The Best and Worst of Ian Fleming's James Bond Novels

When the question of the original James Bond novels comes up, most seem to mention Live and Let Die (1954), From Russia With Love (1957) or On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) as the best. All of these are regarded as robust action-adventures in which Fleming worked relatively fresh territory. Live and Let Die, for instance, offered the first of Fleming's famously theatrical villains, and the first of his underwater action sequences, both of which won him high praise from even so sardonic a critic as Simon Winder, who compares Fleming to Jacques Cousteau in his bringing a sense of the world beneath the sea to a wider audience. (He also praises the shootout in the tropical fish warehouse as "one of the most delirious set pieces in all the books, and proof of why Fleming was so often far, far more than a hack.")

Three years later, From Russia With Love opened with the interesting device of devoting its first third to the dramatization of the emergence of the Soviets' plot to get Bond within SMERSH itself, during which 007 is just a name and a picture in a file. The idiosyncracy of the plot, so obviously a trap into which the Service and Bond knowingly step, is an intriguingly Ambler-like idea, which leads to an action-packed visit to Istanbul and trip through southern Europe on the Orient Express, and a cliffhanger of an ending that could really have spelled the end of the line for Bond.

By contrast, On Her Majesty's Secret Service is remembered as the novel where Bond gets married. However, it is also worth recalling that the action in the last part of the story is strong enough that the makers of the 1969 film did not need to add very much to make it memorable on screen.

Familiar as these three books are to purveyors of lists of Fleming's best, it is equally customary to find The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) numbered as the worst. Not only is it the case that Francisco Scaramanga is a far cry from the great villains of previous novels, or that the image of Bond at rock bottom is a bit much for many a reader to stomach. This slender book consists mainly of weak repetitions of elements from earlier and better Fleming novels (the Jamaican setting from Live and Let Die and 1958's Dr. No, the American gangsters and miniature train from 1956's Diamonds Are Forever, itself usually numbered among the weaker Bond adventures), in the most anemic prose any of the Bond stories have to offer.

Of course, many a critic regards that book's weaknesses as partly a function of Fleming's ailing health (not unreasonably, given that the book felt to me underedited), or as simply the worst of the conventional adventures, with The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) the worst of Fleming's books overall. That book, narrated from the "girl"'s point of view, offers a mix of confession and hard-boiled crime (the one-chapter retelling of Bond's mission to stop a minor SPECTRE operation in Toronto aside). Fleming's handling of the female viewpoint struck many as ridiculous, offensive or both, while the noirish plot (involving a pair of low-rent hoods trying to burn down a motel in upstate New York so their boss could get the insurance money) was a big step down from the accustomed stuff of Bond's adventures. Even Fleming was displeased with the result, enough so that he forbade a paperback issue in his lifetime (though it is of course available in that format now).

The other novels are less often talked about in these ways, but among the remainder, it semes to me that Dr. No and Thunderball (1961) rate honorable mentions for crystallizing the version of the series we see in the films. Dr. No brought the idea of the freakish, theatrical villain using high technology in a still higher geopolitical game (already fully developed by 1955's Moonraker) together with an exotic setting and fast-moving action-adventure (the mix that made Live and Let Die work, and which also happened to be absent from the awkwardly structured and comparatively dull and drab Moonraker). Thunderball followed the same pattern, but also gave the world SPECTRE. The result was that it was a comparatively short leap from the page to the screen in their cases (in part, I suppose, because they began as screen projects, Dr. No in plans for a TV show, Thunderball in a screen treatment). Much the same can be said for Goldfinger (1959), a less groundbreaking and efficient tale which nonetheless gave the screen what is for many the definitive Bond film.

By contrast You Only Live Twice (1964) is a stand-out for its sheer strangeness, given the image of a shattered Bond at the start, his dispatch by M on a mission expected to be psychologically therapeutic as well as useful to the Service, the strange circumstances that lead to his even stranger final confrontation with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, his loss of his memory, the consequences of that event at the end. And of course, Casino Royale (1953) has a special place as the very first of the books, even though it was to prove uncharacteristic of the series as a whole in its structure and treatment of Bond's adventure.

Ian Fleming's 007 as Gary Stu

I have previously remarked here about the limitations of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels as fantasy, his original conception of 007 as a Gary Stu (or Marty Stu). Certainly 007 was such a figure for Fleming, clearly modeled on him (in his Scottish ancestry, Eton education, wartime Naval intelligence work, etc.), but doing what Fleming himself could not--have adventures in the field instead of doing staff work at headquarters. It is clear, too, that the Bond novels also worked this way for the audience, with their travel and luxury, their adventure and sex (less overwhelming than in the films, though certainly there), giving readers a comparable sense of transport. But Bond was also a fallible, vulnerable, at times even helpless figure, most of the time a "pursed-lip civil servant" (Simon Winder's phrase, here) out of his time and out of his depth, who spends most of his working days dealing with tedious paperwork and mundane office headaches, tormented by doubt and self-doubt when he has a moment in which to think. On many an occasion he suffers significant defeats, with painful consequences.

Consider the first Bond novel, Casino Royale. Here Bond gets bankrupted at the gaming table and has to be bailed out of his hole by Felix Leiter's money. This enables him to defeat Le Chiffre, but he is then tricked into a chase which turns out to be a trap that leads to Bond's capture. Then, "puny and impotent," he is tied naked to a chair and bashed in the genitals with a carpet-beater by Le Chiffre as he demands the return of the money Bond won. Bond does not free himself from this situation, or get personal satisfaction in avenging himself on his torturer, but is saved when an enemy SMERSH agent shows up and kills Le Chiffre instead--and cuts a signifying mark in Bond's hand before letting him go. Afterward he goes through a lengthy recovery from his injuries in hospital, and watches the romance between him and Vesper Lynd die slowly, concluding finally when she kills herself and leaves a note telling him how she betrayed him--something she did for the sake of another, previous love, a whole other layer of betrayal.

This is all very far from the stuff of personal fantasy (for most of us, anyway), and such things happen again and again and again in the books. Bond getting stomped on by football-cleated Wint and Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever. Bond getting poisoned by Rose Klebb in From Russia With Love. Bond seeing his bride killed right after the wedding and going to pieces and getting brainwashed by the KGB and betraying the Service and winding up in a mental hospital being subjected to electroshock therapy to break him of his mental conditioning in the story arc that unfolds through On Her Majesty's Secret Service, You Only Live Twice and The Man With the Golden Gun.

It was one reason why the books so utterly failed to grab me the first time I looked at them, and even now I find myself comparing Bond not just to his later screen incarnation, but to other fictional figures in this regard--not least, Robert Howard's Conan, perhaps as much a Gary Stu as a character can possibly get.

One may as well start with the character's extraordinary autonomy. He is without a past, family, country or superstition (his god, Crom, is conveniently distant), and admits no master, joining this leader, this army, that crew, only where it serves his own purposes, and only for so long as it does so--and able to go on acting that way because of his utter competence and adaptability. Conan is not merely an able fighter, but one strong enough to fell an ox with a single blow, and fling a lance like a javelin--and to boot, an able military strategist, skilled sailor, talented linguist, canny thief, charismatic politician, and just about everything else his diverse adventures can possibly require him to be in order not only to survive them, but to become top dog wherever he winds up, be it a pirate crew, a tribe of hillmen, or the elite of an ancient metropolis, in any corner of the rough and tumble Hyborean world. Even the setbacks serve to show just how formidable Conan is. Being betrayed in "A Witch Shall Be Born", for instance, proves an occasion for him to show his fearsome prowess in battle as he takes on a hundred attackers and kills them until they lay "strewn in heaps thigh-deep about him" before their comrades get a hold of him; his extraordinary endurance when he is crucified (Conan still able to tear the nails out of his feet, mount a horse and ride ten miles when his rescuers find him); and exact a like revenge on his enemy (who does not survive the treatment).

Conan's barbarism is a considerable asset rather than a disadvantage in this respect. Not only is it held to be the source of his physical strength and endurance, but also his cleanness of soul, and his clarity of mind. That he is uninhibited by civilized men's mores about such things as property and social distinctions lets him see the world more accurately than those who would look down on him--as well as go after what he wants with a clean conscience, and sense of honor intact (able as he is to abide by his simpler ethics). And Conan's wants are not small ones, be it a taste for adventure or an eye for loot. In contrast with Howard's earlier, womanless heroes, like Kull, Bran Mak Morn, and Solomon Kane, Conan is not only a sexual being, but in his proclivities and successes--well, rather like we think of James Bond being. Ultimately he winds up the crowned head of a Hyborian kingdom, Aquilonia--and while on its throne, even proves himself an exceptional ruler, not least because he is so utterly self-made.

The wish-fulfillment in this narrative can hardly be more complete.

Granted, Bond was, is, a creature of the modern world, of large organizations and high technology; there is simply no room in such a milieu for a figure like Conan, a fact that Howard escaped by going back to the antiquity-before-antiquity that was the Hyborean Age. Reflecting on the two characters there seems no question that there was a profound difference in the attitudes of these two authors to their creations. Fleming was conflicted, ambivalent, ironic toward Bond (as, one supposes, he was toward himself), and this shows in his writing, the inconsistency rather consistent. Reading Howard, however, I have never sensed anything of the kind; instead he appears to be in full fantasy mode.

Perhaps the difference in the respective ages of these authors was a factor. Neal Stephenson remarked in Snow Crash how until the age of twenty-five men on some level hold hugely deluded ideas about how tough they could be, given the incentive or the chance. ("If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge.") I imagine some recognize it for what it is earlier, and a good many others never quite let the notion go. Fleming was already well into middle age when he sat down to write Casino, but Howard still in his twenties'--and as it happened, exceptionally gifted at expressing this aspect of himself.

Postmodernism and Self-Censorship

Uncertainty and doubt has always been part of intellectual and cultural life--including that exceptionally large doubt as to whether anything is knowable (an issue that seems as old as philosophical speculation itself). Equally, intellectual and artistic expression has always entailed risk. There was always a premium on pleasing "everybody," and offending "nobody."

The difference between our own, postmodernist-influenced era and earlier periods is that a significant portion of opinion elevates incoherence to a virtue, with the result that muddled pseudo-engagement is often taken as something bold and worthwhile, while the muddle itself is taken for aesthetic sophistication.

How did we get here? Certainly part of the explanation is the inescapable irony of the postmodernist outlook, which very easily turns intellectual life into a parlor game. (Indeed, "playful" is a word that comes up very frequently in postmodernist discourse.) Surface is about all we can get at, so that text is assumed to be about nothing but itself, a premise that can reduce politics to hollow theater, culture to a play of symbols.

This makes it especially easy to fall into the frame of mind that we can't know anything, and can't do anything about it--and therefore bear no responsibility. (Philosophers do not change the world; they don't even interpret it anymore.) This being the case, why fuss over ideas? Especially when we can't be sure what the truth is, and thinking that we do is arrogance, pure and simple? (History, in the old sense, is over.) Besides, aren't we always being told that ideas just get in the way of art? ("If you want to send a message, use Western Union.")

But all the same, it's almost impossible to totally escape ideas, to totally escape making reference to the world. At least touching on them sometimes is something writers can't help. And one supposes that touching on them that way can make the parlor game more interesting. It gets attention. People may even call you daring and clever for doing it. (And all that can be profitable, of course. No one's so postmodernist they don't appreciate dollars and pounds, euros and yen, "skepticism" about the existence and value of these interestingly lacking on the part of even those most committed to these ideas.)

And it's possible to play it safe. Just evoke the idea, while studiously not taking a position--not least by turning your "text" into a game with the audience. Or if you do wind up taking a discernible position, so that it is possible to spot the personal "truth" from inside of the bodyguard of what the plainspoken might call lies surrounding it (sometimes writers just can't help it), play it ironically, so that you have that avenue of retreat. If anyone thinks you did say something, you can always say that they're not reading you correctly, that you were being ironic, that you meant to say the opposite. Or perhaps to say nothing at all about anything but THE TEXT!

Play it even safer: say you were being ironic even when the whole thing is an impenetrable muddle.

Are you telling the truth when you do that? Well, what's truth? What's honesty? What's the self? What's memory? You're unsure yourself; your reader will be more so.

Ah, there's that postmodern doubt again, just when we needed it.

A Note on Literary Technique in an Age of Muddle

Postmodernist thought is famously marked by a suspicion of certainty and stress on subjectivity, and a tendency to view cultural production as "play." Those attitudes are quite prominent in the prevailing views of literary technique. That the author (unavoidably an authority figure making authority claims within their work) should be invisible in their work, their voice never obtrusive (the sorts of "indulgences" in which, for instance, Victor Hugo engaged in a book like Les Miserables today unthinkable). That it is far, far better thing for them to write from within a character's point of view than to write from a third-person omnisicient point of view, and even more impressive, several first-person viewpoints. That the use of unreliable narrators is to be especially esteemed. That a writer's "showing" their story is far better than merely telling it, or even showing and telling, and "incluing" far better than "infodumping."

All other things being equal, the use of these techniques - which have come to be regarded as "rules" for writers with any aspiration to genuinely literary endeavor - makes a piece of fiction more rather than less difficult to read, which, ironically, only raises their prestige. Many influential critics in and out of the Academy treat such difficulty as a virtue rather than a failing, because they enjoy approaching books as puzzles, because it is the more difficult works which require the kind of explication and interpretation which results in published papers, because mastery of the obscure carries with it great prestige. Because, for all the postmodernist suspicion of value judgments, and questioning of the old line between high culture and low, a leisure class elitism not only endures, but where literature is concerned, seems to be growing wider. (Thus America's first Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Sinclair Lewis, is virtually unmentioned among highbrows, while these typically regard the High Modernists as kings and queens of twentieth century literature.)

This is not to dismiss techniques of the sort discussed here, or the difficult books in which they result. Certainly all of the devices mentioned above have been used to good effect by various authors in various books. Equally, difficult works can be well worth the demands they make on the reader. Yet, it is undeniable that, in line with the postmodernist emphasis on surface, and sense of cultural and intellectual life as a parlor game, the attitude elevating them presumes that what one says is of far less importance than how one says it - with the premium placed on everything but clarity.1 The result is that while a writer can create a narratively and intellectually coherent story with the techniques discussed here, they make the task much more difficult, and anyway one who elects to use them in the first place has already made a concession to the prevailing fashion - gripping them within a very powerful tendency toward the fragmentation of the work in which they are using them. Naturally, one can make quite the muddle of things without particularly trying - and if they are very, very lucky, get hailed as a genius for doing so.

1. One might plausibly regard this as also a function of the advent of electronic, visual media, and a consequent tendency to emphasize what print fiction can do that, for instance, film and television cannot - leading to a stress on how language is used, and in particular, the word game. One might also see the postmodernist emphasis on surface rather than depth as a factor.

How James Bond Got to Have a 50th Anniversary

My writing has tended to look at the ways in which the James Bond series has dated, or been exceeded--rather than why it endured so long.

Of course, one should put the matter of the series' longevity into the proper perspective. Bond has been around for almost six decades in various forms, the film series for a half century. But Mission: Impossible in its various incarnations goes back to the '60s, as does Star Trek, which has been prominent on the big screen for four decades now. Thirty-five years after the first Star Wars film, we are hearing about plans to make Episode VII. And of course, comic book superheroes like Batman and Superman hit print and screen well before Bond did--but are still very much around.

What is really more extraordinary than the length of time for which it has been around is how prolific the series has been, twenty-four feature films appearing in the space of fifty years, the six year break between 1989 and 1995 the longest gap within this output. This warrants some explanation, and it seems to me that four factors are responsible (beyond the allure of a brand name).

First and foremost was the sheer scale of the series' success in the '60s, the kind of success that comes with not just being a hit, but a game-changer that has everyone else scrambling to follow. Success on that scale meant not just a powerful brand name, but a certain inertia. Putting it in financial terms, the series' grosses were so high at their peak that even with considerable erosion the films could go on being financially viable for quite a long time, as was indeed the case. There was a (more or less) steady decline in the films' earnings after 1965's Thunderball, the result of which was that 1989's Licence to Kill grossed a mere quarter what the older film did (after inflation)--but still turned a profit. That sort of margin also meant plenty of opportunities for at least limited comebacks from the low points--such as Goldeneye managed after Licence to Kill.

There was also the fact that the series was based not on a story with a beginning, middle and end (in the manner of the Star Wars saga, for instance), but a formula which proved susceptible to considerable adaptation. The early films, certainly, can be construed as having been about Bond's battle with SPECTRE and Ernst Stavro Blofeld, but no one seems to have been seriously troubled by the switch over from SPECTRE to Auric Goldfinger in the third movie (in fact, he became the series' most celebrated villain by far), and after Bond's last real battle with Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever, there was no sense that Bond's adventures had come to an end, no real reason why M could not simply send him on yet another mission after another villain. And even by that point the film had developed enough models to allow considerable scope for reworking, the series' concept accommodating films as diverse as Live and Let Die and Moonraker within the space of six years--and audiences accepting it, making each of those movies a hit on a scale not seen until well into the twenty-first century.

It helped that the films were consistently backed by large budgets. Long after the Bond movies ceased to be pace-setters for the genre, the big money behind them let them provide enough spectacle to remain a draw, very few comparable series financed on the same scale until the late 1980s (the Bonds of that decade all produced for $30 million or more, even as Hollywood still tended to spend $10-20 million to make major action films like Commando, Aliens, Predator and Robocop).1 There were certainly misfires despite this, films which were too goofy or flabby or derivative to really satisfy as action movies (like The Man With the Golden Gun, or A View to a Kill, or Die Another Day), but a fair number of the later installments offered memorable stunts, chases and fights. (The pre-credits sequence of the much-maligned Moonraker, for instance, was to be copied time and again by other films, like 1996's Eraser.)

Finally, there was the continuing appeal of the concept's idiosyncracies for a considerable audience. The familiarity that bored and annoyed some attracted others, while the series lasted long enough to have become an object of nostalgia without ever really having gone away. There remained, too, an attraction on the part of many to the idea of a sophisticated, globe-trotting, hedonistic hero, the over-the-top quality of the characters and plots and action, the lightness of the tone with regard to the sex and violence--much more than those who pompously insist that the "guilty pleasures" of pop culture "must change with the times" would admit. Much as the films did have to change, a significant part of the films' attraction was the ways in which they did not do so--though of course, this could not and did not go on forever.

1. It should be remembered that the early Bond films played a significant role in founding the genre, doing much to develop the form (its structure and pace, its use of the set piece, its editing techniques), creating quite a number of classic scenes (Bond's fight with Red Grant on the Orient Express in From Russia With Love, the climactic battle at SPECTRE's volcano crater base in You Only Live Twice), and inspiring wide, direct imitation of specific elements (in decades of James Bond-style adventure from Our Man Flint to XXX).

Of Postmodernism and Conservatism

Three years ago I published an article about the politics surrounding space development, in which I identified postmodernism with conservatism. It was not the first time I suggested this in a public forum, but that time around it evoked a strong, and mostly negative, response, many readers of my article expressing shock or outrage at my having suggested a connection. Alas, those expressions of shock and outrage did not include a coherent criticism of my position, and apart from some brief explanatory remarks I offered during an appearance on The Space Show, I left the matter at that. However, given the replies some of my recent remarks have drawn (specifically those regarding the ways in which a postmodernist stance can be a dodge) it seems appropriate to enlarge on them here.

Just What is Postmodernism Anyway?
Offering even the most basic definition of postmodernist thought is an exceedingly difficult task (complicated further by its close relationship with post-structuralism, and the imperfect boundaries between them, as well as their looser relationship with critical theory). Offering a list of its most central characteristics is only slightly less difficult. However, it would be relatively uncontroversial to say that postmodern thought is hugely skeptical of the various forms of human reason and their exercise (deduction, induction, definition, categorization, dialectic, the separation of subject and object, linguistic description, etc.).

Accordingly it takes the position that what knowledge of the world is attainable is of a limited, conditional, "fragmented," surface character (at best), and more aptly described as "constructed" than "discovered." Experience and understanding are therefore relativistic and subjective--while the subject itself is also a target of the aforementioned skepticism, postmodernism typically regarding the individual as "an effect of social forces, and an illusory one at that." Accordingly postmodernists stress the role identity plays in one's approach to the world, to the point of denying that it can be transcended to permit anything like the formation of coherent, objective images of the world modern thought generally strove to produce, let alone a satisfactory basis for making value judgments.

The result is the elimination of not only the basis of a universalistic view of the world, but of comprehensive and systematic understandings or explanations of the world--and for criticisms of it. This narrowing of the scope for critical, rational thinking also constrains the possibilities for rational action, and the ideas premised on it. This certainly includes the "utopian" projects of ameliorating the condition of humanity through the use of reason espoused by the major ideological traditions that came in the wake of the eighteenth century "Age of Reason." Indeed, the presumed end of the era of such "grand," "totalizing" or "meta" narratives--like the Modern idea of progress, the Enlightenment "project" of emancipating humanity, or the Marxist reading of history--is exactly what Jean-Francois Lyotard referred to when he wrote of "the postmodern condition" in the 1979 book by that name.

A Negative Conservatism
As it happens, the outlook I have just described has historically been the province not of the left, but the right, corresponding to the thought of those who attacked the Enlightenment in the wake of the French Revolution--men like Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, and their intellectual descendants. It is they who have for the last two centuries emphasized the limits of human knowledge, reason and action; who have denounced the application of reason to human affairs, and especially the utopian impulse; and who have responded to universalistic liberal or radical principles with a stress on identity and particularism.1

There is, too, the way in which each of these streams of thought emerged. Just like the conservatism of Burke and his contemporaries, postmodernism emerged in the wake of revolutions, wars and associated catastrophes--in the postmodernists' case, the rise of fascism, World War II, the Holocaust, while, as M. Keith Booker notes in his study Mushroom Clouds, Monsters and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, it also received a great deal of impetus from Cold War anti-Marxism. And just as the ideas of Burke, de Maistre and the rest became part of the intellectual arsenal of the opponents of revolution, so has postmodern thought tended to explicitly oppose Marxist thinking, with the result that postmodernists and Marxists have often been at odds--a fact acknowledged in the writings of Marxists like Jurgen Habermas, Frederic Jameson, Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Parenti and John Molyneux, who pointedly dismissed postmodernism's "incredulity toward metanarratives" as "an old song long intoned by bourgeois historians of various persuasions."

While postmodernism's essentials safely situate it within the conservative tradition, it is the case that there are important differences between postmodernist thought and the mainstream of conservative thought, specifically that where conservatism typically has something to offer in place of reason, whether tradition, religion or some other sort of authority, postmodernism offers nothing. Even postmodernism's endorsement of identity and the traditions on which it is founded lacks the certainty and solidity of conservative theories about the validity of those things: their claims for divine endorsement of their favored social order, for society as an organic entity on which surgery ought not be performed, for institutions like property, capitalism and traditional family structures as "natural."2 Indeed, postmodernism's skepticism and hostility to system-building leaves it wearing an ironic face rather than the earnest one generally associated with more conventional political stances, and an uneasy fit with any source of authority (including the authority of postmodernism's own premises).

One may contend on this basis that postmodernism is a negative form of conservatism, much more suited to attacks on the intellectual tools and objects of the left than the defense of those things cherished by the right, but, just like the arguments of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, conservatism nonetheless, tending overwhelmingly toward acquiescence in the status quo, whatever that status quo may be, in both intellectual and practical terms.3 And it does not seem at all implausible that, in ways direct and indirect, postmodernist thought has contributed significantly to the larger political climate in conservative ways--inhibiting robust criticism of society and the exploration of alternatives, lowering the expectations of reformers, shifting politics away from matters of economics and class toward symbolic issues, and in its attitude toward science, opening the door wider to the "merchants of doubt" who have manufactured specious arguments for "creation science" and "climate change skepticism."

Explaining the Confusion
Given the case to be made that postmodern thought is essentially conservative, one may wonder why this position is not more widely seen outside the academic Marxist writing of which the mainstream is scarcely conscious (and even within Marxist theory, not more fully developed and frequently expressed than it currently is).4 A central reason would seem the undeniable fact that many a postmodernist thinks of themselves as being left of the political center, not least because many of them espouse liberal-left positions on specific political issues (as has been the case with, for instance, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida). The apparent dissonance between their philosophy and their practical politics in this regard is concealed by the reduction of political ideology in the public imagination to stances on a few hot-button issues (abortion, gun control, etc.), the notion that conservatism, liberalism or radicalism entail larger understandings of the world apparently alien to most of those claiming adherence to these ideas (which is itself a rather postmodern attitude). This image is bolstered by the tendency to associate postmodernist "identity politics" not with all those engaged with such issues, but only the claims of ethnic minorities and other traditionally disadvantaged groups championed by the left, rather than the claims of dominant groups, which can equally be termed identity politics, but which usually come bearing other labels (like "culture war").

The confusion is increased by the notorious unreadability of much of the relevant writing.5 Where the English-speaking world is concerned, this is likely compounded by their experience of French academic writing as "difficult" due to the differences in prose style across academic cultures (a more frequent use of "point-late" text structures, the less frequent organization of paragraphs around topic sentences, etc.), and the divergent traditions of Anglo-Saxon and continental philosophy (e.g. the synthetic-analytical divide), which leaves English-language readerships struggling to follow the thread of argument, overwhelmed with abstractions and starved for concrete evidence for the claims they see being advanced.

The matter is certainly not helped by the fact that few outside the Academy, or the upper strata of high culture, consciously and openly avow postmodernist thought. One generally does not see politicians, CEOs or popular authors cite postmodernist authors, and certainly the works of Jacques Derrida do not command the kind of intense elite enthusiasm that those of, for example, Ayn Rand enjoy all these decades later. Their combination of irony, idiosyncracy and obscurity has not lent itself to use in public battles of ideas in the manner of, for instance, the ideas of Herbert Spencer, Ludwig von Mises, George Gilder--or the aforementioned Rand--in the last hundred and fifty years. Conservatives looking for intellectual champions simply find more appealing candidates elsewhere, leaving the parallels and the connections unadvertised. Unsurprisingly, there has been little effort to convey the actual content of postmodern thinking to general, non-scholarly audiences--to produce "pop" postmodernism for lay readers.6 Thus critical engagement with postmodernism's actual ideas has remained the purview of a cultural-intellectual elite, even as those ideas have become so ubiquitous as to be utterly taken for granted within the mainstream.

NOTES
1. This is all without getting into such matters as its rendering of situations where oppression exists much more ambiguous through power analytics; its original sin theology-like propensity to reduce all human activity to an exercise in power relations; and the divisiveness fostered by identity politics, and the ways in which they undermine broader struggles for equity (which conservatives have frequently exploited, going back at least to Klemens Von Metternich). It is certainly worth recalling Michel Foucault's enthusiasm for the Iranian Revolution--a rare but particularly telling example of the way in which the postmodernist critique can take the shape of explicit support for retrograde irrationality and anti-rationality.
2. It is even clearer that postmodernists have nothing to offer the left in the way of these things. As Alexander Sidorkin put it, "postmodern writers do not give us a good reason to act, nor do they give us a reason to resist oppression. They are just not useful in dealing with our real problems of injustice and human suffering. They do very little to address racial or gender discrimination, or to redeem inherent economic injustices of capitalism."
3. In that classic Hobbes argued for obedience to the prevailing government in preference to the worse alternative of disorder, rather than on the basis of tradition, historical practice or religious doctrine (in the manner of, for instance, the much less well-known Robert Filmer).
4. Rare exceptions of non-Marxist writers making this point include Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture. There has also been some acknowledgment of the relationship between conservatism and postmodern thought on the right in Gerald J. Russello's writing on Russell Kirk.
5. Noam Chomsky, a not altogether unsympathetic observer, wrote that on examining the texts of Foucault and Jacques Lacan "what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish."
6. However, that is not to say that postmodernist jargon and thought has failed to enter mainstream usage, with that influence most evident in the rhetoric of identity politics (like feminist use of the term "objectification," a legacy of Lacan's writing).

Reading S.M. Stirling's Draka Novels

S.M. Stirling's well-known Draka series presents a culture founded on a distillation of the most brutal elements in nineteenth century European thought (the proto-fascism of Carlyle, the pseudo-scientific racism of Gobineau, the Nietzchean will to power), and given space in which to develop and expand (nineteenth century southern Africa).

Thematically it is an interesting concept. However, Stirling's treatment is quite unconvincing, even by the standards of alternate history, which is quite a different thing from historical counterfactual.

It is nearly inconceivable that a feudal culture of xenophobic, Classicism-obsessed, warrior-landowner aristocrats, presiding over a population of illiterate serfs whose lot is no better than slavery, would succeed in building an industrialized society. These are, after all, exactly the kind of people who have held development back elsewhere, and if anything the history of both South Africa, and the southern United States (a major contributor to this culture), only reinforce this view of the Draka's prospects. That this society should not only industrialize, but do so in a part of the world that in real life has suffered greatly from what development theorists term the "resource curse" (the propensity of a natural resource-rich country to "underdevelop," in line with which South Africa was a developmental laggard); and then succeed at their task so completely that they technologically outstrip the rest of the world by the 1940s, and go on to push the envelope far beyond what our world achieved by that time; is nothing short of preposterous.

The idea that this mix of elements would at the same time produce such an atheistic, feministic and hedonistic culture as that of the Draka, and somehow harmonize this with a quasi-Spartan martial ethic, is that much less believable. It is hardly more credible that with their rather small demographic base (despite the infusions of Loyalists, Confederates and other immigrants into the region) they would succeed in conquering and developing sub-Saharan Africa in the space of a century, and Eurasia in another, even with their technical prowess and without the grave disadvantages of their social model. (We are given to understand that the ratio of serfs to Citizens gets as high as eighty to one, and that even serfs who serve in the armed forces have a very low glass ceiling over their heads – as does everyone else not born at the top in this extremely inegalitarian culture.) Stirling does make some concessions to the handicaps such a system would suffer in its pursuit of its goals, the Draka culture's limitations all too apparent by the time of the third novel in the series, The Stone Dogs – yet, they finish that book as masters of the planet, their enemies literally driven off the Earth's surface.

Reading the novels some readers have taken these aspects of the book for a wish-fulfillment, one which some readers have found appealing (Stirling himself has commented on those "who wanted to move there"), while others have charged Stirling with being a racist himself (Stirling remarking "Oh, all the time" when asked whether this happens). Of course, Stirling is contemptuously dismissive of those who read the book in such ways. However, it is worth noting that no one can mistake Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four for a wish-fulfillment – but the truth is that there is at least some scope for such a reading here. Orwell's Oceania was a very far cry from the world to which those who joined the Communist Party generally aspired, but the Domination of the Draka realizes a host of fantasies regarded as unseemly in the mainstream, but which nonetheless have their enthusiasts. There is a radical right-wing fantasy of a society built on the most harshly elitist principles, which not incidentally finishes off the Soviet Union and Communism by 1942. A militarist fantasy of a modern-day Sparta sweeping all before it (with much made of the softness of other folk). A Southern nationalist fantasy in which the South does rise again (even if it does so in another hemisphere), and takes on the Yankees and wins decisively (and on a global stage, an extension of the U.S. Civil War the final world war). And that is all without touching on the other fantasies (of power, sadism and other things) to which Draka culture speaks. (I leave it to the reader to judge whether the illogic of the outcome makes such appearances more or less pointed.)

Additionally, the novels focus not on the outsider or the rebel traditionally at the heart of the dystopian tale, but the system's biggest beneficiaries, the most privileged of the Citizens, who despite particular misgivings and occasional alienation, ultimately uphold the prevailing order. Their homes and estates, and their often brutal entertainments, are also described with a lushness that might not unreasonably be seen as romanticizing their world. Stirling contends that despite the Domination of the Draka being a dystopia

any society that lasted that long would have to have some attractive features. Besides, part of the challenge of using the bad guys for p.o.v. was to force people to identify with them and then go ICK! mentally.

This is, of course, plausible enough, but the approach does not always have the effect planned, and this time around there is little arguing that the Draka series is fairly susceptible to those interpretations he has dismissed in the above comments – even by those not given to "reading against the grain" and invoking the Founding Fathers of the Linguistic Turn with every breath.

The Myth of Liberal Hollywood

Back in August New York magazine's Jonathan Chait published an article titled "The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy is on Your Screen," which contended that a liberal view of the world pervades Hollywood and its product.

What was remarkable about the article was not the sentiment, but the author and forum. Jonathan Chait, after all, recently authored a noteworthy critical analysis of supply-side economics, The Big Con: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America--and whatever else one may say about it, New York magazine is not The National Review or The Weekly Standard. (Indeed, the first sentence of the Wikipedia article about Chait pointedly describes him as a "liberal commentator.")

Naturally, the piece excited some critical comment, but that such an argument should have appeared in that forum at all--that this image of Hollywood's liberalism should be so enduringly pervasive--is astonishing.

Granted, it may seem that nothing would be more natural than for Hollywood to be a bastion of the left. It is, after all, a center of the arts, peopled to a significant extent by those who have chosen self-expression and the creative life over the "practical" world of the 8-6 job, and situated in one of the country's biggest and most cosmopolitan metropolitan areas, out on the west coast in youthful, forward-looking, forward-thinking California. And as all this might lead one to expect, some of its most well-known personalities do indeed speak unfashionably leftish opinions (as Sean Penn and George Clooney do).

Yet, Hollywood is also a place dominated by gigantic multinational corporations (like the Time Warner Company, News Corporation and General Electric), and, even where they are artists, a hugely wealthy elite who are living out the American dream of fortune and fame, and prone to believe they are doing so because they are deserving of every bit of it, and others aren't--or at least, prone to be content with the status quo and complacent about "playing the hand you're dealt" because, after all, their hand was a Royal Flush.

These are people who live within an enclave of privilege, who have often been born to it and never known anything else (the preponderance of working actors, directors and writers with significant familial links to the business can give the impression a caste system is at work)--or if they did come from humbler places, may be all the more dismissive of life's difficulties for it, because, after all, didn't things work out for them in the end? People whose income makes them investors and employers, and leads to their association with others of the same socioeconomic level but from quite different walks of life--like the actress who marries a financier. People whose particular way of making a living (not least the outsized claims for talent, conspicuous consumption and flamboyant display that make up so much of publicity) steeps them in a "leisure class" culture, to which they are all too susceptible (as demonstrated by their propensity for alternating between lavish excess, and spectacular bankruptcy). People who are, like everyone else, not unknown to become more conservative as they get older (or simply richer); to run their lives into the ground and, after hitting rock bottom, decide they've found Religion (usually, a severe form of it), or simply learned the Hard Facts of Life (about which it is always easier to lecture others from the lap of luxury); and on occasion, be reached by the same events, the same trends, affecting and afflicting the rest of the country in which they were born and of which they remain a part (and which has itself been moving steadily rightward).

The results of all that are predictable. There is no denying that there are actors, directors, producers and writers of liberal sensibilities in Hollywood, but conservative political attitudes have never been scarce there, either, and support for the Republican Party certainly no rarity, even among its Big Names (as figures ranging from Clint Eastwood to Adam Sandler, from Kelsey Grammer to Vince Vaughn, from Dwayne Johnson to Jon Voight, from Joel Surnow to Mickey Rourke, demonstrate). And these are by no means silent or inactive. They routinely lend their celebrity (and give their money) to conservative causes, media and political events (like the Republican National Convention), and on many an occasion, run for political office themselves (like the previous two-term governor of California, and the fortieth president of the United States, political heights no liberal entertainer has come anywhere near). Between the extremes the "center" is less liberal than libertarian, in the sense Michael Lind describes in his writing on the "overclass," of which Hollywood's glitterati are most certainly a part. Naturally they are to the left of the American center on sociocultural matters like GLBT issues and the legalization of marijuana (which, admittedly, are all that those who equate politics with the "culture wars" care about)--but hew much closer to the political right on socioeconomic issues like tax rates and spending on welfare programs (much less often talked about).

The product we get reflects the fact. Take, for instance, the economic sensibility prevailing in film. As conservatives often complain, we do frequently see the business corporation cast as villain--but the bad guy is usually a bad apple rather than The System. At the same time, there is also lots of CEO worship, endless celebration of wealth and "success," and the mentality of the Horatio Alger story, reflected in such things as the transformation of the "IT billionaire" into one of the screen's most tired clichés (such that, thanks to the man who brought us The Big Bang Theory, even the implausible Ashton Kutcher is playing one). David Fincher's The Social Network, so widely characterized as a "hatchet job" on Mark Zuckerberg, is actually just another piece of tech god mythmaking, and along with the success of Iron Man on the big screen in not one but two major franchises, is at bottom an update of that close relation of the Horatio Alger tale, the Edisonade.

That genre in which one might most expect to see teeth, the political thriller, similarly plays it safe with films like Syriana the exception, not the rule. The much more widely imitated Jason Bourne series does have its hero fighting his former employers--but drains the tale of anything remotely resembling political content, turning it into the spy film equivalent of Seinfeld, a "movie about nothing" (to paraphrase Roger Ebert). Meanwhile many of the thrillers that do espouse a clearer political position offer shallow orthodoxy, like The Kingdom or Vantage Point, while TV has offered NCIS, and the torture porn of 24, and the "allegory" of Battlestar Galactica, and . . . the list goes on.

And so on and so forth. Consequently, liberalism is a presence, but it is often of a limited, mild, muted or superficial variety (and always more evident in the sociocultural sphere than the socioeconomic)--with conservatism tending to fill in the spaces it leaves open, and frequently rather bolder and blunter in its expression. Indeed, looking at it all it seems that in Hollywood, as elsewhere, "postmodern" conservatism is king.

Star Wars: Episode VII?

One of the bigger stories of the past week (in and out of that part of the news media devoted to speculative fiction) was the sale of Lucasfilm, and the Star Wars franchise, to the Disney corporation for four billion dollars. Making the story even bigger was the announcement that Disney will use its newly purchased rights to make another Star Wars film, due out by 2015.

The Star Wars films were, of course, foundational for me when I saw them way back when. Later I enjoyed the prequels, which I regard as having been treated unfairly by many a fan of the original trilogy. Still, I'm not sure how to feel about the prospect of Episode VII. Certainly the series offers an appealing universe, without real parallel in the history of Hollywood space opera, and the idea of returning to it in additional stories has its attractions. And as the films are expected to be based on an original story, there is at least an avoidance of the obvious complications entailed in filming the Heirs to the Empire trilogy (which, at any rate, seems at best a postscript to the larger saga of Episodes I through VI)--like recasting the roles of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia.

Yet, this franchise has already been very heavily mined at this point, so much so that I'm not sure the company will recoup its outlay to buy Lucasfilm anytime soon. And Disney's crassness can be nothing short of spectacular. Consider their lack of compunction about debasing their hit films with cheap straight-to-video releases (Aladdin IV: Jafar May Need Glasses only a slight exaggeration of their practices), from which they have graduated to big screen sequels no one asked for (like 2011's Cars 2). And frankly, wouldn't it be nice if filmmakers were actually allowed to work with NEW IDEAS, instead of being pressed into feeding the studios' addictions to old IPs, with the result that (the recent and highly anomalous Avatar excepted) our grand-scale space opera franchises all go back to the 1970s (Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien)?

At best I'm ambivalent--though yes, I would enjoy a good, new Star Wars film.

Robert Heinlein's Friday - Probably Not Coming to a Theater Near You

io9 has just posted a list of "Ten Science Fiction Novels That Will Definitely Never Be Movies." Robert Heinlein's novel Friday made the #1 spot - and I'm pleased to note that there's a link to my 2006 article about the book, which has probably led to a record number of eyeballs looking at this blog at once, and certainly that posting (which originally ran in a peer-reviewed academic journal).

I suppose the fact that the words encompassed within the hyperlink happened to include "group marriage" was a factor.

At any rate, I found myself considering the film's likelihood of ever becoming a movie. As the blog suggests in its comment, the story's abundance of sex, which Friday has quite casually, with several men and women, is a complicating matter. On the whole Hollywood is rather more reticent than it used to be about depicting casual sex, especially where this is construed as pleasurable or fanservice-y, and is certainly unlikely to insert it into such things as feature action films, and certainly big-budget science fiction films. (Roger Vadim, who actually did feature casual sex in a science fiction film - the cult classic Barbarella - once remarked that "Hollywood is sometimes licentious, but always puritanical."1 So it remains today.)

It sometimes seems as if Hollywood is less bothered by sexually adventurous women than sexually adventurous men (James Bond had to clean up his act while Sex and the City was just taking off), but this sort of thing was clearly a problem for comparable material in the not-too-distant past. The 1998 TV movie Chameleon (a pilot for a TV series that never got made for the now-defunct United Paramount Network) had the titular character - like Friday, a sexy and sexual genetically engineered covert operative - hopping beds in its first half (mostly in the line of duty), and then giving this up as she became more self-aware, less an instrument of her employers and more her own person. She was not seen having sex again in that film, or the two sequels (1999's Chameleon II: Death Match and 2000's Chameleon 3: Dark Angel) which followed it. On the TV series Dark Angel the feline component in the genetic code of the Friday-like Max caused her to periodically go into heat, but the writers handled the material very carefully, keeping her out of the sorts of adventures and misadventures to which this could easily have led (though I imagine some of the fan fiction writers must have been less inhibited about exploring that side of her).

If anything, I imagine the studios to be more anxious about such matters today, and that is all without considering the story's handling of Friday's rape by enemy agents during an interrogation, which has understandably disturbed and offended many a reader.

One might also add to the list of problems the looseness of the story, the highly personal nature of the plot, the elaborate world-building required to faithfully render his version of Earth, the crowding of the tale with Friday's views on life, the universe and everything (all especially difficult challenges for anyone trying to build this into the kind of science fiction film that would sell enough tickets to cover the cost of a suitable budget). Consequently, it seems that too much would have to be cut out, and too much added, to turn it into a workable film - too much to seem worth the effort. All that said, I don't know that I would have come up with the same top ten, but I'm hardly surprised to see Friday on it.

1. The remark appears in his first autobiography, 1975's Memoirs of the Devil. Incidentally, this has likely been a stumbling block for that Barbarella remake long in development hell.

Of Science Fiction and Futurology

Science fiction writers have often displayed a propensity to downplay the extent to which the genre makes predictions about the future. (To name a recent instance William Gibson did it again in Wired in September.)

There are good reasons for this. A writer's purpose in producing a piece of fiction is much more likely to be the creation of art or the presentation of an entertainment than writing a manual to life at some future date. Serious guesswork about, for instance, life in 2050 might be secondary to what they are doing, or even incidental. They may also wish to distance themselves from the opprobrium some have directed at futurology.

Yet, in the process they sometimes exaggerate the distance between the two endeavors. The truth is that science fiction writers often ask the same questions as futurologists, and often arrive at the same answers. (After all, "extrapolation," labeled by John Campbell but long preceding him, is at the heart of the harder types of science fiction.) In the course of their work they often look at, and draw on, what their counterparts on the other side of the line have done, science fiction writers referencing futurology, futurologists drawing inspiration from science fiction, for a very long time now. (Looking at Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, for instance, the influence of predictions about aerial warfare by the military theorists of his day is very apparent in the book's often-denigrated early chapters.) And many try their hand at both games successfully (science fiction writers from H.G. Wells to Vernor Vinge becoming accomplished futurists).

Given this relationship it would seem natural that if one of these is stagnant, so is the other, and that has indeed been my impression. There is a wide, though apparently not dominant, view that science fiction has fallen short in the ideas department in recent years. (As Charles Stross recently noted, all we have to show for the last three decades in this respect is radical hard science fiction and the Singularity, both rather well-worn at this point.) It seems to me that futurology, too, has been short on ideas for many years now, evident all across the spectrum from optimistic techno-libertarianism, to pessimistic eco-catastrophism. The former shows little sign of innovation, which has tapered off since the boom in Singularitarian thought during the 1990s. (Since then we have tended to see the same names, the same ideas, those of Vinge and Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec and company cited over and over and over again rather than the production of original, compelling arguments for this idea – as demonstrated in Peter Diamandis and Steve Kotler's rather tepid Abundance.) The same goes for the latter. (While ably describing our problems, it has great difficulty describing how the plausible technical solutions might actually be implemented.)

These failings, in turn, point to still larger failures in our intellectual life. The technical frontiers appear to be the same one we've been looking at for decades, except that our prospects for conquering them seem more modest than in, say, the years of the tech boom. Meanwhile, there is a distinct lack of imaginative daring among our thinkers on social and political matters. And it is not only readers of science fiction who are noticing. When the hand on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock moved one minute forward this month, Kennette Benedict, the magazine's executive director, cited the lack of "new thinking" as a factor.

In short, this problem is much, much bigger than the doldrums of a single literary genre.

The Debate Continues . . . (As Paul Kincaid Answers)

Over at his blog Through the Dark Labyrinth Paul Kincaid has posted the first part of a response to the buzz his September review of three anthologies of year's best and award-winning science fiction for the L.A. Review of Books generated online, complete with links to dozens of essays and commentaries which caught his eye.

My post of September 17th made the list, and was actually addressed in his remarks. Kincaid makes it clear that he is "agnostic" about the idea that the future will be incomprehensible in the way that I mentioned, but that he finds the presentation of the future as incomprehensible an unsatisfactory approach to writing science fiction. He points to the experience of rapid change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which led to things we take utterly for granted (trains, planes and the rest), and the way in which we quickly "domesticate the new" (as we have the personal computer in recent decades).1 Accordingly, he notes, writing a future-set story means dealing with the tension between the differences which "scream" at the reader, while being familiar to the characters, with the writer's job

negotiat[ing] that tension . . . display[ing] the strangeness to the reader while at the same time evoking its familiarity for the residents of that future. My feeling is that an increasing number of writers have taken this notion of the singularity as an excuse for not engaging with the familiarity of the future, only with its strangeness.

The result is that we get strangeness rather than a "sense of a lived future, . . . [a] thorough inhabiting of the world."

I agree. In fact, this tension was a significant concern for me when writing my future-set novel Surviving the Spike. As I told Maria Violante in an interview about the book last year, I specifically chose to eschew the common cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk approach of overwhelming the reader with flashy detail (what Bruce Sterling called the "literary equivalent of the hard-rock wall of sound," and what I described as "an ad for the future") in favor of a world just as densely imagined, but which was made to "feel like a place people lived in," those quite different lives ordinary to the people actually living them.

1. Of course, the claim of the Singularitarians is that the change ahead of us would simply have no parallel in our past experience, plausibly overwhelming our ability to domesticate change in this manner - but again, Kincaid's focus is on the quality of the results as fiction, rather than futurology. It seems worth noting, too, that there is little in the Singularitarian package that did not appear in, for instance, Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 The City and the Stars (mind uploading, designer bodies with 1,000 year life spans, immersive virtual reality, etc.), which he managed to present as something other than a succession of strange spectacles.

The Tea Party as a Steampunk Movement

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth thinkers like Frederick Jackson Turner and Thorstein Veblen expected that Americans would come to terms with the consequences of industrialization and the end of the frontier – a world of Big Business and Big Science, mass society, and finite natural resources, which necessarily brings with it Big Government, Big Labor and a more refined ecological sensibility as necessary features of everyday life. At midcentury, however, C. Wright Mills in books like White Collar and The Power Elite, William H. Whyte in The Organization Man and William Appleman Williams in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy all wrote of the failure of American culture to come to grips with these realities. Instead the predominant ideal remained a romanticized world of small business and small government, and unbounded economic expansion sustained by profligate resource use – an ideal which is not merely an object of nostalgia, but a key source of legitimation of rightist political initiatives. Some, like Richard Hofstadter, the historian of the post-New Deal "liberal consensus," or John Kenneth Galbraith in books like The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, believed they saw the country adapting to the new realities, but the repeated and cumulative triumphs of the political right in the last half century has also been the triumph of those who idealize that lost nineteenth century world, and claim to be working to bring it back – the position still around today in the form of the Tea Party's platform.

And so here we have it: an economic model belonging to a world before railroads as a major political force in the twenty-first century, as retro-futuristic as the vision of a telegraph in every home, a steam-powered cars in every garage, and a little Babbage engine in every pocket. The fact that this persists as such a strong element in American life is, of course, worrisome. After all, the coming decades seem certain to pose profound challenges – in particular, challenges relating to technological change, demographic transformation and ecological constraints. The endurance of pieties already outmoded in the day of Queen Victoria, year after year, decade after decade, is a reminder that we never quite met the milder forms those challenges took in the twentieth – and considerable reason to fear that we will cope even less successfully with the problems so clearly coming into view now.

More Reactions to Paul Kincaid

Paul Kincaid's comments on the state of science fiction in last month's L.A. Review of Books is still sending out ripples through the critical universe.

Some of these ripples appear in a lengthy two-part interview Kincaid gave the site Nerds of a Feather Flock Together, in which he clarifies and elaborates some of the ideas he presented in that article regarding science fiction's crises of "ideas" (the lack of engagement with the genre's actual possibilities), "identity" (the tendency to write science fiction as fantasy to avoid science fiction-al rigor, or write fantasy sans the fantastic) and "confidence" (as writers eschew real exploration of their worlds).

Two other pieces seem especially worthy of mention.

One is Jonathan McCalmont's response to Kincaid's recent writing in "Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost The Future." There is much that I agree with here. (McCalmont's comments on the genre's refusal to take anything seriously, its tendency to push buttons without taking a coherent intellectual position, the unwillingness or inability to imagine serious alternatives, are all very much on the mark. So too his remarks regarding the attitude of the genre's "gatekeepers" toward the type of debate Kincaid has started.) There is also much that I disagree with. (His take on steampunk's appeal seems to me representative of only a part of that subgenre, and his readings of the Enlightenment idea of a universal subject, and of identity politics, differ substantially from my own.) But I found all of it worthwhile - and the same goes for the lengthier-than-usual comments thread following from it (thirty-nine posts, some quite long, at the time of this writing, with Pat Cadigan and Jeff Vandermeer among those who have dropped by to offer their thoughts).

The other, rather shorter, reply that caught my eye is M. John Harrison's "Pink Slime Fiction," in which he memorably sums up Kincaid's reading of the genre's prevailing pattern as

the intense commodification of ideas & styles evacuated of their original meaning & impact, an apparently deliberate industrialisation of the commonplace & worn out.

Kincaid, when asked for a prognosis, suggested in the interview that the genre seems to be "going through one of its phases of being inward looking, repeating itself rather than reinventing itself." McCalmont and Harrison, too, have some hope of the field's recovery, and all three can point to recent work in the field they have enjoyed, but as McCalmont's analysis demonstrates explicitly and at length, some of the problems of the genre appear to be not just genre problems, but problems broadly and deeply rooted in the cultural moment.

The Return Of Xander Cage?

The revival of Vin Diesel's career following his return to a starring role in the Fast and the Furious franchise in 2009 quickly led to a third Riddick film (shot earlier this year, and likely to be released in 2013), and talk of a continuation of the XXX series. However, for the time being it seems that the proposed XXX3: The Return of Xander Cage, is stuck in development hell. The exact reasons for this do not seem altogether clear, but the fact is less surprising than it may appear, and not solely because the second film in the series, 2005's XXX: State of the Union, was a flop. The fact remains that it has already been a decade since the first XXX movie came out, and even were the film to get a green light today it would almost certainly be 2014 before its release. A dozen years is a long time for a franchise--especially one which is premised on being an update of an earlier concept. XXX, after all, was sold as "James Bond for a new generation" in its overhaul of the idea of the adventurous and formidable, yet suave and high-living, secret agent who gets the girl(s) and saves the world from the depredations of assorted madmen.

As an attempt at a "neo-Bond," however, XXX had its share of problems. In contrast with other Bond-inspired Hollywood blockbusters, like Indiana Jones (with its archaeological theme, fantasy elements, period setting, and homages to yesteryear's movie serials) and True Lies (with its heavy element of suburban domesticity borrowed from the French film La Totale!), its reworking of the material was superficial. The early part of the film certainly succeeds in establishing a different tone with an opening scene in which a tuxedo-clad operative's conspicuousness at a Ramstein concert gets him killed, and the antics of its rebellious, extreme sports-loving protagonist. However, once Cage has been drafted into the service of the National Security Agency the innovation becomes almost completely aesthetic--Cage's conspicuously not walking and talking like an Etonian, meetings in dance clubs instead of casinos, fur coats instead of evening wear. Everything else is standard Bond imitation, the mission, the gadgets, the villain, the bad girl who turns out to be a good girl, the assault on the bad guy's lair with the clock ticking away to oblivion and the final pursuit, all of it much more copied than reinvented, down to Cage winding up at the wheel of a missile-firing car racing down a Czech road with the Russian villain's former girlfriend in the passenger seat. One might add, too, that while the execution of much of this was competent enough, the film displayed neither the flair or the scale to out-Bond Bond (was the ski chase, for instance, really so "extreme" as to put it in a different class from those already seen in the Bond films?), while some bits were decidedly sub-par. (The villain's plan is especially stupid, all the more so for being explained through reference to "anarchism.")

In short, XXX was a serviceable action film which had some fun with its idea of a Generation X/Y version of Bond, but which fell short of properly realizing that ambition, which at any rate is already showing its age ten years on. The "extreme" label has from the start seemed to many like a mere matter of marketing rather than substance, and in any case has long since been played out as superlative, gimmick and brand--so much so that it is no longer even the butt of jokes.1 Vin Diesel is now forty-five years old, a fact which has not been an obstacle to his continued participation in the FF films (he appears in Fast Six next year), but which makes him less and less plausible as the star of "the new generation's" version of anything--especially if one considers how much older he would be in further sequels (the prospects for which are naturally a crucial factor in any decision to continue the series). Meanwhile, even the Bond films have stopped trying to be Bond films of the kind it took as its starting point. Indeed, rather than the start of some new wave XXX now looks like the last major attempt by Hollywood to make an actual action movie using the Bond films as a model--virtually everything seen since then conceived as parody, from Cody Banks to Get Smart to last summer's Cars 2--while makers of more serious spy thrillers take their cues from Mssr. Bourne.

The result is that that update would now seem in need of a massive update itself. Even if this were feasible, and frankly I'm not sure that it is, it would probably leave the series unrecognizable, little of the original XXX's concept (already thin stuff to begin with) remaining but a title, a couple of character names, a casting choice or two--and it hardly seems strong enough to survive that. At this point I think it simply isn't going to happen, and that it's going to keep on getting less likely with time, the window in which the project could have looked like a good idea closed.

1. Stargate fans, for instance, will remember the episode "Wormhole X-Treme!"--which aired way back in 2001, almost a year before XXX came out.