Elon Musk and the Dark Singularity: Is the Fear of AI Running Out of Control Principally a Fear of the Ultra-Privileged?

Time and again I have been struck by the amount of attention given to what seem to me the sillier fears about the problems that progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence may raise, particularly the idea of "AI" emerging as a distinct, malevolent Other, and in particular AI, with its opaque, possibly alien natures and thought processes and agendas, somehow wresting power from "humans."

I have been struck, too, by (at least to hear Ezra Klein tell the story) how many of those involved in AI at its cutting edge themselves publicly espouse such fears, as seen in how heads of major tech companies are themselves calling for a "slowdown" in such research, and appearing on cable news shows to go from merely warning of the possibility of a Dark Singularity they tell us could be coming a lot sooner than even Ray Kurzweil thinks, to telling Tucker Carlson that we need quasi-military contingency plans for preemptively shutting down that none-too-far-off Singularity (!).

In that I see the influence of an abundance of bad sci-fi (such as Isaac Asimov was already inveighing against a century ago, apparently to no effect on the conventional wisdom whatsoever), and shameless, sensationalist attention-grabbing that feeds off of itself. However, there also seems to me an obliviousness to, or desire to ignore, the very real conflicts among humans of vastly unequal power, with all it implies. For all such talk about "humanity" being in control the vast, vast majority of the people on this planet have very little power over their lives, either individually or collectively, and are quite conscious of being subject to other "intelligences" that seem opaque, possibly alien in their natures and thought processes and agendas, which may be hostile to them and a threat to their survival, from dictators to oligarchs to the "faceless" functionaries within the "artificial men" and "corporate persons" that in a very meaningful sense already give us a world crawling with inhuman super-intelligences as scary as any out-of-control computer.

But for a tech billionaire in a culture which, to borrow from Hegel, regards the "successful" entrepreneur, and above all the "successful" Silicon Valley entrepreneur, as "God on Earth," and that precisely because those corporate persons, and even the artificial men, do their bidding, the thought of something replacing them as God on Earth has a different, more threatening, quality, so much so that silly scenarios of robot revolt that may be even less likely than ye olde zombie apocalypse have a powerful purchase on what serves them in place of an imagination.

Are Those Who Keep Banging on About The Terminator in Our Discussions About AI Missing the Point of That Movie?

It is a tiresome cliché of discussion about artificial intelligence that people keep referencing an Arnold Schwarzenegger B movie from 1984. (We all know which one.)

The idea, in line with the Frankenstein complex that Isaac Asimov had already had occasion to criticize a half century before (to no effect, apparently), is that we will create a powerful artificial intelligence, and it will kill us all.

They pay very little attention to how it did so in the movie--specifically initiating a nuclear exchange. The fact would seem the more significant given that the movie was made in, and came out during, the "Second Cold War" and the associated "Euromissile crisis" when the danger of nuclear war, and the protest movement against war and against nuclear weaponry, was particularly strong--the years of the miniseries The Day After, and movies like WarGames, and novels like David Brin's The Postman and Stan Lee's (the "other" Stan Lee's) Dunn's Conundrum--such that this was not implausibly on James Cameron's mind. (Indeed, Terminator 2 can seem a reminder, if any were needed, that that danger did not vanish with the Cold War's end in the manner that those intent on lionizing the victory would have liked the public to believe, while trigger-happiness with nuclear weapons was, again, a significant element of Cameron's 1989 film The Abyss.)

But people never think of The Terminator as a warning about the dangers of nuclear weaponry, without the arms race in which "Skynet" would never have been created, let alone given the means with which to devastate humanity--means humans in the long run might have used no less destructively even without the involvement of artificial intelligence. My guess is that this is partly because the memories of the nuclear danger have been forgotten and buried, with opinion-makers by no means eager to revive them (they blatantly call people alert to that danger "cowards," the world-view of a Barry Goldwater become the mainstream here as in so many other areas of political life), while there is instead a preference for fixating on less plausible and less troublesome dangers--an AI apocalypse, like a zombie apocalypse, being a lot less politically contentious than fears of nuclear or climate catastrophe, with catharsis through thinking about the former perhaps a way of taking the edge off of worries about the latter. Another evasion, of the kind that so characterizes political life in our time.

The Politics of Edgelordism

It seems to me that, like so much else, "edgelordism" has a politics.

Consider what it means to be an edgelord--to go about provoking people for the sake of provocation. This seems to fairly obviously entail pleasure in an exercise of power over others, and using it to subject them to unpleasantness, that has more than a whiff of the bully about it. This is probably more dissonant for a person espousing the egalitarian values of the left than a person of the anti-egalitarian right.

Meanwhile there is the matter of whom one provokes. It may not always be clear just in which direction someone is punching when they make a provocative statement or perform a provocative act, but inclination apart, they are unlikely to get away with it for long if they offend persons more powerful than themselves. Those who offend for the sake of offending--if they get to do it for long--are probably managing to go on doing so because they take the safer course, making sure to stay on the good side of the former, not just by not directing punches at them, but directing punches at those they dislike (as bullies necessarily do).

Consider, for instance, the country's pieties. As James Galbraith remarked, "one cannot use in public" the word "market . . . without bending a knee and making the sign of the cross." But how many of our edgelords make the market their target? Quite the contrary, I remember how in the episode "Gnomes" the "edgy" creators of South Park made their "shock" ending their siding with Big Business against the mom-and-pop shop--and thus did it go with their sneering at rainforest-protecting environmentalists, and those who criticized the way in which the presidential election of 2000 was decided, and much, much else, so continually taking right-wing positions that some wondered if they were being ironic, and eventually realized they weren't.

The combination of politically conservative politics with a delight in obscenity that would be expected to offend a conservative seemed to them incongruous enough to media-watchers that they coined the term "South Park conservative." Yet "edginess" and conservatism have often gone hand in hand, as any look at a list of literary classics makes clear. The "èpater the bourgeoisie" Decadents are more easily classed with anti-rationalist reactionaries than with any progressive element (in contrast with, for instance, an Emile Zola, who offended in a different way for different reasons). Likewise Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange--all on the Modern Library's list of the Top 100 English-language novels of their century--are all at bottom deeply right-wing works that were edgy in that way, with what Nabokov had to say of his intentions in writing his book in "On a Book Entitled Lolita" making clear that in at least his case edgelordism was a motivation. The result is that rather than an innovator South Park stands in a long tradition, shock at which bespeaks nothing so much as the fact that our designated cultural commentators generally do not read books--or understand books when they do, none of which prevents them from being on the big platforms and getting the big money for being there in that way that makes fools of all those who snivel about the word of letters being a "meritocracy," such that we ought to be awed by its officially designated leaders and respectful of their opinions.

Is Writing Turning into Rewriting in the Age of the Chatbot?

Anyone who has had much experience of writing knows that it is hard, time-consuming work, which is why anyone who buys a book "by" a celebrity who takes it for granted that the celebrity on the cover actually wrote it is very, very ignorant, gullible, or both.

One reason for this is that writing is in large part rewriting, a notoriously tedious and painful process.

Still, as people increasingly rely on chatbots to generate "content," with the artificial intelligence pouring out lots of words that they must then polish, the polishing seems likely to be ever more of what it means to "write."

In considering the situation we should remember two truisms about writing, namely:

1. You can't rewrite well unless you know how to write well in the first place--and people do not pick up that skill just cleaning up chatbot content.

2. Most people who take pleasure in writing at all take pleasure in the experience of writing, not the rewriting, which they are apt to experience as a chore, and want as little as possible to do with.

Together 1. and 2. mean that increasingly relying on chatbots for text creation will leave people with less of the skill needed to polish that created text--and the wherewithal to go about that polish properly (which comes down to a readiness to tough out the tedious, painful process because they care about the quality of the content). The result may well be a decline in the quality of written content from what we get today--especially if the required skills go faster than the improvement in chatbot functioning that would make up for them.

The Decline of the B-Movie Star

Ordinarily when people speak of the "decline of the movie star" these days they have in mind the way in which Hollywood no longer produces "bankable" head-liners of the "A-list" type whose casting as a lead in a major feature film (within reason) can deliver a healthy opening weekend gross.

They speak much less of the B-movie star. This is, in part, because the B-movie itself went into decline--as A-movies became really big B-movies with great technical resources and Big Names attached, and as other forms of small-screen production exploded, as with serial television, leaving less room for two-hour-oriented content of any form. However, the B-movie stars would also seem to have suffered from the same factors that overshadow the stars in the A-movies, including the films having to be sold on some basis other than the appeal of the leads, like brand-name franchises, which has its echo in the "mockbusters" in which the Asylum specializes--like Almighty Thor, Independent Day, Tomb Invader and Top Gunner. Amid all that it is not so easy for the would-be B-movie to stand above the evocation of the big movie, any more than the leads in the A-movies can hope to be bigger than their franchises.

It's Only Politics When the Left Does It

Irving Kristol, attempting to distinguish the neoconservatism of which he was the "godfather" from other ideologies, argued that neoconservatism was overtly and explicitly ideological--setting it apart from other forms of conservatism that treated ideology as a uniquely leftist trait (and intellectual sin).

The same seems to me to extend to the way in which those who sniff about the inappropriateness of injecting politics into art approach the matter. People are far more likely to object to politics there when those politics are not their own--and given who has the command of the review pages that generally means that (especially outside the culture war) it is the injection of the left's politics into art that gets artists a hard time from critics for having committed a supposed sin when the reality is that, as George Orwell put it, "All Art is Propaganda."

Learning to Think By Learning to Write

Looking back on my own schooling I know how much I learned from the process of having to research material and organize my thoughts about it required by an assignment to produce a thesis-centered paper. In fact, it taught me that thinking is central to the writing process, so much so that when I got around to writing a book about composition it was on the thought process that I centered it.

Today, with students, and even scholars and scientists, counting on chatbots to generate content in this manner I suspect that that kind of training is a lot less likely to happen.

What do you think?

Of the Quasi-Middle Class

Recent years have had me thinking me a lot about the term "middle class"--starting with the awkwardness of the "New" middle class concept which completely overlooks the whole issue of property and independence to treat people who work for a paycheck at the pleasure of a master ("boss" is just a euphemism for master, because apparently someone thought saying it in Dutch made it different) as a privileged stratum.

The idea was that they enjoyed a higher level of material consumption, more security, more opportunity to get ahead than other people working for a boss for the sake of a paycheck--but on close inspection it seems that while in the post-war era and after a great many people had houses and cars, this was a matter of having a mortgage and making car payments rather than owning things outright, all as (in part because of their indebtedness and its perils) they had relatively little of the security and opportunity promised. And all in all I think a case can be made that what we speak of as the "middle class" is overwhelmingly just the "quasi-middle class"--and that we would understand the stresses of the present situation a good deal better than we do now if we started to recognize it as such.

Whither the Promise of Silicon Valley?

The '90s, as I find myself saying again and again, were a period of profound delusion. Many of the delusions had to do with the New Economy, in which a certain conception of "Silicon Valley" was central. For the information age-singing neoliberal Silicon Valley represented everything good and great about America (such that when its boosters speak of it they seem to be imagining heavenly choirs raising their voices them). Its people were--in line with their obsessive compulsive disorder-like propensity for invidious comparison--the country's "best and brightest" (which was to say that if you were not one of them, you were not best and brightest--you were worse and dumber). It embodied what they regarded as the finest American values ("entrepreneurship," "innovation," and many, many other buzzwords), which they held to be more strongly present here than anywhere else in the country or the world. (It may well be that the origins of the "If Cars Were Like Computers . . ." joke are not what we are told they are, but even so one could easily picture the executives in Detroit getting sick of hearing their counterparts in the Bay Area get talked up so much as to concoct something of the kind.)

Delusional, too, were the populist fantasies that the cheerleaders tried spinning around it. The market populists portrayed the tech billionaires as young upstarts, vaguely progressive and even countercultural--hippie techies out of the West Coast "Ecotopia" who wanted to make the world a better place. ("It's like, freedom, man!") Such people were supposed to be the redeemers on Earth of the neoliberalism that tore the guts out of the industrial base that was the foundation of American economic might--with an unceasing stream of INNOVATION! from which wealth would trickle down to all in ways from "good jobs" to day trading that would make every adult a rentier. And even as they made for a more productive capitalism than ever before they would make for a kinder and gentler one, too, greening our production and making our lives easier not only with their products and the income with which to buy them but their management style as our workplaces became kindergartens for grown-ups, full of beanbag chairs and toys contributing to a gentle, soothing, creativity-nurturing atmosphere.

Of course, it did not work that way. At all. Anyone who imagined that Silicon Valley by itself would make everything wrong with the American economy right found out otherwise in short order as Silicon Valley hype actually tanked the economy with dot-com bubble and bust--while the same old problems just went on getting worse through and after it, as Silicon Valley's INNOVATION! engine all but sputtered compared with the promises of the '90s. (The prospect of genuine advances like self-driving cars came to nothing, as they pushed things no one asked for and most people refused when offered them, like that Internet of Things they never shut up about.)

The populist fantasies looked especially ridiculous. Those supposed upstarts (rarely of such obscure origin as their PR people would have folks believe), who were supposed to have challenged the club of Old Men ruling the economy became a club of Old Men in their turn. And they, and the corporate empires they built, have become monuments to extreme and ever-more established wealth, and the inseparability and ultimate indistinguishability of the newest money from the oldest in connections, style, tone and even possessions (the onetime icon of tech wealth since become the biggest private landowner in the country). Monument to Wall Street paper profiteering and offshore banking and race-to-the-labor-standards bottom offshoring and sweatshop exploitation; to monopoly power and Orwellian surveillance and censorship; to hyper-elitism and contempt for the have-nots, in ways from the Josiah Bounderby pretenses and Ebenezer Scrooge callousness to the ideologies to which those to whom so much is given so easily incline, desperately trying to persuade the world that they are the supermen of Ayn Rand's inverted proletarian lit stories (with the media a very willing accessory as it promulgates their images of themselves as chess-playing math whiz child prodigies all growns up who will personally unlock the secret to immortality as Prometheus stole fire from the gods!).

It is increasingly difficult, and perhaps not even possible, to regard the Silicon Valley people were promised, always a delusion that one had to be truly gullible to be taken in by, as anything but that delusion now--and indeed there seems a certain symbolism in the Silicon Valley Bank Financial Group being bankrupt, just like the hucksterism that may prove to be the place's single greatest cultural legacy.

What Will the Film Market Be Like in 2031?

Looking at Disney's recently revised schedule of releases I could not help but notice that Disney has Marvel Cinematic Universe films planned all the way through 2027--and Avatar films all the way through 2031.

I generally get the impression that business does too little long-range planning, rather than too much. (However much Establishment commentators like to pooh-pooh those who dare speak of short-termism, it really is an issue.) But it seems to me that the world of film in 2023, which looks quite a different thing from what it did in 2019, let alone 2015 (when Hollywood was orienting itself to China, when the possibilities of streaming were supposed to be unbounded, when Disney looked unstoppable and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was imagined to be replicable and the pandemic was just disaster movie stuff), could be very, very different in 2031, so much so that planning specific installments in specific franchises that far down the road is indicative of someone getting ahead of themselves.

What do you think?

James McDonald, and the Demand for "Strong Characters"

In recently surveying the literary scene and asking "Where is Our [Emile] Zola?" James McDonald, noting the extreme neglect of working-class life not only in the more popular genre fiction, but the ever more minute body of "literary" fiction purporting to offer something more than escapist entertainment, had occasion to consider the literary agents who are the field's gatekeepers, their standards, their tastes.

As he noted one commonly finds among the agents' hazily expressed preferences (in fairness, they're not really interested in having some unknown trying to cater to their tastes) a desire for "strong" characters. As McDonald remarks, these agents' "tastes represent an upper-middle class approach to literature," looking for "role-model ("strong") characters," who will somehow "overcome" some contemporary problem, typically of the more fashionable types ("spousal abuse, alcoholism, sexism, to take a few from the current bestsellers") on the basis of "[i]ndividual resilience, 'grit' (the term of the hour) and personal choices," even when purportedly writing realistic, adult fiction (which is rare enough, McDonald emphasizing the preference for "escape into childhood, magic and a romanticized past").

It is, in his view, a step backward from what we were starting to see in the nineteenth century with writers like that pioneer of naturalism, Zola--I would say, a step back into the eighteenth century, when the individualistic, bourgeois novel emerged.

Thus do we, in an age in which "Artificial General Intelligence" may have already arrived, carry forward literary ideals belonging to an era where the steam engine was scarcely becoming serviceable for industrial use, and pat ourselves on the back for how progressive we are in doing so.

The Working Class in Fiction, and the Working Class Author on Park Avenue

Recently writing about the near-invisibility of the working class and its life from literary fiction today James McDonald emphasized the tastes of the literary agents who are the publishing industry's gatekeepers.

These tastes certainly play a part in determining what may reach a publisher and what does not. However, given that McDonald was (rightly) insistent that one need not be working class to write well about the working class (just as, more broadly, people can, do and should transcend their limitations as they write about the world), he was less probably less inclined to emphasize the extent to which working-class persons are by and large not to be found in publishing, the Academy or anywhere else--while, contrary to the hopes endlessly raised about the slush pile by the colossal industry playing on the hopes of aspiring authors, barring a "platform" (i.e. the ability to answer "Yes" to the question "Are you famous enough that a commercially significant number of people will buy a book with your name on the cover?") personal connections are pretty much the only way in. Working-class persons are particularly unlikely to have connections of that kind--and what this means for their exclusion from traditional publishing, if far from the only factor in the invisibility of the working class in literature today, does contribute to it.

Review: SeaFire, by John Gardner

Compared with its particularly odd predecessor SeaFire can seem a return to form for the series, Bond once again up against a billionaire of dubious origin and dubious business practices who will shortly be revealed as an utter madman in an adventure which will have considerably more opportunity for jet-setting, chases, gunplay as we zip from London to Seville, from Munich to Puerto Rico, with a range of toys extending to an old World War II U-boat coming into play. (We even see--very rare for a Gardner Bond novel--Felix Leiter show up in an evocation of the old days.)

Yet there is also some fairly dramatic rupture to go along with the continuity. It was predictable that Bond's cooperating with Fredericka von Grusse in Never Send Flowers would eventually lead to her becoming more than just "his friend Flicka." What was less predictable was that she would get booted from her old job, and that M would give her a new one with Bond's own service, while cohabiting with Bond in a relationship that continues with them partners on and off the job. (Indeed, Gardner tells us that Bond himself was "astounded" at M's "out of character" acceptance of this foreign woman within his unit, and at least as much so, her "living in sin" with the agent on whom he so relied but whose antics he had so often deplored.)

At all this Gardner's Bond wondered if M was not "desperately trying to keep in step with the times," but it seems a safer bet that this is the series, not M, keeping in step with the times, not least in its depicting Bond in what the author seems at pains to persuade us is Bond's "entirely novel experience" with Flicka, unlike what he had before even with Tracy--"a deeper commitment," a "more mature understanding" which "had little to do with sex" and more with "[t]wo people blending together as one," with all this having its effect on Bond's "mode of life" more broadly. (The spendthrift gambler and mass adulterer Fleming described in Moonraker hardly seems even a memory anymore, with Bond to be found in the evenings not at the gambling table at some latterday Crockford's, but rather sitting on the couch in his apartment with Flicka watching some old movie--about which Gardner is so emphatic as to contradict himself, telling us that Bond was never much of a film or theatergoer before, in spite of Gardner having made him a veritable encyclopedia of theater trivia in the past books, including the adventure with Flicka immediately preceding this one.)

Similarly "mature," one supposes, is Bond becoming ever more the bureaucrat, with the old super-operative in the field now put in charge of a sort of resurrection of the old "Double O" section, the "Two Zeroes"--just one small part of a reorganization of the Service that has more than a little to do with the expectation of the post-Cold War as seeing secret agents more concerned with organized crime and small-fry terrorist groups than the old geopolitics. Indeed, Gardner, who is quite aware of what a comedown all that can seem for the international men of mystery (which had Flicka being sent to courses on "such relatively dull subjects as Accountancy"), nonetheless displays some relish for working out the associated minutiae, detailing it in the expository passages, and incorporating it into the adventure, with Bond not simply coming in to the office to get a quick word from M and then going off and doing his thing, but working out the next move, which is not just his own next move, in conference with other senior staff of the Security State (all to surprisingly little griping from Bond, compared to what anyone who remembers Fleming might expect).

The resulting concoction is not without its good points. The adventure is decently paced, avoiding dull stretches in spite of the concessions to a fuller portrait of Bond the Bureaucrat, and if much of the action is mostly standard stuff, it works, with Gardner showing some flair in the finale. Still, after all of the times when Gardner, despite acknowledging Bond's lone wolf nature, put him in a group anyway, I have to admit it still jarred. And the mechanics of the plot suffer by comparison with Gardner's prior work. Max Tarn and his scheme, if in respects timely in those years of German "reunification" and a resurgent far right, was a bit on the derivative side--another would-be Hitler, and a less successful creation as such than Icebreaker's Von Gloda, while also carrying with him some of the less than compelling elements of '80s terrorism-entrepreneurs like Win, Lose or Die's Baradj and the ecological wackiness of Licence Renewed's Murik. (Indeed, astonishing as it may sound, Murik's plan was, if clearly the more reckless and destructive, less totally incoherent, given that it came down to pure and simple blackmail, however lunatic the purpose or vile the means. By contrast Tarn's plan had him staging an oil spill at sea just so he could demonstrate a new technology for cleaning up spills, which did not actually exist, that would confirm his stature as some sort of political messiah, enabling him to become the new Fuhrer of reunified Germany--or something like that.)

I also have to admit that I found Bond's relationship with Flicka a bigger problem. I have to admit to not being a fan of the kind of smugly wisecracking crime-fighting duo for which Gardner was clearly going with them, while given how it ends up--all too predictably--it was not clear what the point of writing such a duo was here, really. Was it so important to show Bond in a "mature" relationship, however briefly, in the name of assuring the readers who care about such things that he is no longer the old 007? If so then it seems the sort of thing calling into question the point of anyone's continuing to write James Bond novels at all. But of course it was not the last such effort, Gardner confirming the other impression he gave of laying the groundwork for further adventures (surely he didn't expect us to learn all that stuff about MicroGlobe One and such for a mere one book?) by producing one more Bond novel--Cold Fall.

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

Review: The Facts of Death, by Raymond Benson

Like John Gardner in his sophomore effort, in his second novel The Facts of Death Raymond Benson shifts his approach from doing the utmost to make Bond contemporary to heavily evoking the character's past, drenching the reader in references to it to the end of connecting this adventure with the work that came before. Thus he includes in his second book not just Bill Tanner or Major Boothroyd, but James Molony, the now retired Miles Messervy, and Felix Leiter, and yet another ally from a different adventure in Stefan Tempo, while even giving Major Smythe from "Octopussy" a mention.1 Of particular interest Benson attempts to establish a single continuity between the works of Fleming, Amis and Gardner. The meeting with Messervy is at his residence Quarterdeck, previously featured in Colonel Sun, which is occasion to mention that book's episode. And if Zero Minus Ten hinted at at least a possibility of continuity in its reference to Messervy's retirement (Cold Fall ended with Bond on his way to meet the new, female M for the first time), this book removes any doubt about that, Benson mentioning, in passing, Bond's last trip to Texas--to face down the "last heir" of Blofeld--in an obvious reference to Gardner's For Special Services.

Still, it would be a mistake to exaggerate Benson's backward glance. Benson goes only so far in incorporating the material of the Gardner era, at least. There is no sign of Ann Reilly in his Q Branch, which, again, recalls the movies with Major "Now Pay Attention 007" Boothroyd the figure with whom 007 deals when visiting that section of SIS headquarters. And despite the mention of Bond's prior Texan adventure, and his meeting with Felix, there is not even a perfunctory "How are the kids?" mention of Bond's partner in that prior mission, Cedar. In fact I got the impression that this was an attempt to placate fans irritated by the apparent chucking of Gardner's amassed material the way many Star Wars fans were to later be aggrieved by Disney's designating the hundreds of novels and associated materials the franchise's Expanded Universe amassed over decades mere "Legends" rather than "Canon."

More significantly, where Gardner turned not just to a density of reference to the older works, but concocted a plot out of the elements of Moonraker and Goldfinger, here Benson pointedly writes a novel of the 1990s, taking its cue from film rather than Fleming's books where it really counts. Facts opens with a brisk account of several incidents hinting at a villainous plot that have Bond already abroad investigating the matter in his first scene, and then before that is over, caught up in a bit of over-the-top action--a much quicker start to the adventure which, as hinted here, is more swiftly paced, and more outlandish in its action-adventure elements, exactly as would be expected of one of the film series' famous "pre-credits sequences." Just the first time military hardware comes into play in the course of the story, the adventure also includes plenty of spy-fi gadgetry, above all a new Jaguar for Bond more fancifully upgraded than any preceding vehicle in print, and perhaps the movies. Bond's car now has, among other features, holographic projectors affording a host of possibilities for deceiving observers, its own drone aircraft, Chobham and reactive armor, and "heat-seeking rockets and cruise missiles." (It seemed to me that the author did not have an especially good idea of what some of these things were, that the terms sounded high-tech and fancy and he threw them around without worrying much about whether they could be discretely incorporated into a luxury car, but they do succeed in making the desired impression, while each and every one of them promptly comes into play.) Once more Bond finds himself at a gaming table with the villain of the piece (Konstantin Romanos), but rather than an intricately detailed game such as we got last time, there is a briefer, more accessible round of baccarat in which he seizes on the chance to afford a verbal provocation of his opponent (such that it recalled the film version of Thunderball rather than the print version of Casino Royale or Moonraker or Goldfinger). The adventure even has Bond trying to beat a clock at the climax, as he did so many times in the movies--while again, Benson was more casual than Gardner about involving Bond with various women through the story, typically along the cinematic lines again.

Moreover, it seemed to me that the novel's turn to the parodic also had a whiff of the cinematic Bond about it, not least Benson's making a crucial element of the enemy's plan a sperm clinic which Bond infiltrates as a prospective donor--an element that had me thinking of nothing so much as the then-recent third Naked Gun film, and which predictably brings its share of crude and sometimes self-aware humor. (Bond, after all, has to submit to a medical exam and account for the innumerable evidences of severe and often exotic injury in the course of his past adventures.) There is, too, in this period when metafiction-heavy pop postmodernism was still being passed off as something novel and "cool" a surprising density of pop cultural reference which extends far beyond the James Bond franchise. (One scene notable in this respect has Bond being menaced by a female captor tracing a knife over his face and cheek as she verbally references Reservoir Dogs, Basic Instinct, and Natural Born Killers in quick succession.)

Less parodic, but still characteristically '90s, was the geopolitical element in the story, and its mixing with Bondian supervillainy. The conflict between the Greek and Turkish ethnic communities on Cyprus, its connections with the broader conflicts between Greece and Turkey, and the ways in which Turkish politics intersect with those of its Middle Eastern neighbors (the country shares borders with Iraq and Iran), are all very real. As people looking at the headlines in those years were only too aware, so was the existence of violent religious cults, often highly idiosyncratic in nature, with Benson certainly taking this course with Romanos, a Greek Cypriot refugee who, believing himself a reincarnation of the philosopher Pythagoras taking direction from the Olympian gods themselves, leads a similarly-minded cult in the pursuit of a campaign of personal revenge, while at the same time caught up in a biotech company plot to discretely hold the world to ransom. (The result is hardly the deepest treatment of the conflicts roiling the eastern Mediterranean, but at the very least Benson would seem to rate points for originality in the villain's conception.)

Altogether the overall impression I got was of an unfilmed Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movie on paper--a fact which did not make it go over particularly well with Fleming purists. However, the adventure certainly works on those other terms it took for itself. Indeed, when these books were new, and I was coming to them as a fan of the movies disappointed in my contacts with Fleming and Gardner, I was very pleased to accept those terms, with the briskly paced, action-packed (and in respects surprisingly original) Facts perhaps Benson's most satisfying effort on that level.

1. Stefan Tempo is one of Darko Karim's sons in From Russia, With Love.

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

New Reviews of the James Bond Continuation Novels

I have had many an occasion to remark the decline of the print thriller, and especially the print action thriller--and I might add, the short half-life of such fiction, with yesteryear's genre-defining blockbuster, if called a "classic" by connoisseurs, probably little-read now by the standard even of older books.

In spite of the recent furor over the James Bond novels' reported bowdlerization the fact remains that few are likely to read their way through Fleming any time soon--while fewer still are likely to pick up the continuation novels. Still, they have their place in the history of 007, and I have recently opted to fill in the gaps with a slew of new reviews of them, starting with Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun.

Happy reading.