Raritania

As word trickles through the entertainment press about what the world can expect of "Bond 25," a glance back at Bond 24 seems appr...

What seems like a thousand years ago, I was gulled by the hype into reading Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club . I ultimately found it incoh...

This essay is a development of two prior posts, "The Secrets of Tom Clancy's Success: The Boom Years" (August 22, 2019), and ...

A surprising number of Americans seem to romanticize Britain's upper classes, and its associated trappings--the ultimate symbol, idol, f...

Over the years I have found that anyone who expresses a dissenting opinion on the matter of Quentin Tarantino's films almost immediately...

Studying the Bond series for my books I found myself increasingly researching post-war Britain--to the point that I wound up writing two boo...

In one of the comparatively few scholarly articles written about the military techno-thriller, "Redeeming Vietnam: Techno-Thriller Nove...

Looking back at the military techno-thriller, it seems worth remarking that not all combat arms or weapons systems were equally popular wit...

Cultural commentators have always inflicted on the world a great deal of inanity about the younger generation not measuring up to their sati...

Running into the odd Home Improvement rerun on cable, I am time and again struck by how backward-looking that superficially contemporary sh...

The latest word about "Bond 25" is that it will start hitting theaters in April 2020. Assuming the franchise keeps to the schedu...

I have been reading and thinking and writing a great deal about spy fiction and military techno-thrillers. It is not really possible to do...

Most of this who dig into the history of science fiction in any systematic way quickly encounter a particular outline of that history, or at...

The chivalric tale of the Middle Ages and after glorified and flattered the feudal warrior-aristocracy. Likewise science fiction has glorifi...

In considering the historical counterfactual E.H. Carr argued in his classic What is History? that when facing a major turning point in the...