The Macropolitics and Micropolitics of Spy Fiction

In discussing the concern mentioned in my title, I suppose I should define my terms.

By "macropolitics" I mean the the international scene that is the reason for the existence of intelligence services in the first place. The question of whether or not a government sees other countries as threatening, which countries those might be, and the nature of that threat could all be thought of as macropolitical.

By "micropolitics," I mean the politics of the intelligence service itself. I would put such things as the office politics ongoing within its corridors, its rivalry with other intelligence services of the same nation, its dealings with legislative oversight, its concern for public relations under that heading.

Both have been part of the reality of intelligence work from the start, and neither is new to the genre, with the two commonly figuring in the same plots. The novels of Ian Fleming present a convenient example, as with Moonraker. That novel centers on Hugo Drax's building a ballistic missile system for the British government, and its plot gets properly underway after a murder at Drax's facility. The threat from the Soviet Union in the early Cold War years supplies the novel with its macropolitics. The jurisdictional questions raised by Bond's investigating a question of domestic security, the frictions between the Secret Service and Special Branch, the concern for Drax's image as a celebrated public figure, are micropolitical.

However, by and large the attention given to micropolitics has risen over time. An obvious reason for this is that such services became increasingly professionalized and bureaucratized in the twentieth century, as a result of which the life of organizations simply became a bigger part of the realities of espionage. (Already Maugham, writing of his experience in intelligence during World War I, wrote of the spy as a "tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine.")

Another is that this same transformation of spying into an affair of large, permanent organizations made espionage and its workings better known to the public--while writers drew on the little details for the sake of achieving verisimilitude in the eyes of a more sophisticated readership. (Moonraker, notably, opened up with a lengthy account of the Service's workings.)

And still another is the development of the more politically critical tradition within the spy story, which regards the workings of that machinery with skepticism and distrust. (Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, for example, is a satire of the backward-looking imperial romanticism, bureaucratic ass-covering and sheer stupidity that he found in the British Secret Service--which also defined the novels of John le Carré, whose work included, among other things, an homage to Greene's book in The Tailor of Panama.)

Still, that hardly seems to be all of it. It often seems that as it becomes harder to portray the macropolitics as a titanic struggle against barbarian hordes on the verge of crashing through the gates, the micropolitics get more attention. World War Two spy stories, for example, rarely seem to devote much time to that sort of thing--in part because a real, colossal, life-and-death shooting war was being waged against an enemy acknowledged by nearly everyone to be so genuinely threatening,  and so horrific, as to justify almost anything in many minds.

By contrast, Cold War spy stories, because they are set within a "cold" war, contain greater room for doubt about just how dangerous the enemy is, just what the rights and wrongs are. The war never went hot, after all, and the aggressiveness and power of the Soviet Union were never what the hawks said--the Stalinists a realpolitik-minded group relatively accepting of the status quo, and the Bomber and Missile Gaps pure fantasy. Consequently, despite the status of militant anti-Communism as a default attitude in much of the Western world, there was room for greater introspection of this sort, greater sensitivity to the complexities of the situation, with even an undisputed hawk like Tom Clancy able to own that the Soviets had valid security concerns of their own, and look forward to the dismantling of the strategic nuclear missile forces at Cold War's end.

The post-Cold War era saw even less consensus regarding the international scene, the mainstream finding the challenges to the prevailing order more ambiguous, more diffuse. Some still saw Russia as threatening, but it was economically and militarily a shadow of what it had been, and in any event, shorn of the ideology that made it so objectionable to orthodox opinion. China remained Communist in name, but not in any other sense. Its economy was much more dynamic than post-Soviet Russia's--but most realized it was to be quite the while before that rapid growth translated into very much state power, widening the scope for observers to watch the trend with as much optimism as fear, especially as Western companies profited from trade and investment, while many hoped that economic liberalization heralded political liberalization. Iraq and North Korea, despite the grandstanding, were easily dismissed as small-timers, and non-state terrorism was even more easily dismissed than that.

Accordingly, the proportion of micropolitics to macropolitics in our spy fiction went up yet again--with the updates of works originally created in the Cold War period making this especially obvious--"continuation" Bond novels like John Gardner's SeaFire (where the Secret Service is thoroughly overhauled for the post-Cold War), or Jeffrey Deaver's Carte Blanche (where Bond begins his career against the backdrop of the War on Terror) particularly noteworthy in this regard. This was at least as much the case in the cinematic adaptations of the series after the reboot. These gave James Bond some external enemies to fight (a vaguely imagined terrorism, the Quantum organization behind it), but in Skyfall the villain was an ex-operative looking to avenge his personal betrayal against M herself, nothing more and nothing less.

One might see in this the ascendance of that tradition of political critique that undoubtedly played its part. Still, relatively little recent spy fiction has taken such a line, least of all in the more popular work. And despite a flirtation with a more critical view in Quantum of Solace, the Bond films in particular remain an endorsement of the idea that we "need these guys," Skyfall in particular exalting the continuing value of operatives like Bond (any irony in the menace coming from an ex-SIS operative with a grudge apparently unintentional).

What it really seems to suggest is an anemia on the part of the print side of the genre, which on the whole has not been so fresh or innovative or had the cultural impact that it did before, while the movies deal less in the old essence of spy fiction than in its hollowed-out forms and trappings.

Still, as the success of Kingsman, Spy, and Mission: Impossible 5 (or is it 5 million?) has already demonstrated this year, and as Spectre will almost certainly demonstrate again this autumn, writers and audiences still seem to be having fun doing that.

Bond and the 'Sixties

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 an "international man of mystery"--whose cover is that of a fashion photographer who freaks out at the happening that is the Electric Pussycat Swingers Club, a man possessed of countercultural credentials that Dr. Evil openly mocks.

More recently, the Big Time Rush movie opened with the members of the band dressed in tuxedos and acting out a secret agent fantasy while singing the classic "Help!"

What, one wonders, could be more 'sixties than this blend of Bond and the Beatles?

And yet, what could be more dissonant and unlikely?

Of course, both the secret agent and the band were icons of the decade. Yet, the simple fact is that the 'sixties was not all one thing, no more than any period is one thing, Bond and Beatles the product of different, frankly conflicting currents. One thinks "1961-1969," and the stereotype is youth culture and counterculture, but Bond is a far cry from that, even the Bond of the films. Yes, they looked very fresh and modern, with their hedonistic, sexual, irreverent hero, their fast pace and flashy visual style, their jet-setting narratives and futuristic technology and visceral action, brought to you through the magic of Technicolor and Panavision.

Yet, even the Bond of the screen remained at bottom an updated clubland hero of the kind granddad enjoyed as a kid. A bowler-hatted, suit-wearing, middle-aged civil servant who not only works for an organization run out of a wood-and-leather office by an uptight, pipe-smoking Victorian, but expects to wear black tie for night life, snaps at the nearest Black Guy to fetch his shoes and remarks the inappropriateness of red wine with fish. He even takes a swipe at the Beatles themselves, remarking that they should only be listened to with earmuffs on. Youth culture? It was the kind of thing that Bond was reacting against, explicitly in the novels (think the cab ride in the early part of Thunderball), and only somewhat more subtly in the movies.

With his usual incisiveness, Simon Winder remarked the contradiction between Bond and that broader image of the 'sixties at some length (and some of the recent continuation novels have acknowledged it in little ways, like Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care), but by and large the realization seems to escape most of those looking back at the decade. The humor in the Austin Powers films was at times subtle. (Even in an era when it seems everyone is bragging about being a black belt in some martial art, I suspect that the utter nonsense that is the "Judo chop!" went over most people's heads.) At times, it was even sociologically astute. (The exchange about how there is no world for Dr. Evil to take over anymore is priceless.) However, I never got the sense that Mike Myers' blend of secret agent and Swinging London was meant to be taken ironically--and this seemed still less the case in the Big Time Rush movie.

Still, it has been good for a laugh.

Review: Outbound Flight, by Timothy Zahn

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. However, as the launch of Episode VII approaches, I've found myself taking another look at them, starting with those books most closely tied to the Thrawn saga. The first that I picked up was Outbound Flight, which dramatizes the titular event referenced in the Thrawn books--the attempt, led by Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth and backed by the government of the New Republic, to establish a colony outside the galaxy, which went awry in ways that factored into Zahn's earlier cycle.

As it happens, Outbound Flight runs to some 453 pages, which naturally reflects its having a complex plot tying together multiple threads. As is so often the case, this means that a certain amount of patience is expected on the part of the reader during some rather lengthy exposition. It may have demanded more than it should have, in fact. Much of the first third of the book or so is devoted to an intrigue on Borlak that fed into the main plot, but was in itself relatively minor. It seemed all the more marginal because its principal viewpoint characters were Obi-Wan and the young Anakin--who simply drop out of the story of Outbound Flight prior to its climax, rather than playing any role in the key events later in the tale.

Still, when I got to those events they did justify that patience. Offering plenty of plot twists and action, they culminate in a multi-sided confrontation involving Darth Sidious' agents, Outbound Flight, the Chiss and a party of human smugglers caught in between (among all of whom there are still other, smaller divisions). In writing it Zahn pulls off the considerable feat of making this climax intricate, briskly paced and lucid all at the same time in a technical tour de force that far exceeds anything in the Thrawn trilogy. The book's presentation of the original C'baoth, and the future Admiral Thrawn as a young officer of the Chiss Ascendancy's Expansionary Defense Force, also have their interest, both within these events, and as background to the other books--their depictions lengthier and fuller than the Thrawn trilogy offered. All this helped to make the result a lot more satisfying than I expected, as both an elaboration of the Expanded Universe, and plain old pulp space opera.

Just Out . . .

My new book, The Forgotten James Bond.

It focuses on those aspects of the franchise that tend to get overlooked, or which most who talk about the series seem to know only vaguely--like exactly how the '60s-era Bond films helped shape the action movie, the special place of the 1967 Casino Royale movie in film history, and the continuation novels that came after Fleming.

It is now available in both e-book and paperback editions.

You can also read it at the Kindle Library.

If you'd like a preview, you can get one over at Google Books.

To everyone who's taken an interest in my writing, here on this blog and in my books: again, thank you.

That Jinx Johnson Movie . . .

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 Fleming's biographer Andrew Lycett reported that back when Ian Fleming was shopping Bond around to the studios years before the first Bond movie hit theaters, Walter Wanger of Twentieth Century Fox suggested Fleming develop a female version as a vehicle for Susan Hayward. The idea didn't inspire him, and that was that as far as he was concerned, but it has popped up here and there over the years, various authors trying something similar. (Walter Wager, for example--now fairly obscure, though he wrote Telefon, and his novel 58 Minutes was the basis for Die Hard 2--tried his hand at one with Blue Moon.)

And of course, Everything Or Nothing productions--producers of the main Bond film series--toyed with the idea itself, Die Another Day conceived as at least a potential launch pad for a series centered on the Jinx Johnson character, with a Jinx movie perhaps appearing in the off-years between new editions of the main series.

Of course, EON backed away from the idea. In fairness, the Johnson character had been less than universally acclaimed, but it seems that the underperformance of the sequels to Charlie's Angels and Lara Croft in the summer of 2003 was decisive (or at least, an excuse to be decisive), their lower-than-hoped-for receipts taken as proof that the moviegoing public was less enthusiastic about woman-centered action movies than the studios. And as it happened, the track record for female-centered action movies did indeed prove shaky. Certainly movies like the Resident Evil (2002-) series starring Milla Jovovich; the Underworld series (2003-) starring Kate Beckinsale; and Angelina Jolie's continued career, which included the post-Lara Croft hit Salt (2010); made them a real part of the scene. However, these have generally been lower-grossing and lower-budgeted affairs than the $200 million summer releases that remain kings of the genre.

Of course, the estimated budget for the Jinx movie was not so high as that for the contemporaneous Bond films (I recall talk of something on the order of $85-90 million), but that too was a potential difficulty: lower-budgeted spin-offs of a bigger action series, centered on a character who was a supporting player in the prior film, are a risky proposition, suffering by comparison with the more established, more lavishly produced original.

There was, too, the fact that Berry's own career was peaking. Hollywood stars tend to go through a period where the press absolutely fawns on them, followed by an equally excessive backlash, and her backlash was well underway by the time a Jinx movie would have hit theaters. That it would have followed Berry's flop Catwoman also would not have helped. Nor the fact that it would have been at odds with the fashion for more grounded spy movies emergent in the wake of the Jason Bourne films (which, soon enough, contributed to the rebooting of the Bond series itself, which would have left the Jinx Johnson adventures in a very awkward position).

On the whole, the kind of success that would have produced a solid supporting franchise seems a long shot, and it is probably best for EON's bottom line that it canceled the project when it did. Still, one can wonder at what might have been . . .

William Haggard's Yesterday's Enemy

William Haggard (1907-1993) is relatively obscure today, but in his day was regarded as a master of the spy story, and often compared with the best of the field in the 1950s and 1960s. Julian Symons, in his classic study of the mystery Bloody Murder, actually considers Haggard alongside figures like Ian Fleming and John le Carré.

Such an appraisal seems to me overgenerous. Haggard lacks the knack for action, atmosphere and travelogue Fleming displayed at his best, and Fleming's sense of fantasy as well. At the same time, he falls far short of le Carré's realism, humanity and facility with complex intrigues. Rather what seems to me most distinctive about Haggard's writing is his highly idiosyncratic outlook, expressed through his longtime protagonist, Colonel Charles Russell of the imaginary Security Executive.

Where the last is concerned, take Haggard's politics. His contempt for the left is unremarkable in itself, but it does take him in a surprising direction. While some Western leftists saw in the course Soviet history took the disappointment of their hopes for human liberation, and went so far as to characterize it as "Red Fascism"; and conservative anti-Communists frequently used such a characterization as part of their arsenal of arguments against the Soviet bloc, Communist parties, Marxism and the rest (and especially their attempts to present the Soviet Union as equivalent to Nazi Germany); he takes the Soviets for the "hard, hard Right"--and admires them for it. Indeed, Russell wonders at one point if he doesn't now "think of orthodox disciplined communism as the saviour of a decadent Europe" from the real "disease of a degenerate nation . . . something called egalitarian socialism. Which hardline communism destroyed at sight."

This view is central to the plot of the novel from which I took that quotation, Yesterday's Enemy. There Russell, now in his sixties and retired, is approached by a Soviet spymaster (known simply as the "Colonel-General") with whom he has a long acquaintance for assistance with a problem--the possibility that somebody is trying to make it appear as if West Germany is building nuclear weapons. Should the deception succeed, the hawks in the Soviet high command would resort to force to stop the program, with World War III the result. Accordingly, the Colonel-General wants Russell to help him show that the "German Bomb" is actually a con. While initially skeptical about the enterprise, Russell takes on the job, which eventually brings him to Switzerland, where he ends up working with Helen Monteath (a Soviet agent that Russell himself had actually recruited for them) and Molina (a former dictator of Argentina who has fled with his loot in the face of a CIA-backed revolution) to investigate the plot. This falls far, far short of reinventing the familiar formula--but it certainly does give it a different twist.

Review: The Italian Navy in World War II, by James Sadkovich

Westport, CN: Praeger, 1994, pp. 416.

It can often seem as if no historical subject has been more thoroughly, minutely, exhaustively examined than World War Two--and yet, even here glaring gaps quickly appear when one searches the material in a thorough way. One of these is the matter of the Italian armed forces, and their performance in the conflict, about which little of substance has been written.

There is an extent to which this is unsurprising. Italy was economically and militarily the weakest of the three principal Axis powers. It also fought the war for the shortest period, entering the war only after the fall of France in 1940 and dropping out in September 1943--just a little over three years, with the end coming nearly two years before VE Day. Additionally, its actions were generally confined to a single theater, the Mediterranean; the fighting on land occurred on a much smaller scale than what was seen on the Eastern Front, the fighting on sea than what happened simultaneously in the Atlantic and the Pacific; and the implications of these battles seem marginal next to what was happening in those other regions (Stalingrad or Midway more important than El Alamein).

There is, too, a tendency to see Italy's war as having been relatively one-sided--and not in its favor. It is commonly claimed that the Battle of Punto Stilo enabled much more aggressive British forces to achieve a "moral ascendancy" over an Italian navy that became unwilling to fight, that the raid on Taranto achieved strategic dominance in the region for the British, and that Britain's dominance in the theater was reaffirmed by the "decisive" Battle of Cape Matapan. Reading a typical account of the fighting in the Mediterranean, one gets the impression Italian warships left their bases only to be sunk, and that the war there went on as long as it did is due to German intervention, pure and simple.

However, James Sadkovich argues in The Italian Navy in World War II that this version of events does not fit the facts. Examining the actual course of these and other clashes, he concludes that the Italian fleet remained more daring and aggressive than they have been given credit for, the British more cautious. Despite their allegedly crushing triumphs (and even during them), British forces consistently avoided operating without cover of night and bad weather, and in all weather held back from engaging Italian naval fleet units near their land-based air support, while eschewing head-on clashes with the Italian navy even on occasions when they had numbers on their side. Indeed, Sadkovich describes the British Navy as having fought a "corsair war, hitting and running before the Italian forces in the area could react" (134), and that even while following this practice, it inclined toward actions valuable principally for propaganda rather than offering real tactical or strategic advantage ("small, easy victories" over "decisive encounters").

All of this reflected the fact that more decisive action was time and again deemed too difficult or risky to undertake--implicit but powerful proof of the actual willingness and ability of the Italian navy and air force to fight. And indeed, any actual evidence of some great shock to Italian morale as a result of early battles like Punta Stilo is lacking--the record clearly demonstrating that Italian forces remained ready, willing and able to seek battle. Moreover, on close examination such successes as Britain enjoyed in sea-fights appear to be due less to any advantage in morale (or for that matter, superior training or seamanship) than to intelligence from Ultra, technical advantages like radar (about which the Italian navy did not even know early in the war), and "dumb luck" (134). If Italian submarine losses were high, so were those of the British--a fact Sadkovich chalks up to the clear, shallow water in which they tended to operate. If Italian industry was no match for Britain's (and the Allies more generally) when it came to quantity, it was capable of high-quality production, not least in aircraft, its best fighters a match for the Spitfire, letting Italian pilots hold their own in dogfights. Sadkovich also credits Italian commanders with a sound strategic sense (hampered as their range of actual choice was by their limited resources), and logistical excellence (their Navy achieving wonders with the limited shipping available to it).

The result was that, with only "sporadic help from their German ally," the Italian navy and air force sustained a war effort in North Africa for three years, besieged Malta, and for considerable periods dominated the central Mediterranean. And in the end it was wartime attrition, American entry into the war and the Axis's general declining fortunes (like Germany's setbacks in Russia) which overwhelmed the country's more limited resources (that smaller industrial capacity, and weaker access to raw materials), and the Allied invasion of North Africa (by way of Vichy-held territory), rather than the heroics of British ship captains, which decided the fight on that continent.1

To support these contentions Sadkovich marshals a vast body of highly detailed evidence, from comprehensive assessments of warships and other weapons systems, to minute accounts of the fighting, to close-reading of orders of battle and statistics on losses. Indeed, he can seem to have almost too much evidence, the data at times nearly overwhelming Sadkovich's ability to present it in organized, readable fashion--as in an early discussion of the specifications of the cannon used on British and Italian warships. However, it does not overwhelm his analytical skills, and his case appears overwhelming.

All this being the case, one may wonder why the image of Italians

at the mercy of that bombastic fool and master of bluff and braggadocio, Mussolini [making] only an occasional appearance in order to throw down their arms and be meekly led away to a POW camp, or . . . lose their ships to superior British seamen and their aircraft to superior British pilots (xiv)

has been so enduring and unquestioned. Certainly one factor would seem the racism with which the Allies (and the Germans) viewed the Italians, which shaped early historiography. Another, Sadkovich holds, is the fact that many wartime secrets remained secret for decades--like Ultra, which let British forces read Axis naval codes and enabled many of their successes against Italian forces. The secrecy surrounding it made British forces appear that much more competent, the Italians that much less so (and the belated revelation of Ultra's role in the 1970s, which should have been a corrective, came long after perceptions had become well-established).

And of course, alongside the warping of the record of Italy's performance by bigotry and secrecy, there is also the perception of Italy's principal enemy here, Britain. Nationalistic British historians, and writers from other English-speaking writers inclining to their view, have been prone to apply a double-standard. As Sadkovich observes, "While Britain's defense of Malta is extolled as heroic, Italy's ability to keep the supply lines open to Africa and the Balkans is discounted as unimportant" (331)--though "if so much is made of the few convoys that managed to reach Malta, much more should be made of the many that kept the Axis war effort in Africa alive" (349). Indeed, the fighting as described by Sadkovich--that image of a hit-and-run corsair war--clashes unacceptably with the image of the fighting sea-dog spirit to which Corelli Barnett paid a thousand-page tribute in the text and title of his history of the Royal Navy during World War II, Engage the Enemy More Closely.

Unsurprisingly, two decades on, the discussion of this subject remains much what it was before--with the result that Sadkovich's book still comprises a relatively large and up-to-date portion of the literature specifically focused on Italy's armed forces, and a crucial debunking of myths about the war in this theater.

1. In the whole first year of the war British forces sank 12 of 334 Italian merchant vessels--just one ship per month, despite this being a major theater of operations.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and the Market for Retro-Science Fiction

In 2014 a fairly slow early summer gave way to a late summer season packed with surprising commercial successes (Guardians of the Galaxy).

2015 has proved a more typical year in that respect, with the bigger successes appearing early on, and the latter part of the season seeing the piling up of disappointment after disappointment--with The Man From U.N.C.L.E. lengthening the list.

It seems safe to say that one factor was the degree to which the late spring and early summer, packed with colossal successes (Fast and Furious 7, Avengers 2, Jurassic World) sated the audience's appetite for big action.

Indeed, 2015 had already sated the appetite for as specific a taste as that for '60s-style spies, with this spring's hit Kingsman, this summer's Spy, and Mission: Impossible 5--not just a '60s-style spy adventure, but one which, just like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., was spun off from a '60s TV show, and came out just two weeks earlier. And not incidentally, was yet another hit, so much so that it actually ended up making more money during The Man From U.N.C.L.E.'s opening weekend than the new movie did.

In short, the timing of the movie's release was terrible.

However, the film had two other disadvantages as compared with Mission: Impossible.

The first has to do with each show's presence within the pop cultural universe.

The original show's run had begun in 1966 and continued for seven seasons and 171 episodes, to 1973. Then there was a two season, 35 episode revival, beginning in 1988 and running to 1990--just six years before the first of the Tom Cruise films hit theaters, and exploded at the box office, after which that movie was followed up by a money-making sequel every few years.

By contrast, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. had just a four year run, from 1964 to 1968, and apart from a single reunion TV movie in 1983, has not produced anything since. So basically this is a show from a whole half century ago, which incidentally does not seem to have left any trace quite so recognizable as, for example, Mission: Impossible's famous self-destructing messages or Lalo Schifrin's theme music.

The result is that not only has that property simply been less visible, but Hollywood made the mistake of waiting much, much longer to get the movie made, making it that much more obscure.

The second was the fact that Mission: Impossible got updated to the present, while Man From U.N.C.L.E. stuck with the original period setting. In short, it is an atompunk film, as the publicity made clear. That genre has been a tough sell to audiences, even when it has been attached to a successful franchise, as the underperformance of X-Men: First Class and Men in Black 3 demonstrated. I wondered for a time if this would be the movie to change that, but unsurprisingly a movie based on an obscure franchise dropped into the marketplace at the end of a season crowded not just with action, but with '60s-style spy action in particular, did not prove to be that film.

"The 25 Most Hated Sitcom Characters of All Time"

Interesting list up at Complex--not at all new, but new to me as it happens.

I haven't seen all the shows on the list, and don't remember all the shows that I did see. Some of the choices seemed questionable. The inclusion of Holly Tyler from What I Like About You may simply reflect the overblown backlash against Amanda Bynes, while Robert Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond was merely one unpleasant character on a show packed with them who, appalling as he could be, nonetheless fit in very well with the Barone family's dynamic.

Also questionable was the fact that of the only two shows to land two characters in the top twenty-five, one was Married . . . With Children, and that one of them was not an actual character, but rather a persona briefly adopted by Bud Bundy (a character the list's makers seem to rather like, dubbing him the show's second-best), which was meant to come off as being just as silly and obnoxious as it seemed. (The other character is Marcy D'Arcy, whose #12 ranking seems to me to be way too high up the list.)

However, it did not surprise me at all that where most of the featured characters from older sitcoms were supporting characters (or even just personas of supporting characters), many of the more recent characters were the leads of their own shows--with three particularly annoying characters from three particularly annoying CBS sitcoms earning well-deserved places in the top ten. Leonard Hofstadter of The Big Bang Theory made the #1 spot, Charlie Harper #5, Ted Mosby #7.

I'm taking it as evidence that I'm not the only one who thinks TV writing is getting more obnoxious by the year. Indeed, it seems astonishing that Married . . . should have got two notices, while (among others) Big Bang got only one. However, even if Sheldon Cooper and the rest went unrecognized, it is worth noting that the list contained so many characters presented as "high IQ"--Leonard (and in his more over-the-top intellectual displays, also Mosby) accompanied by Stuart Minkus of Boy Meets World, Screech Powers from Saved By the Bell, and by way of yet another persona, Steve Urkel of Family Matters.

The point bears repeating: Hollywood seems incapable of portraying intelligence without making it grate unbearably, and as the list above shows, the only thing more annoying that its presentation of "grown-up geniuses" is its handling of "child geniuses."

Is it all deliberate anti-intellectualism? Probably not. But such trite, lazy writing contributes to it all the same.

Science Fiction's Sense of Mission

It has long been unfashionable to think of fiction as having a purpose. Still, what is "fashionable" has absolutely no value for anyone trying to understand anything. (All the more so as actually trying to understand things is also unfashionable.)

Looking back over science fiction in the past year, it has seemed undeniable that from H.G. Wells to John Campbell to Horace Gold, science fiction's prime movers regarded their genre as having a special purpose, apart from other kinds of fiction--and that the genre did realize that purpose. Science fiction helped us discuss science, technology, the future. Specifically it helped accustom us to talking about these subjects, and helped develop and popularize the tools for doing so--like the thought-experiments we call "extrapolation."

Science fiction also helped bring the fantastic back into literature more generally.

Yet, having accomplished all that, science fiction also became less special, less important. Pop science has come a long way since Wells' day. So too futurology. Someone who wants to publicly speculate about what some new technology will mean, for example, does not have to write up his ideas in fictional form. He can just as easily use those old science fiction tools in a piece of nonfiction--which may be all the more effective at its job for not having to work as a story, not having to bother with plot, characters and the like (as Wells did not in Anticipations, and decreasingly did even in his novels). And those who would go beyond mundane reality in telling their stories need not dress up the fantastic in scientific jargon (the way Wells felt he had to when he began writing his scientific romances). Indeed, today fantasy seems to have trumped science fiction, with the popular market and with the critics alike.

The old mission having run its course, science fiction writers, by the 1960s, increasingly prioritized other things--things which diminished their ability to deal with science fiction's traditional concerns. The emphasis of many on Modernist and postmodernist subjectivity and irrationality in their choice of content and style were absolutely at odds with the "science" in science fiction, and edged it out over time, as science fiction increasingly abandoned its old interests to the end of becoming regular old fiction which simply happened to have science fiction's trappings.

Indeed, even getting away from the highbrow, artier end of the genre, one suspects that many of the old formulas which retain their popularity are having an effect opposite to what science fiction once did. Rather than helping us think about science, technology, and the future, the genre trades in ideas inhibiting this. The Frankenstein complex (which had even Asimov's I, Robot present us with robot rebellion). The Edisonade (epitomized by Iron Man Tony Stark). Science fiction where the "science" is really pseudoscience (as Carl Sagan complained about The X-Files). There are plenty of reasons for all this, like the ease of fitting such material into a superficially character-centered dramatic narrative, the appeal of the sensational, and so forth. But really these ideas are lingering on past their time and cluttering and confusing things.

One way of looking at this may be to think that science fiction ran its course and, over the last half century, became increasingly decadent--reaching the condition that Paul Kincaid famously criticized a few years ago, recycling old ideas, more or less nostalgically, or playing the game ironically, or even being just fantasy (or even mundane) fiction passed off as sf. Certainly I have tended to that view in many of my writings on the subject. However, one might also imagine that the stage has been set for "science fiction 2.0"--for science fiction to set aside its old tasks (and old devices), and take on some new task, using speculative science to look at the world in a new way (or perhaps even an old way we've simply forgotten). In today's cultural climate it is hard to picture anyone actually doing anything like that--writers and editors and critics too leery of such seriousness. Yet, it seems to me that that possibility does exist.

Just Out: After the New Wave: Science Fiction Today

Four years ago I published a collection of my writing on science fiction, After the New Wave.

I have just published a revised version of that collection, containing a fair amount of new material, some of which I have published there for the first time, and which I have reorganized with my other book Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry in mind, enough so that while it was intended to stand on its own, in its offering more in-depth looks at various aspects of science fiction today alongside CSW's more comprehensive picture, I like to think of it as working as a companion volume.

To all who made those earlier writings, and the earlier version of the book, seem like it was worth revisiting: thank you again.

Reviewing George Friedman's Predictions

Reading George Friedman's comments on Greece made me take another look at his arguments in The Next Decade and The Next 100 Years.

As one might guess, the evidence is ambiguous on a great many issues. Still, he seems to have been at least partly right about some things. The idea that Europe's integration had reached its high water-mark now seems more persuasive to me, rather than les so. I would say that he has also been right regarding an increased American concern with Russia leading to greater attention to European affairs, and China's increasing economic difficulties.

However, Friedman would also seem to have been wrong about the emergence of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis. Germany seems to behave more unilaterally than ever now (as the Greek situation demonstrates), while its relations with Russia have worsened considerably, particularly in the wake of a civil war in Ukraine. Additionally, the idea that this would be associated with the U.S. pulling back militarily from the Middle East and keeping aloof from East Asia has also been wrong. Instead there have been the operations in Libya, Iraq, Syria in the former region, and the "pivot to Asia" in the latter--even as the U.S. has become more concerned with Eastern Europe. And certainly the idea of Russia falling apart looks less likely than it did before.

Africa also remains a more active scene of foreign intervention than he thought, as has been the case in Mali--with that particular intervention related to that greater intensity of conflict in the Middle East (its civil war, in part, a spillover from the fighting in Libya). And of course, while he anticipated a more statist economics, neoliberalism, discredited as it is, remains the conventional wisdom among policymakers, no real challenge having emerged to it (a fact recently underlined by SYRIZA's immediate and utter surrender to Germany's demands).

Of course, tabulating right and wrong guesses has only a limited interest. What seems to me more interesting is the reasons for both the successes, and the failures. Given that his books--forecasts--offered more in the way of prediction than argument for why he thought events would take the course he describes, there is only so much of that one can discuss. Still, it seems to me that his track record has much to do with his basic analytical framework, which is centered on a realpolitik vision of international relations in which billiard ball-like states bounce off of one another. This keeps him from underestimating the importance that nation-states still do have--but it would seem that this also leaves him with an insufficient regard for economic motivations. Even where he was right (the EU and China bumping up against important limits) it seems to me that he guessed the event, but not what would lead up to it, namely the depth of a worldwide economic crisis, which he does not seem to have appreciated. Nor does he seem to have appreciated the difficulties neoliberal prescriptions for the problem have caused (the real factor which has made the EU's weaknesses so glaring).

Fourth Reich, Again?

A few years ago I remarked the way that the "E" word--empire--kept coming up in discussions of Germany's dealings with its neighbors. (George Soros, for instance, made a few headlines using the word back in public remarks in Italy back in 2012.)

The word's use did not quite disappear afterward, but it did seem to come up less frequently until this year, and especially the recent deal with the Greek government (which has brought another troubling word, "diktat," into wider use again).

What is more surprising than the frequency with which the word "empire" is the way in which it is being used--not as a thing that might happen, as Soros said it was, but an accomplished fact--and at least as much so, the places where this sort of rhetoric came up.

It is, perhaps, not so unusual that it came up in recent coverage of these events by Sputnik News. However, in this case Sputnik is citing a piece by David Dayen which ran in the very mainstream American Salon.

George Friedman of STRATFOR (you can read my reviews of his books The Next 100 Years and The Next Decade if you want a sense of his writing), also used the word in his comment, titled "An Empire Strikes Back: Germany and the Greek Crisis."

Interestingly, an article by the staff of Der Spiegel (the guys who ran this surprisingly offensive cover), while denouncing the political usage of the term and the memories it evokes, conceded that it "may not be entirely out of place."

Still, in light of the fact that holding the EU together is still broadly approved by not just Germany's but Europe's elites, and the short and long-term limits to Germany's economic power (the German economy is the continent's biggest, but not overwhelmingly so), it appears more a matter of the four decade-old fight of neoliberal globalizers against state intervention in economic life, welfare states and organized labor. The fact that a free-trading European Union serves German manufacturing well does not change this.

Still, there is no denying that economic nationalism had been drawn into the fight, on both sides. German economic nationalism is on the side of the EU in this matter, Greek economic nationalism opposed to it.

One might even wonder if the nationalists are not exerting a greater influence within the dialogue and the horse-trading than has been the case for some time. After all, for many years we have been hearing about a "revival" of statist economics. However, by and large this was a question of the behavior of exceptionally large states able to buck the conventional wisdom through sheer mass, and the power that it brings (China); of resource exporters advantaged by the boom in commodity prices during the first decade of the century (Venezuela); and especially those countries combining both those characteristics (Russia). That Greece would go similarly nationalist (refusing the deal, exiting the euro) would have extended this to a country in quite a different situation--a small nation (10 million people) which is not a noted producer of commodities like oil and gas, and a First World EU member to boot, suggesting the kind of challenge to globalization not really seen in a long time. However, Greece's falling into line only confirms the pattern that has prevailed thus far.

In Defense of Star Trek: The Next Generation: Characters

In the world of Star Trek bashing, certain criticisms have long since become cliche, and they include criticisms of the characterizations.

The crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation is no exception.

Of course, the show might be said to fare better than most entries in the franchise. Much better, in fact. Jean-Luc Picard, Worf and Data are on the whole very well-liked, enough so that they make the top ten lists for the whole Trek universe again and again, as at Ranker, IGN, the Mary Sue and Paste.

Still, other characters have been far less popular. They have their limits and failings, of course. But some draw much more than their fair share of flak, usually for reasons besides those normally given. Deanna Troi, for instance, seems to suffer somewhat because psychic powers are on the whole less fashionable in science fiction than they used to be, and more importantly, because telepathy, empathy and the like do not lend themselves well to depiction in visual media. That a lot of people dislike her mother Lwaxana likely hurts her all the more, their irritation with Lwaxana rubbing off on her by association. (And the gender politics that find their way into these debates don't help her much either.)

When people remember Katherine Pulaski, they usually seem to picture her prodding Data into the game of stratagema in "Peak Performance"--not necessarily the best thing she could have done in the situation, but she had the grace to admit it, and things did work out in the end. Besides, when I look back on the character, I also remember her in "Up the Long Ladder" telling a white lie to save Worf embarrassment, and then sharing a Klingon tea ceremony with him, a reminder that she had more likeable moments too. But they are the more apt to be overlooked because she had the problem of replacing a reasonably well-liked predecessor in Beverly Crusher, while Crusher's return made her presence seem that much more anomalous in hindsight.

And I suspect that a good many people hate Wesley Crusher (who often occupies the #1 spot on the "most hated" lists) because, underneath all the empty verbiage, as adults they find the idea of a kid out-smarting or upstaging adults threatening; because as parent and authority figure, they can't stand difficult children and adolescents on screen any more than they can in real life. (Indeed, while not written as super-kids, it seems noteworthy that TNG's Alexander Rozhenko and Deep Space Nine's Jake Sisko often make the lists of least well-liked characters, and that the same pattern is evident in other franchises. Wesley's Doctor Who counterpart Adric is equally likely to top that show's "most hated" list, while these same sentiments doubtless factored into the ire directed at the Annakin Skywalker-centered Star Wars prequel movies.)

However, the biggest criticism often seems to be not of individual characters, but of the cast as a whole--the group's dynamic. The characters were not without their baggage, or their rough edges, or their conflicts with themselves and each other. Still, on the whole it was a fairly harmonious group.

Dated, they say. Old-fashioned. Unrealistic.

But I have to admit that this happier dynamic does not seem unreasonable to me. This is, after all, the flagship of the United Federation of Planets' Star Fleet. It ought to operate fairly smoothly--and plausibly would operate more smoothly than any comparable effort today. If one takes the Federation as an example of the triumph of the "scientific world-view," a society which has embraced reason and humane values and succeeded in eliminating a great many of the evils we take for granted in the twenty-first century, then it stands to reason that we would be looking at a society which is on the whole saner than the one we now have, with this going for its individual members too--and the crew of a ship like the Enterprise representing the best it has. (It isn't as if Star Fleet fills its ships through a policy of impressment; or has people enlisting simply to escape hunger, and accepts them out of sheer hunger for personnel.)

Indeed, calling Star Trek unrealistic on these grounds is simply a failure to understand what it is they are looking at--a piece of science fiction imagining how, as the world changes, life changes along with it. In this case, it is change for the better--which seems to be exactly the problem many have with it.

This is, in part, a question of the fashions in our entertainment, all this being a contrast with what so much other television serves up as a matter of course: a reveling in the brutality and brutalization of rat race and marketplace, where every dialogue quickly turns into a pissing contest, or at least an occasion for colossal douche-baggery. A vision of every human heart as a heart of darkness, every mind as a basketcase of neuroses and delusions, every human being as consumed with getting ahead or evening the score or simply inflicting injury because they can; the sense that where two or three gather, there is a snake pit.

Those with a taste for such material don't want heroic starship captains, or explorations of humanity through devices like robots trying to figure humans out. (And we all know how they feel about having a character whose outstanding quality is her empathy aboard the bridge.)

What they want is soap opera, the meaner and nastier the better. They want the Enterprise to feel like the Galactica. Or King's Landing. Or the offices of Sterling Cooper. They want anti-heroes who do conniving and cruel things, brushed off with a "Whatever" or a "Get over it" or a "Welcome to the real world."

However, all but the most extreme misanthropes will acknowledge that what such fans take from those shows is hardly a complete or nuanced depiction of even our comparatively bleak era. And if the results can at times be viscerally gripping, it is far from being the sole basis for drama, or the best basis for it, or even a sure-fire basis for some minimal level of success. Indeed, however much the fashionable are ready to award automatic points for this sort of thing, it does not take any great skill on the part of a writer to give us a bunch of unlikeable characters tearing at each other--and it is not necessarily insightful or interesting or worthwhile, especially when everyone is doing this anyway.

In fact, I suspect that for those of us not addicted to what gets exalted as the "dark and gritty," it makes reruns of this edition of Trek a welcome respite from the rest of what passes for "drama."

H.G. Wells' The War in the Air

It can be said that the theme of the apocalyptic has been part of Wells' work since the beginning of his career--The Time Machine, and The War of the Worlds, for example, unambiguously so. However, in subsequent decades he increasingly presented apocalyptic visions arising in the very near future, as a result of more grounded, more literally true factors.

In 1907's The War in the Air, intensifying nationalist, militarist and imperialist behavior combine with the increasing power of military technology to wreck the world--a theme Wells was to revisit in works like The World Set Free (1914) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933). However, at this point he has not yet gone fully over to the "future history" approach of those later books, which submerge the narrative of any one character within the larger stream of events. Instead the invasion story element is blended with the realist satire of novels like The History of Mr. Polly (1910).

Running through it all is the story of Bert Smallways, the sort of character he was to sum up in Mr. Polly as "one of those ill-adjusted units that abound in a society that has failed to develop a collective intelligence and a collective will for order, commensurate with its complexities." A son of the lower middle class with a head full of notions as conventional as they are wrong-headed, "Smallways" embarks on a career of small-scale entrepreneurship that only points up its outmoded, futile quality, first in a bicycle repair shop, and later as a street performer. The hapless Smallways, through a series of blunders, finds himself ballooning to Germany, and landing in the staging area of the aerial component of a German air-sea attack directed against the American East coast, with the intent of forcing the U.S. to clear the way for its own imperial ambitions.

Smallways ends up the Germans' prisoner, from which position he becomes a witness to a great battle in the Atlantic in which German forces defeat the United States and go on to attack New York--just as Sino-Japanese forces attack the country's west coast. Very soon the whole world is at war, and while the Sino-Japanese alliance gets the better of the Western powers, their victory is ultimately a Pyrrhic one. The physical destruction caused by the fighting, and even more than that, the resulting chaos, opens the door to famine and pestilence which bring down modern civilization, and leave the remnants of humanity scrambling to survive in the ruins.

In that, there is the second great difference between The War in the Air and Wells' later treatments of the theme, the fact that the book closes with the post-apocalyptic image, rather than a portrait of a process of rebuilding and renewal creating a saner world. One may read this as a more pessimistic work, but one can also see it as a matter of his keeping this Smallways' story--the blend of which with momentous world events is surprisingly seamless.

Indeed, one could argue that it was the vision of larger events which ended up being relatively crude in this work. Certainly one might declare his early recognition of the destructiveness of aerial warfare as prophetic--but in hindsight it can also appear exaggerated, the kind of thinking that made air forces attempt to "bomb their way to victory" so many times in this past century, at such a high price in human life.

Additionally, the treatment of the geopolitics is uneven. As in his later work Wells was here a critic of nationalism, racism, imperialism and war. Yet, the images of the German attack on America, the Sino-Japanese attack on the West, can seem to play into the clichés of the invasion story genre (the "frightful Hun," the "Yellow Peril") so popular at the time, and which contributed to the toxic political atmosphere against which he was trying to fight. The satirist always risks appearing to promote what he is criticizing--and Wells was in this case less careful than he might have been, the book quite easily (mis)read as just another invasion story regaling us with spectacular techno-thriller bits as it warns us to keep on our guard against the villainous foreigner. Still, these are comparative quibbles next to the book's considerable imaginative and technical accomplishment.