.
2. That was one reason why, impressive as the older authors I mentioned here were, they did not have quite so profound an effect on my thought. Another, of course, was that I had seen plenty of Star Trek in its various incarnations, which, much as some snobs put it down, had been an introduction to such things.

Doc Savage and Dirk Pitt

If I really got started discussing or even listing the characters who have been influenced by Lester Dent's classic protagonist Doc Savage, I would probably never finish. After all, Superman, another New Yorker named Clark of far more than ordinary human ability whose deceased father raised him from infancy for a life of world-saving heroism and periodically retreats to a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic (yes, Dent uses the term, and near the beginning of the very first Savage adventure too), owes a very great deal to him--and we all know how much the rest of comics owes just to Superman.

Still, given how much I have written about Clive Cussler here it seems worth discussing Savage's influence on Cussler's creation, Dirk Pitt. Pitt lacks Savage's combination of omnicompetence and ultracompetence. I am not sure he can be regarded as a genius at any one thing, certainly not the more esoteric skills Savage possesses, let alone everything. (In fact, the only contemporary character I can think of as really comparable in that respect would be Martin Caidin's Doug Stavers.*)

All the same, Pitt shares the rootless, larger-than-life merry swashbuckler aspect of the character, and something of the dynamics among Savage's group is evident in Pitt's own inner circle as well, down to the ways they annoy each other. (Al Giordino's stealing Admiral Sandecker's cigars recalls for me Monk's relationship with Ham.) It is undoubtedly an important part of his appeal, contributing to the series' continuation for nearly a half century now.

* You may have noticed the initials--Doc Savage, Doug Stavers--are identical, while the first name is similar in ring, "Doug" the closest real name to "Doc" I can think of. And Caidin's lavish tributes to Doug's superhuman prowess are just as (unintentionally) funny as Dent's to his character. Still, Stavers is the very opposite of Savage's goodness, making him an awfully "Dark Messiah."

The Savage Doctor--Doc Savage

Decades before the action film subordinated filmic structure and pacing to thrills (the "thirty-nine bumps" that became standard for the Bond films, and which in turn set the standard), pulp writers did the same thing for print fiction, as Lester Dent demonstrates in his Doc Savage novels.

And I must say that the approach has its charms here. In contrast with the more measured pace of so much other earlier fiction, the briskness of old pulp writing holds up surprisingly well, even by the standards of today's action films--and still more, by the standard of today's novels. I won't deny the roughness of the approach, reflecting not just the pace of the story, but the pace at which it was written in those paid-by-the-word days. In line with the priority on pace and thrills logic is casually tossed out the window, while the writing is more tell than show, slight on details and even where minimalist, far from crisp and lean given its tendency to repeat the same few details over and over again. There can hardly be much suspense when the author harps on the hero's invincibility every chance he gets, and we learn very early on that there will always be a hokey out.

Yet the tale, helped by that spareness with description, is so brisk and there is such a spirit of fun that I didn't really care how little sense it made, and if none of the cliffhangers left me wondering if the heroes would make it through this one, I still read to find out how they made it, and even though I was sure the answer would be ridiculous (and was usually right), I felt fairly forgiving. In the process Dent crams into fifty thousand words as much in the way of plot twists, action and adventure as Clive Cussler (whose Dirk Pitt owes a very great deal to Savage) does into books three times' that size, and few use such space nearly so well as Cussler--one reason why, even after having a lot less interest in most contemporary popular fiction of the kind than I used to, I still find myself enjoying these sorts of brief, punchy, vigorous tales.

On the New York Times Bestseller List . . .

On last Sunday's New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list, Jonathan Franzen, Nicholas Sparks and Stieg Larsson are all on top, but mystery writer Janet Evanovich's urban fantasy Wicked Appetite is at #6, while Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Fall (book two of their Strain cycle) is at #8. There are, however, quite a few other authors using milder speculative elements in their fiction, Ted Bell's Warlord and Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood's Lost Empire being at #13 and #14 respectively. If one stretches the definition of speculative fiction that much more, there's also Sara Gruen's story of missing bonobos who turn up on a reality show, Ape House, currently at #15.

The list of speculative-themed works lengthens considerably when one looks at the extended NYT list, where paranormal romance is evident, with Sherilyn Kenyon's No Mercy at #16 and Christine Feehan's Dark Peril at #32; still more urban fantasy from mystery writers who started out as "mundanes," with Charlaine Harris's Dead in the Family at #23; epic fantasy in Terry Brooks's Bearer of the Black Staff and Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings, at #25 and #29; more idiosyncratic, slipstream-ish work like William Gibson's "post-science fiction" novel Zero History at #17 and W. Bruce Cameron's story told from a dog's point of view, A Dog's Purpose, at #28; and finally, S.M. Stirling's latest entry in his "Emberverse" post-apocalyptic military adventure series, The High King of Montival at #31.

Once again, it's validation for the arguments that fantasy, the paranormal and what might be termed "slipstream" are more popular than science fiction more narrowly defined; that books and authors incorporating just a little of the stuff into their stories (e.g., contemporary urban fantasy) have an easier time reaching big audiences than work which uses more fully speculative contexts (like epic fantasy or space opera); and that the big names, by and large, remain old names (including quite a few 1970s-vintage names), both those which are more (Brooks, Gibson, Stirling) or less (Cussler, Evanovich) closely associated with science fiction and fantasy.