Raritania

I continue to be struck by how many people come across my blog looking for word about a new Dirk Pitt movie--and the strong feelings that so...

George Lucas' Star Wars (1977) is one of that handful of mid-'70s films celebrated, and attacked, as giving us the contemporary blo...

The military techno-thriller is more British in its origins than anything else. Even overlooking the tradition of the "invasion story...

New York: Putnam, 1984, pp. 304. In John Gardner's Role of Honor , the British Secret Service stages a spy scandal which has Bond rath...

It was about the turn of the century that I first took notice of the whole transhuman-posthuman-Singularity dialogue , reading the books of ...

New York: Bantam, 1991, pp. 361. I first read the books of the Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy ( Heir to the Empire , Dark Force Rising ...

New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1989, pp. 319. In Win, Lose or Die , the British carrier Invincible is set as the site of a secret conf...

In the opening pages of Death is Forever we learn that Cabal, a hugely successful Anglo-American spy ring run in East Germany during the Co...

New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008, pp. 288. First things first--the book's title will strike many as a misnomer. In the str...

Graham Greene once wrote, How seldom in the literary life do we pause to pay a debt of gratitude except to the great or the fashionable, who...

Reading early twentieth century American literature--Sinclair Lewis for example, or Theodore Dreiser, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or any number ...

In discussing the concern mentioned in my title, I suppose I should define my terms. By "macropolitics" I mean the the internati...

Over the years, Bond parodies have often blended the send-up of 007 with a broader evocation of the '60s. Austin Powers, for example, is...

New York: Del Rey, 2006, pp. 453. Timothy Zahn's original Thrawn trilogy apart, I've read very few of the Star Wars tie-in novels....

The idea of a movie starring a female James Bond type is nothing new. It wasn't even new in 1962 when the Bond series began. Ian Fle...