Raritania

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS I have remarked previously that by the '80s techno-thrillers centered on Britain had become a rarity . Still, t...

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS A nuclear submarine equipped with a revolutionary stealth technology becomes the prize in a contest between the Sov...

For me one of the weaker elements of Craig Thomas' Sea Leopard was the character of the scientist Quin. A very large part of the novel ...

John Hackett's The Third World War: August 1985 (1978) was followed up four years later by The Third World War: The Untold Story , upda...

Decades before the action film subordinated filmic structure and pacing to thrills (the "thirty-nine bumps" that became standard f...

Shane Black, who has spoken of his love for yesteryear's pulp and paperback hero many a time (rather more seriously than most Hollywood...

If I really got started discussing or even listing the characters who have been influenced by Lester Dent's classic protagonist Doc Sava...

I was one of those who saw the TV adaptation of Robert J. Sawyer's Flashforward before I read the book. But I did get to it not long ...

No, probably not. But I do. I remember it because back in the '90s the terms of the publication of Steve Alten's Meg was the kind...

New York: Putnam, 2003, pp. 496. WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD Clive Cussler's Trojan Odyssey marks the end of an era in many ways. Not ...

Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1957, pp. 319. It is a commonplace that the literary genre of the novel is distinguished...

Back in tenth grade I was first introduced to F. Scott Fitzgerald, by way of The Great Gatsby . I wasn't all that impressed with the boo...

Back when I wrote the first edition of The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I included in the appendix a brief essay discussing Britain&...

Originally published as part of THE MANY LIVES AND DEATHS OF JAMES BOND At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Britain was the only in...

Recently I ran across Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home again--the bit where Kirk and Spock walk around twentieth century San Francisco and the...