Review: Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future, by Timothy Zahn

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

After revisiting Timothy Zahn's sequel trilogy to the original Star Wars trilogy I found myself picking up the duology which capped off that story, consisting of Specter of the Past (1997) and Vision of the Future (1998).

The original Zahn trilogy was already a diffuse work, and this dulogy is rather more so. The fact is all the more problematic because the tale is made of slighter stuff--villains on their last legs, a con man's pretending to be the second coming of Admiral Thrawn (we know that much from the start), the internal politics among New Republic worlds of which we had previously known little or nothing. The intrigues among the Bothans and Caamasi and Mistryls (and for that matter, the question of what ever happened to J'orj Kardas) could have been interesting given the proper treatment, but they are all thinly sketched (understandably, as anything more would have overbalanced this epic still meant to center on our familiar protagonists), and serve only to leave the two books still more crowded and slower-paced than they already are.

This sets the story we get here up to be something of an anticlimax, and alas, the execution is not all that it might have been, especially from the standpoint of pacing. This is, partly, a matter of overwriting, compounded by the fact that the book, rather than switching back and forth quickly across its various threads, tends toward very lengthy scenes. (The climax of Luke and Mara's adventure, for instance, runs some fifty pages without so much as a glance at the other goings-on.)

Time and again I felt my patience being tried by the fact--and such occasions the more numerous because of how long the books happen to be. Specter of the Past is 344 pages long, while Vision of the Future is rather longer, at 528 very packed pages markedly longer than any of the preceding books (and it seems, longer than any other Star Wars book published as of the time of this writing). Still, I did stick with it to the end, and I can say that the book does manage to build on what came before. The events of the book's narrative do, ultimately, determine what the relationship between Luke and Mara is to be, while it is here that the Empire, or rather the little left of it, concludes its peace treaty with the New Republic. Still, it seems to me that there was, by this point, not so much remaining to be wrapped up, while taken by itself it is not really all that satisfying--certainly not in the nine hundred page form in which we got it. In fact I find myself suspecting that there was a rush here to cash in on the popularity of Zahn's trilogy, the three volumes of which each had a very healthy run on the New York Times bestseller list), and promise readers a sense of this being a similar "event," compromising what might have been a perfectly fine single, epilogue volume of more modest proportions.

Indeed, while I am usually even less likely to have a good word for a prequel than a sequel, I found myself much preferring Zahn's Outbound Flight--a better-proportioned, swifter-paced and more cleverly constructed book that derived rather more interest from the Thrawn character, and that it seems to me has a much juster claim to being more than "another" Star Wars book from the standpoint of the mythos.

The Continuation Bond Novel Writer's Dilemmas: Bond Movie on Paper, or More Fleming? Write Like the Original, or Only Pretend to Do So?

Those who have gone on flogging the James Bond series in print as in film have made much of being true to the original. "Not the last time, but this time," they promise--and it is all as implausible as it is insincere.

Where the matter of the impossibility of making a Bond novel today read like a Bond novel then is concerned, Fleming's attitudes regarding gender and race (in that order, and only these, it would seem) get most of the criticism here, but the differences go far beyond that. The films distilled the stuff of his middle books in particular (Dr. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball) into a very specific formula (freakish villains, gadgets, high-tech complexes blowing up at the end, etc.)--resulting in a tone and a briskness, a density with and emphasis on action and sex and luxury and glamour, not just so intricately structured that fans might complain about any deviation, but far at odds with Fleming's more varied and in many ways odder Bond adventures (compare the film version of You Only Live Twice with the book), and more generally, the darker, slower, more grounded, more character-oriented approach of Fleming that makes quite a shock for the film fan coming to them for the first time.

Still, even if one had never seen a Bond film, knew nothing of them (unlikely for one coming to the books now, but there you have it), they would still likely be struck by Fleming's ostentatiously Literary prose style, with its technique of the "aimless glance" that in showing translated to slowness by not just cinematic but print standards, placed additional demands on the reader's concentration, and from the standpoint of today's action-adventure reader as well as viewer, buried them in the minutiae of things not all that interesting while hastily passing over what they would consider the "good parts." It is all the greater, too, because of just how indifferent Fleming could be to being interesting or accessible to an audience much like himself, which did not know the ins and outs of golf and bridge, which did not share or want to share his anxieties about whether he was going slack in time of peace, or the direction of post-war Britain was going--the heavy freight of upper-class conservative middle aged-ness, the senior British civil servant-ness of the books (which, of course, were what made those social attitudes hard to miss).

Unsurprisingly, while Amis offered up more Fleming, mocking Fleming's critics and the films (and M, whom he'd never much liked) in the process, only Faulks in his idiosyncratic Devil May Care made any real attempt to capture the flavor of Fleming's prose (and even for him, none of that aimless glance stuff!), while the rest were more inclined to write in their own voices rather than pretend to put on a ventriloquist act, while usually spending  a good deal less time on minutely described upper-class games or in Bond's head. There was also an increasing tendency toward the stuff of the films with regard to pace and action, with Gardner and Benson tilting one way and then another, and more often toward the movies rather than the Fleming novels (exemplified by Never Dream of Dying), and even Faulks inclining this way in his 2008 book, though his attempt to write as Fleming did got in the way. (We had, for instance, a scene with Vulcan bombers chasing a nuclear-armed ekranoplan that could have been an atompunk techno-thriller reader's delight--but true to the approach he was taking in his book, Faulks treated it in Fleming's more typical, aimless glance manner, and did the same with what could have been Bond's epic journey home across Soviet territory.) Jeffrey Deaver chucked Fleming altogether when seeming to start from scratch with a thoroughly modern 007 born in 1979, and while his successors William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz headed back to the era of the originals (Boyd pushing forward only slightly into 1969, and Horowitz returning to the '50s), with Horowitz actually incorporating Fleming's own material (stories for the unproduced TV show, not novelistic material) in narratives closely tied to specific Fleming novels (a story set mere weeks after Goldfinger, a prequel to Casino Royale), they are only too obviously written for a twenty-first century readership.

The Inconsistencies of Star Trek's Utopianism

Watching Star Trek one does not hear its sociology spelled out, but most conclude that the Federation is the sort of thing that Wellsians and Marxists envisioned as a desirable future.* (Indeed, an opinion piece in the New York Times during the centenary of the Russian Revolution remarked the show's debt to revolutionary socialism.) Humanity's taking that course is why it has survived into the twenty-third--and later, the twenty-fourth--century, moved out into space, and contributed positively to the emergence of a beneficient community of alien civilizations, all while giving its members the sort of freedom and opportunity that, for all the complacent rhetoric of some, the world we actually live in now has never done.

There are times when the utopian premise manifests itself in the franchise in subtle and clever ways--as in Spock and Kirk's memorable adventure on the bus in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. It was, of course, the case that a show made in the '60s could never have sounded like The Sopranos or Deadwood, but it was also the case that the foul-mouthed abuse that is our standard way of relating to each other strikes Spock as genuinely curious, and that this was entirely in line with the logic of the series, according to which society which has transcended scarcity, inequality, bigotry and the other brutal and brutalizing features of our daily life would be quite different, and not understand our behavior at all. (Leon Trotsky--I have no idea whether Roddenberry ever read him--actually wrote a memorable piece about this matter at some length, "The Struggle for Cultured Speech.")

Still, the series is on the whole less than consistent here. Often it falls by the wayside when seeking drama not in the Federation's contacts with other, less enlightened societies, be they aliens (barbaric Klingons, fascist Cardassians, ultra-capitalist Ferengi) or humans who have somehow moved out of the mainstream (like the Neo-Transcendentalists in Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Up the Long Ladder"), and instead among the Federation. I have to admit that the collapse of Turkana IV (the horrific backdrop to Tasha Yar's youth) was never all that convincing to me--this "society that works" should have been able to prevent things going so bad, and even if it failed, one is left wondering why the Federation made no attempt to rectify such a situation in one of its members.

Less dramatic, but perhaps even less plausible, because more intimately treated, was Reginald Barclay's winding up in Starfleet at all, let alone the crew of the Enterprise.

In our world people invest vast amounts of money, time, effort in arduous careers they do not much like and for which they are really poorly suited simply because of the pressures of "earning a living." One would not expect this to be the case in the Federation, and were they to try anyway for some reason it is hard to see how someone doing so could have made it through the ferociously competitive Starfleet Academy, let alone into service aboard a starship. It is equally hard to see why, since he made the attempt, he did not receive a measure of assistance with his far from inconspicuous problems interacting with others as he (successfully) made his way through this whole system.

I suppose it bespeaks what those who have spent much time studying utopian fiction generally conclude--it's not easy to imagine the dramas such societies would have. This is not because they will not have drama, or even that we cannot conceive of some of those possibilities intellectually. Instead the issue would appear to be the difficulty of going beyond hazy notions to actual dramatization of those conflicts--and moreover, dramatization of them in a manner comprehensible and compelling to the kind of broad TV audience required to keep the show on the air week after week. And so in spite of the premise, when taking this course, they fell back on tales befitting the twentieth century rather than the twenty-fourth.

But for all the imperfections of Star Trek's realization of its premise, I still think science fiction, television and the world have all been better off for the attempt.

* I speak here of the original five-TV series franchise, and its associated films and other spin-offs, not the reboots and other stuff we've seen since 2009, most of which I must admit I haven't seen any reason to bother with.

Reflections on a Dragon Warrior Playthrough

I recently played all the way through the original Dragon Warrior--something I haven't done since I first got the game way back when it was a brand-new release for the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System.

At the time there was little to compare it to (it seems that at least in North America the only prior NES role playing game had been Ultima III: Exodus), but even by 8-bit standards (certainly in comparison with the following year's release, Final Fantasy) the gameplay can seem awkward and limiting. Standing on a staircase one actually has to select STAIRS from the menu to ascend or descend it to the next floor. You cannot carry more than one weapon, one suit of armor, one shield, at a time so that when you find Erdrick's Armor you simply lose whatever it was you were wearing before (though the income from the sale of my magic armor--3850 gold--would have been a welcome supplement to my income at the time). There is only one save point, back at Tantagel Castle, and while you can swiftly get there with the wyvern's wings on sale in most item shops, and the Return spell you eventually learn, it is a pain to use them because no spells or vehicles enable quick journeys anywhere else around the world map, making almost every trip a long walk with random battle after random battle--much of it against weaker enemies who basically waste your time because they slow you down while offering virtually nothing in the way of gold or experience, and the rest against tougher ones who make an already tedious walk back to some errand hazardous as well.* This is all the more the case because, given the fewness of specific tasks to perform, the player spends so much of their playing time seeking out random battles for the sake of amassing gold and leveling up.

Naturally returning to the game I had my doubts that I'd stick with it for very long, let alone finish it. However, as my sessions ran longer and proved more frequent than I planned (because I took one more go at the next object, one more round of experience and gold-amassing before I headed back to save my progress), I quickly realized that I would do just that, and soon enough, finished the course.

Thinking about all this I found myself remembering when I looked into the franchise's history some years ago--wondering why despite its relative obscurity in North America it exploded so in Japan. (Dragon Warrior 11 sold 2 million copies in Japan on its first day, the latest success for a series so much a touchstone of the country's gaming culture that the light novel, manga and soon to be anime That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime can casually reference the game in its title, and the target audience know exactly what they're talking about.)

Easily the best piece on the subject was this one by Christian Nutt at the gaming site Gamasutra. As the author notes the game is highly accessible, and rewards "sticktoitiveness," so that even an inexperienced player can get into it, and as they play, make progress so long as they are prepared to persist in building up their levels, and exercise a modicum of intelligence in making their decisions about how to tackle opponents, when to take up a new task, when to explore a new geographic area (unlike so many games where some minor thing they have to do to continue becomes so difficult that they just give up on the whole thing). Nutt notes, too, the game's emotional resonance--and while the piece largely discusses more sophisticated sequels, rather than the simpler original I played through, making my way from town to town as I follow in the footsteps of Erdrick, I can still see what they mean. One may or may not see a deeper cultural implication in the extent to which these elements made a franchise in one country and seem to have meant little in another, but I can say that they helped to make the experience of replaying it all these years later a pleasant surprise.

* One can use fairy water and the "Repel" spell to avoid those clashes, but only much later in the game, well after it has become an annoyance.

Cousin Bette: The Movie

Some time ago I ran into the Des McAnuff film version of Honore de Balzac's classic Cousin Bette.

The novel is a sprawling soap opera, far too populous and tangled to be thoroughly and faithfully transformed into two-hour film. Naturally it is not so surprising that the cast of characters was very sharply reduced, with much tossed out altogether and much of the rest combined and compressed.

What was more surprising was that the film (despite being R-rated, with legitimately R-rated sex and nudity) comes off as tame next to the source material.

This is, partly, because of that reduction of the cast, which eliminated a good many possibilities (Adeline dies early on, Valerie de Marneffe receives but a single early mention, etc.), but also because the film's makers simply lacked old Balzac's audacity.

I think of such scenes as Valerie and her husband, who is quite content to use his wife's adulteries to wrangle promotions at work, and the four different lovers Valerie is leading on at the same time, each jealous of the others to the point of murder, sitting very civilly to breakfast together, each of the lovers smugly thinking to themselves that the child she is pregnant with was fathered by him and not the others, who unlike himself must surely be dupes for thinking the same thing.

Balzac manages to make it hilarious rather than simply ridiculous--and I suspect no filmmaker could pull that off now. The sheer technical virtuosity required to make something like that work apart, there is simply too little of Balzac's readiness to look unblinkingly at the seedy side of money, sex, obsession and the interaction of all these, certainly among those filmmakers who wish to go on being filmmakers--which should put the nonsense spouted by the self-proclaimed moralists about our times (and the self-satisfied edgelords, too) in perspective.

On Reading John Green's Paper Towns: Some Thoughts

Checking the reviews of John Green's Paper Towns on Amazon I was struck by how many were annoyed with Quentin's adulation of Margo--how baseless it seemed. But then that was exactly as it was supposed to be. After all, it was not just about childhood affection, or conventional romantic attraction, but a case of the uncool entranced by the cool, and more precisely his fuzzy notion of who the apparently cool person was, which is a silly thing to begin with and ultimately shown up as deluded.

Yet the book's failure to leave a reader as entranced diminishes the impact of the conclusion's revelation that Margo has all along really just been a scared, confused girl trying to sort things out.

The impact of the revelation is diminished still more by the book's opacity regarding that fear and confusion. Yes, she was shaken by that early contact with death. Yes, she was alienated by the paper-like superficiality of the suburban world she grew up in. But these things are not really delved into, and while one can chalk this up to the limits of the narrator's viewpoint, one can come away suspecting that the hidden depths are really not all that deep. And I will say it--the limited viewpoint is overrated, the omniscient underrated, in ways all too reflective of the deeply flawed priorities of the literary tastemakers of the past hundred years. "What we wanted was a ventilation of the point at issue," Wells said when explaining the difference between his style and Henry James--and that is exactly what we did not get here.

Which can really rankle after three hundred pages of watching the rather less interesting Quentin and his mostly one-note buddies pursuing a mystery consisting mainly of dead ends.

From Page to Screen: Percy Jackson

On the bestseller lists Rick Riordan stood comparison with Suzanne Collins and Stephanie Meyer as a writer of young adult fantasy and science fiction during this past decade. Yet the feature films based on his books have been much, much less successful than theirs commercially. The first Percy Jackson film didn't quite make it to a $300 million world gross, and the second film did not better that, ending the franchise there for the time being, while Hollywood has shown less enthusiasm for a reboot of this particular property than, for example, it has for reboots of well-known superheroes like Superman, Batman and Spiderman.

Considering that--and the dislike many fans of Riordan's books have of the film adaptations--I found myself the more attentive to the alterations made to the material in bringing it to the screen as, having seen the films first, I turned to the first of the books, The Lightning Thief. Percy is made much older in the movie than in the book--the sixth-grader of the novel turned into a high school student. The character list and plot are all simplified--Dionysius, Ares, Cronus are all left out of the events, and the number of incidents with and without them pared down. In particular the more parodic elements were discarded, as with the bit in the Colorado water park, while also excised from those scenes the filmmakers' retained. (In the book the vision of the underworld felt like something out of Mel Brooks--but in the movie it looked much more like What Dreams May Come.) And of course, all this enabled the film to dispense with most of the book's abundance of talky exposition (virtually a course in Greek mythology in itself, which would probably have made a fair-sized portion of the target audience zone out).

The somewhat older protagonist, the simplified, more compact story, the downplaying of the wackiness (and the reduction of the exposition) enabled the producers to achieve a more manageable running time, made the product brisker and easier to follow, and saved on budget. (That fight scene at the top of the St. Louis Arch would not have been cheap to film.) But in the process they sacrificed much of what would have elevated the material above being a rather slight fantasy adventure (the zaniness almost vanished, the bit of drama likewise reduced--so that Hermes' son's betrayal of the hero lost any emotional punch it might have had).

In short, the "safe" approach did not pay off. Of course, it would be nice to think that not playing it so safe would have let the film do better--but alas, that is speculative (and perhaps also a long shot).

THE SHADOWS OF OLYMPUS

Manhattan art dealer and sometime art thief Ashley Sutton has been blackmailed by a mysterious client into the most dangerous job of her career-breaking into the ninetieth story office of financier Harold Northrop and stealing a disc from his safe.

The job goes badly, and Ashley and her partner Logan Scott end up on the run, from both Northrop, and her angry client.

Their only way out lies in their unraveling the mystery of the disc's contents-which leads Ashley into a dark corner of her personal past, while plunging her into the middle of a conspiracy by a secretive and powerful group intent on controlling the world's future in . . .

Available in paperback and on Kindle at Amazon and other retailers.

Get your copy today!

Why Are We Still Talking About James Bond in 2020?

To say that James Bond is the most famous of fictional spies, defining if not the image of the spy then at least a particular popular image of the spy, would be uncontroversial. Yet the simple truth is that Ian Fleming's creation of James Bond was not the moment of the invention of this style of secret agent. Rather he updated what was by then the half century old genre of fiction about such figures established by Erskine Childers in The Riddle of the Sands and, still more, William Le Queux in Secrets of the Foreign Office: Describing the Doings of Duckworth Drew of the Secret Service. The old clubland heroes had operated in a context where Britain appeared, if threatened and even in decline, still the predominant power of the day; where espionage appeared an individualistic adventure. The heroes themselves were ostentatiously, inaccessibly upper-class; chaste; genteel; in line with Edwardian ideals.

None of this was quite as plausible or as appealing circa 1953. Britain had officially lost much of its empire (the Indian Empire was formally independent now, the Dominions more assertive of their practical independence), and was fast losing the rest, while struggling with the bankruptcy brought on by three decades of world war and economic depression, and eclipsed in global economic and political life by the growing might of an increasingly outward-looking, world-trading and politically activist United States with five times' its Gross Domestic Product. The Bretton Woods financial system, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—these were above all American creations that made that country more the workshop of the world, the creditor of the world, the setter and enforcer of the rules for everyone else in the system, and the marshal of the West than Britain had been even at its long-ago height. Meanwhile, if there were still those who sang the romance of the spy, the fact remained that the bureaucratization of national security, far from unknown even a generation earlier (W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden appeared way back in 1928), was all the harder to ignore not only as a result of long and increasing familiarity, but in the wake of six years of world war that had seen the British state ascend to new heights with regard to size, complexity, intrusiveness, control in British life.

And of course, at a time when Britian's upper classes had seen their privilege challenged and in respects even curtailed by imperial decline and post-war austerity, and by the domestic reform demanded by British working people finally achieving some success in asserting themselves, the image of clubland was less relevant or acceptable. The old sexlessness, too, was decreasingly credible. And where their taste in thrillers was concerned, Britons increasingly gravitated to the tougher, more cynical outlook of the hard-boiled fiction developed on the other side of the Atlantic by writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and imitated for local consumption by the likes of James Hadley Chase.

Fleming's adventures, however, found a place for a British secret agent to have adventures in the old way within this Americanized, organized world. If Britain was far along the trajectory of decline, it was still a global presence, economically and militarily, with its remaining colonies and post-colonial defense arrangements and its sterling area, while in its participation in the broad Western alliance, and especially its "special relationship" with the United States, still a country with global interests, and where needed, America a prop to its resources enabling it to continue acting globally. If espionage had become bureaucratized, making the vast majority of those in intelligence cogs in the machine, Fleming was prepared to acknowledge the fact, even make the workings of that machinery a point of interest (making a great show of letting the reader in on the secrets of Bond's world in, for instance, the opening chapter of Moonraker), while concentrating on the exceptions to the image of a vast machine grinding away—those rare times when the individual mattered, with "double-o" operatives taking their orders directly from the chief of the whole organization once every year setting off on some adventuresome special assignment that will come to involve old-fashioned derring-do.

The character of Bond himself was substantially updated in these respects as well. Fleming is rather vague on Bond's background, which he did not think about all that much until faced with having to write an obituary for him in the character's eleventh novel. Obviously it is far from proletarian (we even learn Bond went to that most public school-y of public schools, Eton, as Fleming had), but his Bentley is secondhand, and he only gets into a place like M's club Blades as a guest; a man who certainly has glamorous experiences, but more generally as a result of his government position than his inherited resources—not nonexistent, but far from adequate to keep him in great style. (Indeed, to paraphrase Kingsley Amis, it is "backdoor semi-aristocratness" rather than the just plain aristocratness of that antecedent most likely to be named, Bulldog Drummond.) About the author's preparedness to treat of the series protagonist's sex life hardly anything need be said here, and the same can almost be said for the harder edge of the adventures, their hard-boiled-flavored cynicism and violence far removed from the world of a Duckworth Drew.

As history shows, these adjustments did the trick. And it may be said that, much as the world has changed and popular taste changed with it since 1953 (with Britain thoroughly post-imperial, the bureaucratic-technological quotient in intelligence beggaring any imagination of the '50s, and of course, notions about gender and sex much changed, enough so that one may question whether it is not all terribly out of date), there is an extent to which it still does the trick in a way that those older stories in whose wake Bond followed do not—at least, enough to allow for a credible makeover. (Truth be told, the more recent print versions of the character have strained to keep Britain a global actor in the old way, while the gender politics have become nearly unrecognizable.) It matters, too, that many of those writers who had similarly made a name for themselves in the genre in those years were, for all their accomplishments, and their popularity with audiences in their heyday, to prove less enduring (William Haggard's Colonel Russell novels, huge in the '50s, vanished into obscurity today, a case in point).

It matters also that the way in which espionage has developed since 1953 has not lent itself well to appealing images which might have replaced 007 in popular fiction. Not only has the field grown more bureaucratized, but it has grown more technologized as well in very particular ways. The mass surveillance of communications by the ECHELON/"Five Eyes" program, the intensive computerization of everyday life, the endless multiplication of the cameras pointed at anything and everything from above the counter at the corner store to near-Earth orbit to the drones increasingly filling the skies—the drones that are now used not only to watch the suspecting, but as a matter of routine, to kill them in cold blood from thousands of miles away—inspire revulsion, not romance. And of course, the sorts of technical specialists who happen to man these systems are stereotyped as anything but the dashing hero in a society ever more relentless in its nerd-bashing.

Of course, all that would have mattered a good deal less had it not been for the existence of a screen 007 far better known to the world than even the print version. Again, its success was not a matter of any novelty in the spy trappings. As a glance at the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby "road" film Road to Hong Kong (which hit theaters a half year before Bond's big screen debut in Dr. No) demonstrates, or the remarks of all those critics who looked at the early Bond films and took them for some sort of weird parody of Hitchcock or B-grade science fiction, all that stuff was already cliché in 1962.

The key thing was instead the technique of presentation, which was nothing short of ground-breaking. The "high concept" film that plays like a two-hour commercial because it is at bottom a commercial for itself, with its quick-cutting succession of striking visuals mattering more than the story they convey, its luxuriating in a luxurious lifestyle, its brand name recognition that achieves and exploits a franchise success; that particular variant of this concept, the action-adventure film where what grabs and holds the viewer is a swift succession of shocks, substantially generated by spectacular set pieces filmed and edited for the maximum sensory effect (and everything else from narrative logic to character drama takes a back seat to that); the "blockbuster" mode of marketing and releasing films, with campaigns leading up to a wide release to bring the audience out up front, on opening weekend, while a tidal wave of related merchandise hits the stores to add mightily to the earnings from ticket sales—the Bond series did each and every one of these things first in its earliest films, just about covering the list by the time Thunderball hit theaters. Indeed, the producers of the EON Bond films substantially mastered this approach about a decade before upstarts like George Lucas and Don Simpson would begin guiding Hollywood along this path, and where action-adventure was concerned, Hollywood would still be in the process of assimilating the lesson into the '80s.

This is not the sort of innovation that literary or film historians tend to admire. But Bond's originality and ultimate significance in that innovation are undeniable. And if rarely spelled out in proper fashion, in part because those with the training to properly spell out such things cannot be bothered to do so, that is what really gave the series its place in popular consciousness at the time, what supplied the cachet it has since had, what the sequels that came out after the end of the series' really innovative period (the first half dozen films of the '60s) have traded on ever since in ways from recycled formulas to audience affections to retain some standing as what had been unique to the Bond series became commonplace, and then ubiquitous (along with the constant updating of the veneer in ways from new opening theme songs to more advanced special effects).

Fleming's updating of what in his time had become the worn-out image of the heroic spy. The filmmakers' transformation of Fleming's update into the first of the high-concept action-adventure film blockbusters. One can, of course, point to other aspects of the franchise that seem to merit remark, but where Bond's standing as a pop cultural fixture two-thirds of a century after Fleming began banging away at his typewriter is concerned, that is what matters. One may regard it as a rather slight basis for the continued cranking out of new James Bond films, new James Bond books, new James Bond everything, but crank it out they do, and, along with the cooperativeness of the mass media with such sales pitches and the general credulousness of the general public apart, that is why the pop cultural news pages are subjecting us to the early phase of a publicity blitz in preparation of the public for the twenty-fifth film of the series, due out at the beginning of next month.

The Real Reason No One is Reading Your Blog

I have long regarded what we so inaccurately call "self-help" with deep distaste.

Ultimately, the reason for all that is that its premises are deeply at odds with reality.

Self-help culture assumes that life is some kind of individual test where individual outcomes accurately reflect individual virtue, or the lack thereof. It assumes that one is in total control of their life, that their problems are entirely of their own making, that all they need is the generic "one size fits all" advice it offers to enable them to unmake the problem and live the life they want.

You can be a billionaire! Everyone can be a billionaire! Yes, all eight billion of us on this planet! They just need to do what it is in this book/seminar/program.

And if they don't, well, whatever happens to them is their fault.

The stupidity--and cruelty--of this ultra-simplistic outlook beggar description.

And yet it goes on flourishing.

As anyone familiar with the nonfiction book market knows, apart from gossip (memoir, biography and autobiography and "history" and "current affairs" indistinguishable from either, tabloidy "journalism" like so much true crime), self-help (especially if one counts in those diet books that have somehow never put a dent in the obesity problem, and overtly religious tracts coming from the same place) is pretty much all the publishers sell to a broad audience.

A certain amount of this, of course, is directed at those attempting to make a name or a place or a career for themselves online, writing for an audience. For instance, bloggers whom such "gurus" presume to give advice about "why people are not reading your blog."

You, they snarl, are not going about it the right way. You do not post frequently enough. Your posts are uninteresting. You do not pay enough attention to feedback. You do not have each and every post professionally edited and copyedited in advance of posting. Your blog is not pretty enough.

And so on and so forth.

But the reality is that while the prospect of writing professionally has always assumed a low ratio of content creators to content consumers--one to many thousands, or millions--the ratio, in the age of social media, seems to be approaching one-to-one.

The reality is that computer screens lend themselves poorly to any sort of long-form reading--which people are less inclined to attempt in any medium with each passing year as the alternative uses of time multiply, and the pessimist would say, the requisite faculties wither. Meanwhile the ratio of creators to consumers may be even higher here than with other kinds of online content, because of that faintness of demand relative to supply. (Fellow bloggers, how much time do you spend reading other people's blogs relative to working on your own?)

The reality is that the search engines are not friends to most of the "competitors." Secretive as the companies which created them may be about the algorithms that spit out the results, the reality is that they favor those who have been successful in the past over those trying for success now, favor those who are associated with high-profile platforms over those striking out on their own, favor those who pay to be promoted. Thus go your chances of being at the top of the list of search results--any distance from which hits means the exponential decay of the chances of anyone clicking the link at all.

The reality is that in these circumstances the only real hope for the obscure, no matter their talent, is going viral--and as I have had occasion to remark before, nothing ever goes viral.

No, it isn't that you are necessarily doing anything wrong.

Rather it is that whether you are doing everything right or wrong simply does not matter, the chances so few that the meritocrats' notion of life-as-a-test-with-the-worthy-guaranteed-to-get-ahead-and-the-failures-deserving-to-fail is even more meaningless here than it is in most other areas of life.

And there is nothing we can do about that bigger problem individually.

Alas, such little truths do not sell seminars and books and the rest. And so no one has much incentive to talk about them. But for what it is worth, they have been published here.

Just Out . . . The Neoliberal Age in America: From Carter to Trump

As we enter 2020 it seems as if the country's politics are undergoing nothing less than a tectonic shift—one result of which is that the word "neoliberalism" has passed out of the usage of academics, into general parlance. Those trying to make sense of it all find that the market is flooded with public affairs books—but most are longer on political hacks' rants than substance, or too busy telling colorful stories, to offer answers to such obvious and essential questions as

•Just what is neoliberalism anyway? (And why is there so much confusion about this anyway?)

•What did the Reagan administration actually do, and what were the results?

•What was the policy of the Clinton administration, and did it justify its characterization by critics as neoliberal? (Ditto Obama.)

•What was the country's economic record before and after "the neoliberal turn?"

However, THE NEOLIBERAL AGE IN AMERICA: FROM CARTER systematically examines Federal policy from the 1970s through the Presidencies of Carter, Reagan, the two Bushes, Clinton and Obama, emphasizing specifics and hard data to offer a picture of just what happened in these years as a matter of practical policy, and its consequences—answering these questions and more as we confront this era of crisis, and what may be a historic election this upcoming November.

Available in ebook and paperback formats at Amazon and other retailers.

Get your copy today!

The Trajectory of Robert Ludlum's Career

In 1971 Robert Ludlum became a name in the spy genre with The Scarlatti Inheritance. Counting the works he produced under two pseudonyms (Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd) he published another eleven books in the next nine years--a dozen books in all over the course of the decade.

In the next two decades Ludlum was not to match that output, at least to go by the count of titles. One can chalk this up, in part, to the already large books (Ludlum boarded the post-Forsyth "super-thriller" train early) getting bigger, and individually demanding more work. But one can chalk it up to other factors too, among them the fact that the '80s was less fertile soil for the sort of thriller he wrote, in part because of the rightward shift of its politics. Ludlum espoused a centrist liberalism, which deemed anyone who questioned the structure of society an "extremist"; equated extremism with mental illness (the words "Madness!" and "Maniacs!" come up in his prose with tiresome frequency); and hewed to the orthodoxy of the Cold War, which had the Soviets a genuine threat to the West. And as one might guess from all this he was by no means anti-Establishment, but in fact quite genteely pro-Establishment. Still, he took the principles of liberal democracy sufficiently seriously as to hold that there were lines which should not be crossed, that the Cold War spy game was very far from black and white, that "Watergate" and all the rest associated with that term were an outrage, a view widely shared in the country. It must be remembered, too, that if the malefactors got off with a comparative slap on the wrist, the aftermath of the scandal still saw a Vice-President do time, and a President head off impeachment only by resigning his office.

In the next decade, however, the expectations and the reactions were quite different. As Arthur Liman, chief counsel for the Senate during the Iran-Contra hearings remarked, the hearings thoroughly exposed the crimes committed--but as one may observe of the aftermath, to far less consequence. (Exemplary of the lot, Elliott Abrams was convicted on mere misdeameanors, his punishment a fifty dollar fine and some probation and community service, and Bush the First pardoned him, sparing him the full consequences even of that--while he has since continued in his dubious career, the man subsequently Deputy National Security Advisor under Bush the Second and Special Representative for Venezuela and Iran under Trump.) Indeed, many of the chief participants in those crimes were openly and widely cheered as heroes by much of the public. That face of the scandal, Oliver North, put in TV appearances as himself in shows like Wings and JAG, the latter in particular flattering him as International Man of Mystery, while notable among those contributing to his defense was the writer who trumped Ludlum as the commercial colossus in the spy genre that decade, Tom Clancy, whose uncritical, "populist" flag-waving was much more in fashion.

Indeed, Ludlum not only became less prolific, but also more repetitive. He published five new novels in the next decade (1981-1990)--of which three were sequels, following The Bourne Identity with The Bourne Supremacy in 1986 and The Bourne Ultimatum in 1990, and The Chancellor Manuscript with The Icarus Agenda in 1988. There were some new touches here--the East Asian setting of The Bourne Supremacy, the Middle Eastern action with its whiff of Chuck Norris in The Icarus Agenda (Evan Kendrick gets to be popularly known as "Commando Kendrick" after helping resolve an embassy siege in Muscat), and the final showdown between Bourne and Carlos behind The Iron Curtain in the last days of the Cold War. Still, this was a matter of Ludlum following the fashion rather than setting it, and there was usually more old than new here, with the same going for the two books that were not obvious retreads. The Parsifal Mosaic (1982) and The Aquitaine Progression (1984) were variations on the theme of his next-biggest success, The Matarese Countdown, large and largely European-set tales of international conspiracy at the highest levels, with the Cold War sides interpenetrated in The Parsifal Mosaic, and generals instead of corporate overlords plotting world domination in The Aquitaine Progression.

As one might imagine, this was even more the case in the next decade, which saw five more books, two of them sequels, and one a clear repetition of a prior theme. His crack at comedy in The Road to Gandolfo got a follow-up in The Road to Omaha (1992), while after squeezing the last of the juice out of the Bourne saga (the third book did not sell like the first, and anyway Jason was fifty now, in a time before septugenarian action heroes were all the rage), Ludlum produced a sequel to what appears his second-biggest success, The Matarese Circle, The Matarese Countdown (1997). And again the "originals" were less original than their predecessors. The Scorpio Illusion (1993) once more had terrorists as corporate pawns, while in The Apocalypse Watch it was a neo-Nazi takeover plot that could not but recall The Holcroft Covenant on the level of premise, if updated after two decades and with a good deal of spy-fi about it (1995), while they seemed comparatively slight, shallow things compared with what came before--a tendency evident, too, in The Prometheus Deception (2000). And after that, the very last book completed by Ludlum himself, The Sigma Protocol (2001), once more returned to familiar ghosts of World War II.

Moreover, commercial exhaustion followed creative exhaustion, as an examination of the bestseller lists demonstrates. Where in the '80s, even amid the repetitiveness and other signs of decline, a Ludlum novel could still be expected to last six months or more on the New York Times' bestseller list, spending several weeks at #1 (the original Bourne Identity managed an astonishing 16 such weeks), then go on to rank high among its year's top-sellers (The Bourne Ultimatum, the weakest performer, still made #6 on the Publisher's Weekly list), they faded fast through the following decade. Not one of the five novels of the '90s made the #1 spot on the NYT list for a single week, while The Scorpio Illusion was the last to make Publisher Weekly's list (barely doing so at #10), afterward the NYT list appearance at any rank dwindling. (The Prometheus Deception lasted a mere nine weeks.)

Still, the Ludlum name was not so weak that Big Publishing, in its ever-greater ardor to milk any past success, even one fast-fading (anything beats looking at, you know, anything NEW), passed up the temptation to build the Ludlum name into a veritable imprint just as Ludlum himself was passing from the scene. Thus followed a string of four more big Ludlum novels not actually written by Ludlum. Following The Sigma Protocol were more big books that looked just like their predecessors, starting with The Janson Directive (2002), and the launch of the "coauthored" Covert-One series with The Hades Factor (2001).

All of this, of course, was helped massively when Doug Liman (yup, Arthur's son) achieved what the legendary Sam Peckinpah and John Frankenheimer did not, turning a Ludlum novel into a really popular feature film.* Liman's The Bourne Identity (2002) launched a cinematic franchise and broader multimedia franchise (four more films, a video game in The Bourne Conspiracy, now a Bourne TV show in Treadstone, with more likely on the way) which of course had as one of its first consequences the reinvigoration of the print franchise (with eleven more Bourne novels to date, and two more to follow next year, not counting the apparent TV tie-in, The Treadstone Resurrection). That helped the other series' to flourish as they have, with the Covert-1 novels now numbering a dozen, and The Janson Directive having turned into a franchise in itself, with three more sequels. And so Ludlum's name, like Fleming's or Clancy's, appears mostly on books he never had anything to do with, and that largely because of the successes to which they led in other media consumable by people who never pick a book, with the pattern continuing decades after their writing their last. And likely to continue decades hence with, I suspect, artificial intelligences churning out new ones just like the originals, for whoever still enjoys that sort of thing. And still other artificial intelligences churning out new ones not at all like the originals for those who don't.

* Sam Peckinpah directed a feature film version of The Osterman Weekend which hit theaters in 1983, John Frankenheimer a version of The Holcroft Covenant (with Michael Caine an exceedingly unlikely Noel Holcroft) that appeared in 1985.

Sixty-Six Years After Casino Royale

In 1953 the "international man of mystery"-type spy was an old, well-worn, frankly stale tradition. It had already been a half century since William Le Queux introduced the type in Secrets of the Foreign Office (1903), where Duckworth Drew trots the globe (this week Paris, next week Constantinople and perhaps St. Petersburg the week after that) on assignments mixing the glamour of high life and the intrigue of high politics with a certain amount of physical danger including death-by-improbable gadget. Most of its variations and innovations were only a little younger (with Fu Manchu and Bulldog Drummond the genre already having its supervillains and freakish henchmen and good girls and bad girls and the rest). And the same went for the genre-subverting drama and parody of the improbable material (which, in the hands of literary masters like Maugham and Ambler, was to frequently be a good deal more memorable than the work off of which they played).

Ian Fleming managed to update that material in a number of ways, extending even beyond the dressing of the technology and geopolitics of the moment (atomic and jet-type and rocket-type things that Fleming was in cases to treat with more rigor than his predecessors, Soviet rather than German nemeses). There was the bureaucratization of intelligence (owing more to Maugham than Le Queux). There was the cynicism and brutalization of a society that had been through two world wars and a Depression and the beginnings of the break-up of Empire, while that process had as yet not gone so far as to end all illusions for Britain's moment as a great power being stretched by American dollars and sheer "knack for the game," which made for a more ruthless, violent adventure (the more so for its coloring by harder-edged American crime fiction, just one way in which this universe was being Americanized). There was the acknowledgment of sex and sexuality and the indulgence of fantasy about them to a certain extent, in that breathing space between Victorian prudery and the Sexual Counter-Revolution. There was a certain reimagining of glamour reflecting post-war Britain's mix of privation and comparative egalitarianism (Bond only gets to be a guest at a club like Blades, the luxury on display not aristocratness but, as Kingsley Amis put it, "backdoor semi-aristocratness"), and the redefinition of what even the most flamboyant luxury would look like by post-war consumerism (the use of brand names much remarked). There was, in Fleming, even a readiness to mix the straight adventure stuff with an element of the parodists' irony.

By the 1960s all of this soon enough stood in need of yet another update for film audiences, with the conservative politics and the bureaucracy played down, the luxury and sex and violence played up--with the help of the technique of the TV commercial, all but inventing the "high concept film" and the action movie as we know it, while the producers invented the practice of marketing blockbuster (a publicity blitz of a movie easily promoted in a commercial because it's a commercial-for-itself anyway, leading up to an ultra-wide release, accompanied by a colossal merchandising offensive), the series' real pop cultural legacies (merely extended and Americanized by George Lucas and co., not created by them).

A half century after that the significance of those three innovations (high concept, action film, blockbuster marketing) still stands as remarkable. But that is not enough to make the Bond films unique. Rather the result is the opposite--the Bond films are now comparatively ordinary, because the things that made them unique have become standard. Meanwhile, those things that make Bond different--the idea of British agents still traveling the globe on missions, for instance--seem out of time. Thus Bond today, older in our time than Duckworth Drew was in Fleming's as he sat down to pen Casino Royale, appears both commonplace and anachronistic, and not for lack of trying. Almost since the end of the '60s filmmakers, and from the start of the '80s, new novelists, have tried to update the update, and arguably the results have been less than totally satisfactory to a critical eye, even as the franchise has gone on raking in money. The most recent print efforts have been especially so, veering wildly between the purely contemporary and the totally retro (sometimes in the same book). Anthony Horowitz's typically and atypically twenty-first century effort at an official prequel to Casino Royale, Forever and a Day, only reaffirmed that impression on my part--discussed here for what it is worth.

Review: Anthony Horowitz's Forever and a Day

MILD SPOILERS

I will say up front--for the benefit of those who have never read this blog before--that I tend to be less than enthusiastic about prequels. This is all the more the case when the subject of the prequel in question is a figure like Bond. Double-o-seven is very much a Gary Stu figure (if at times quite an unusual one), and it strikes me that such figures ought not to have too much past about them, or too much inner life, with the rebooted film series only confirming me in the impression.

There is, too, the fact that there just does not seem much for a Casino Royale prequel, about Bond becoming a double-o, to do. In Fleming's universe no one becoming a double-o is a neophyte. He is already a veteran when he starts in the section. And of course, the Bond of the novels, even as a veteran, was no omnicompetent superman. Instead he messed up time and again, and badly, often finishing his mission and staying alive simply because of some spectacularly unlikely coincidence. Thus nothing really formative, no making-of-the-superman-type stuff, can be said to happen here, just Bond being Bond, with a predictable result that, after the opening couple of chapters concerning Bond's assignment to the section I quite easily forgot that this was a prequel until some remark about Bond's preference in cigarette brands or cocktail preparation methods arises.

Hardly the makings of a memorable prequel or origin story, that. Still, if there was little hope of that from the outset the question of how well the book does as a plain and simple continuation novel remains. And the answer there is that some of it works, and some of it does not. One can say that the elements are indeed Fleming stuff, less distinctive and flamboyant than the precedents Horowitz opted to follow in Trigger-Mortis, but less worn too (Corsican gangsters and drug trafficking rather than secret rocket bases). Where its structure is concerned the book manages to feel like a Bond novel rather than a novelized Bond movie where the structure of the adventure is concerned. (For better and worse, Benson, and even Gardner, did not always do so.) And if Horowitz undeniably panders to the sensibility prevailing in 2018, he may be somewhat more circumspect in doing so (at least, by comparison, with an allegedly '50s-era Bond novel which undoes Pussy Galore's "conversion" in extremely in-Bond's-face fashion, and squeezes in a speech on gay liberation). And so in these ways it may be a more successful performance than his first. I will say, too, that his depiction of headquarters and M holds up, and if he does not quite have Fleming's eye for the little details, his travel writing is solid enough.

Still, some fairly central elements of the book are wildly implausible for a Fleming novel (like the bad blood between Bond and the CIA, even if it does not get quite as nuts as what we see in Faulks' Devil May Care), and wildly implausible period. (This is especially the case with the villain's motivation, the idea of an Establishment billionaire making his last grand act in this world the feeding of a heroin epidemic in the hopes of turning the country's attention inward at the height of the Cold War is . . . well, I cannot think of a way to express my incredulity politely.) So does it go where the smaller touches are concerned. (A lengthy anecdote involves a Soviet cruiser named Aleksander Kolchak, with a Captain Stolypin for a commanding officer. If any irony was intended, there is no sign of it, and I have to admit that it jarred.*)

And more consequential than any implausibility in the story is the sense that nothing here is really surprising or necessary. Of course, I doubt that Horowitz can be blamed for that, with the franchise in its seventh decade; with, even excluding the film novelizations (seven thus far), the spin-offs about Bond's childhood (Charlie Higson and Steve Cole have delivered nine all by themselves), the parodies that actually refer to Bond as Bond (from Christopher Cerf and Michael K. Firth's Alligator to Mabel Maney's Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy), and assorted still weirder projects (from Andrei Gulyashki's Avakoum Zakhov vs. 07 to the Miss Moneypenny Diaries), nearly forty James Bond novels in print; with the task of "making it new" so much the more difficult because the interaction of book and film encouraged the "formulaic procedural" expectation so many fans of them; likely no one can do anything with them that has not been done before, and that to the point of exhaustion.

But such things do not give publishing executives pause. Whether or not Horowitz's latest has been a moneymaker, the idea of the owners of an IP whose value has been estimated at a staggering $20 billion (the GDP of Malta) letting go of the idea of continuing Bond adventures in the medium where they began is so implausible as to guarantee that "JAMES BOND WILL RETURN."

* Admiral Aleksander Kolchak, of course, commanded one of the White armies which attempted to overthrow the Bolsheviks during the civil war (1918-1921) that followed the Russian Revolution (1917)--hardly somebody Stalin's government would honor by naming a warship after him. (Incidentally, I did make a brief attempt to see if there had ever been such a vessel. Predictably, there wasn't. By the way, Ian Fleming's brother Peter actually wrote a journalistic investigation of the death of Kolchak, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak. Did this escape Horowitz?) Nikolai Stolypin was a pre-Revolutionary Minister remembered principally for his brutal repressive measures (testament to which is the expression "Stolypin necktie"). Alas, not the first time Horowitz has displayed a profound ignorance of other nations' histories and cultures, to the point of confusing racist stereotypes of one country with another (as with the matter of which nationalities supposedly eat dog and so forth, in Stormbreaker).

For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.

The Excesses of Critics

If you're one of those who thinks that any and everything that is ever said of any artistic work is entirely "subjective," and any one remark as good as another, and nothing can ever be overrated or underrated (let alone more rigorously and substantively evaluated); and you are utterly unshakable in that opinion; then you may as well stop reading now because nothing I will have to say will mean anything to you.

If that is not your position, then perhaps it will be worth your while to keep on reading.

Now, to begin properly:

It has long seemed to me that arts criticism tends toward the excessive in both its praise and dispraise. The good is passed off as great, the bad horrid--while the merely mediocre is often presented as great or horrid as well.

Why is that? An obvious answer is that many critics are, like many people in any and every line of work, simply not equipped to do their job well--in this case, lacking the grasp of the craft, the frame of reference, the fair-mindedness, to render a meaningful, worthwhile judgment on a given work. (There are film critics who, for example, do not understand how film works, or perhaps the particular kind of film they are writing about. There are critics who have just not seen very many movies, or at least, movies of the kind about which they are talking. There are critics who simply do not seem to care if the remarks they offer make any sense, or are at all supportable.)

Another is that being the critic for too long (which is not so long a time as one may think) leads to boredom and even burn-out. One runs out of things to say, especially when the work in front of them inspires only a "Meh." Hyperbole is one way of spicing things up; colorful insult another. The reader may find the results amusing, but as actual judgment it leaves something to be desired.

I suspect this sort of thing is exacerbated by the pressure to deliver favorable and unfavorable reviews in cases. No critic seems to want to offend the Disney conglomerate, especially when it critic-proofs its films with corporate pseudo-wokeness. (Who wants the flak that would come with giving Black Panther a less than enthusiastically celebratory review?) At the same time there are other movies they are expected to denigrate, even if they have to strain to do it--because they are less than congenial to the politics prevailing among the strata from which they hail and for which they work. (I had a sense of this looking at, for example, the reviews for the legal drama Roman J. Israel, which the critics bent over backwards to denigrate.)

All this has critics very used to talking things up and talking things down excessively. And as they are much more often called on to overpraise a movie than underpraise it, they seize on any opportunity to beat up excessively on something with impunity.