From quite early on Clive Cussler got in the habit of setting his Dirk Pitt novels a few years ahead into the future, so as to offer some latitude for the political and technological changes without which his scenarios would not be as plausible, especially in the case of novels like Night Probe! (1981)--or Dragon (1990). Part I of the latter novel incorporates in Cussler's version of 1993 undersea mining stations 16,000 feet down with all their apparatus and vehicles, and satellites with sensors which can render the oceans effectively transparent to investigators, with these things not merely interesting gimmicks but indispensable to the unfolding of the plot--while the technology gets only more exotic from there, not least where the robotics are concerned.
Of course, not only did we not have that stuff in 1993, we do not have it in 2023, and at this much later date are unsure that we ever will. (This applies even to another technology critical to the unfolding of the plot of Dragon, autonomous cars.)
Considering the fact it seems to me reflective of the line between "techno-thriller" and "science fiction" having been thinner for '70s-era techno-thriller writers like himself, or his contemporary Martin Caidin (who like Cussler, was fond of writing in not just imaginary technology but cryptohistory and cryptoarchaeology, as seen in The Messiah Stone, or the third of his Steve Austin novels, High Crystal).
The differentiation of the two genres also seems to have gone with the techno-thriller writers becoming more intent on persuading the reader that their fiction was in fact well-grounded. A Tom Clancy, for example, who did read Clive Cussler, and in some cases seemed to follow his footsteps (I suspect Cussler's influence when I look at Debt of Honor), never expected his readers to take seriously anything like Dragon's undersea mining station, or presented his spy satellites as able to peer through the sea that way--and while some of what he envisioned has since come to seem science fiction-al (as with his conception of anti-missile defenses in The Cardinal of the Kremlin), these were lapses, in this case a product of the wildly overblown '80s-era hype about them by which Clancy was taken in, even as he generally strove to "get the details right" to a much greater degree than Cussler did. (Clancy generally purported to write about real technologies, while Cussler, especially in his earlier books, did not hesitate to make things up even when he did not have to do so. Thus in Deep Six an "F/A-21" fighter plane launched "laser-guided" anti-ship missiles at a key part of the narrative. The U.S. did not have, even on the drawing board, F/A-21 fighter planes or laser-guided anti-ship missiles that would have been launched from such, and such would never have appeared in a Clancy novel.)
However, it seems to me there may be more than the care to "keep things grounded" and "get the details right" differentiating them--especially from the standpoint of a reader looking back. They might scoff at Cussler's seaQuest-like undersea mining station, or the advanced robotics of the tale, but such stations were supposed to be a near-term possibility when Cussler began writing his books, while there was a lot of hype about robotics, and the artificial intelligence controlling them, back in the '80s, and especially what Japan was supposed to be accomplishing in that field. (Remember, fifth-generation computing was going to change the world!) Expectations in both these areas (like the expectations in regard to anti-missile defense) have become more modest as we became habituated to the generally lowered expectations of an era of technological stagnation in which the "techno" became less thrilling than it seemed just a short time earlier.
Sunday, June 25, 2023
Characterizations and Prose in the Popular Thriller: Clive Cussler's Dragon
Recently reviewing Clive Cussler's Dragon I considered the book as a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novel from the period I associate with his best. Thus I had much to say of the book's structure and incidents, pacing and action, focus and flow (which had me concluding that even if other entries in the series were stronger in various ways, the book as a whole works, in cases quite impressively).
I did not raise the matter of literary qualities such as characterization and prose--which were pretty much as expected for Cussler novels, and for popular thrillers generally.
That is to say--they were, are, pretty bad in certain specific ways that were outside my concerns as a reviewer at that time, but of which something may be worth saying.
One may as well start with the most conventional of expectations, as laid out by that most conventional of critics, James Wood. Far from the author's "maintain[ing] an unsentimental composure and know[ing] how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary" as Wood says, such that the "author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible," in the Dirk Pitt novels Cussler's voice erupts into the narrative so often and blatantly and melodramatically (for instance, to hint at some doom the characters did not yet expect) one could be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a Victorian-era book for a not particularly sophisticated audience. Thus it is not enough that almost everyone is a superhuman Gary Stu, but we are beaten over the head with the fact by the chunky character sketch he presents at each introduction of one of his principal dramatis personae. The artlessness of the presentation annoys me less than the triteness and falsity of what was being presented, affirming innumerable, quite stupid social prejudices. Still, the artlessness reflects a broader and very frequent tendency to overdescribe that constantly undercuts what Cussler is actually achieving by pouring out more words past the point at which he ought to have stopped. (Pursuing villains Pitt believes have kidnapped his longtime girlfriend Cussler tells us that "if they harmed her, they would die, [Pitt] vowed ruthlessly." Was there an un-ruthless way to vow that?) Quite naturally, this is the kind of novel where characters "shake their heads" every time they utter a negative (perhaps not so much as in Larry Bond's books, but not much less either, this quirk popping up scores of times in Dragon). The narration is also replete with comparisons that use up a good many words in distracting and confusing rather than enlightening. (We are told that the villain's dining hall recalled those of "the most palatial castles of Europe" and then almost immediately told that almost everything in the chamber was "distinctly Japanese," from the paper lantern lighting, to the bamboo carpet, to the paintings by Japanese masters on the walls. So, basically, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to its counterparts in European castles.)
I find myself more sensitive to such failings all the time, which do not improve the reading experience. Nevertheless, grating as they could be the story did more than survive them--much more. It is a reminder that those aspects of literary craftsmanship that middlebrow critics tend to emphasize are only part of writing, not the whole of it, and that like all writers and works which excel according to one measure or another they do so not because they get everything right, but because what they got right mattered more than what they got wrong.
I did not raise the matter of literary qualities such as characterization and prose--which were pretty much as expected for Cussler novels, and for popular thrillers generally.
That is to say--they were, are, pretty bad in certain specific ways that were outside my concerns as a reviewer at that time, but of which something may be worth saying.
One may as well start with the most conventional of expectations, as laid out by that most conventional of critics, James Wood. Far from the author's "maintain[ing] an unsentimental composure and know[ing] how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary" as Wood says, such that the "author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible," in the Dirk Pitt novels Cussler's voice erupts into the narrative so often and blatantly and melodramatically (for instance, to hint at some doom the characters did not yet expect) one could be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a Victorian-era book for a not particularly sophisticated audience. Thus it is not enough that almost everyone is a superhuman Gary Stu, but we are beaten over the head with the fact by the chunky character sketch he presents at each introduction of one of his principal dramatis personae. The artlessness of the presentation annoys me less than the triteness and falsity of what was being presented, affirming innumerable, quite stupid social prejudices. Still, the artlessness reflects a broader and very frequent tendency to overdescribe that constantly undercuts what Cussler is actually achieving by pouring out more words past the point at which he ought to have stopped. (Pursuing villains Pitt believes have kidnapped his longtime girlfriend Cussler tells us that "if they harmed her, they would die, [Pitt] vowed ruthlessly." Was there an un-ruthless way to vow that?) Quite naturally, this is the kind of novel where characters "shake their heads" every time they utter a negative (perhaps not so much as in Larry Bond's books, but not much less either, this quirk popping up scores of times in Dragon). The narration is also replete with comparisons that use up a good many words in distracting and confusing rather than enlightening. (We are told that the villain's dining hall recalled those of "the most palatial castles of Europe" and then almost immediately told that almost everything in the chamber was "distinctly Japanese," from the paper lantern lighting, to the bamboo carpet, to the paintings by Japanese masters on the walls. So, basically, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to its counterparts in European castles.)
I find myself more sensitive to such failings all the time, which do not improve the reading experience. Nevertheless, grating as they could be the story did more than survive them--much more. It is a reminder that those aspects of literary craftsmanship that middlebrow critics tend to emphasize are only part of writing, not the whole of it, and that like all writers and works which excel according to one measure or another they do so not because they get everything right, but because what they got right mattered more than what they got wrong.
Clive Cussler's Dragon as a Novel of the '90s
From the standpoint of politics Clive Cussler's contributions to the thriller form tend to be of the "orthodox" kind, where all is pretty much well in and with his country and its system save for the nasties, usually foreigners, trying to muck it up. For many years these were usually KGB types (as in Raise the Titanic!, Deep Six and Cyclops), but, with the Cold War drawing to a close, and with Japanaphobia booming, it was for a Japanese plot that Cussler opted--with this the more conspicuous as, while militant anti-Communism and anti-Soviet sentiment can appear so much the background noise to American life as to be easily overlooked, simply accepted as the inevitable even by those not eager to hear more of it, the issue at hand was more novel and controversial for the mainstream.
Rather than merely choosing enemies for his hero according to those politics and then getting on with the story, Cussler is quite emphatic about the view that the economic challenge from Japan, and the Japanese, characterizing Japan as engaged in economic warfare against a United States whose leaders and people consistently failed to see that they were in fact in a war and act accordingly. Indeed, in a piece of particularly striking symbolism (not a word one uses often when discussing Dirk Pitt novels) the villains use as a critical component of their scheme for blackmailing the United States into political and economic submission Japanese-made cars imported into the U.S.--American commentators at the time regarding such vehicles as key symbols of Japanese industrial success and American decline.1 Similarly pointed is the reference Cussler makes to Japanese theft of American aerospace secrets, another then-significant but long since forgotten fear, as the furor over the FSX fighter program demonstrated--which program, incidentally, Cussler references more than once (on one occasion, informing them that a squadron of FSX fighters escort the villain's aircraft back to his home country). Meanwhile all these acts lead up to the villains' proceeding beyond economic warfare to the other kind, with their superiority in robotics becoming a key basis for their subjecting the U.S. to a latterday equivalent of the "Twenty-One Demands" the Japanese government attempted to impose on China during World War I.2 However, long before that point Cussler repeatedly made his view explicit in the remarks of the good guys, be it Pitt's longtime girlfriend Senator Loren Smith grilling a Japanese financier in committee, or the normally cool Pitt's own uncharacteristic political rant when they are alone together that prompts from her the joking suggestion that he follow his father, and her, into the U.S. Senate.
In the process, as was customary in Japan-themed thrillers of the early ‘90s like this one, Cussler retailed the stereotypical and simplistic cultural comment about Japanese society of the approved, "Establishment," experts to whom the mainstream media loves giving a vast platform, and then never calls out when they prove disastrously wrong. Thus we read here plenty about how the Japanese have always been and always will be a closed, culturally homogeneous, individuality-stifling society of ultra-conformists who "know their place"; follow harder, more ruthless leaders who brook no nonsense about rights, egalitarianism and democracy; and cheerfully sacrifice themselves on demand at their leaders' behest; in contrast with open, free-wheeling, diverse, tolerant, liberal, democratic America--such that many an American conservative, if deeming the Japanese irreconcilably Other and threatening, still seems to deep down envy them their model. (Thus does Pitt's rant at one point accuse Americans of "overconsuming" and preferring the "fast buck" over the foundations of prosperity and sovereignty as against the Japanese opposite--with the implication that some fault of the American culture evident in its people as a whole is the cause of the matter, and elite interests had nothing to do with the "fast buck" mentality and the supposed overconsumption. Thus does a different character, surveying a fully robotized Japanese workplace, think to himself of the "workers" operating "twenty-four hours a day without coffee breaks, lunch, or sick leave," and gratuitously add the cheap shot that such a setup would be "inconceivable to an American union leader"--implicitly endorsing the right-wing scapegoating of the '80s that held the "coddling" of the American workers whose unions were at that time being squashed to be what was holding the country back.)
It was a less than one-dimensional view of Japan that (a few token remarks about the villains not representing their country's people aside) overlooked the reality that all societies are complex, divided, conflicted, with Japan's no exception--as the "experts" should have better appreciated at the time, and would have appreciated at the time, had they bothered even to pay attention to the (Japanese) cartoons and (Japanese) video games their own children and grandchildren were growing up on. Now it all looks still more foolish. (After all, what a far cry this image of a hyper-dynamic but overcrowded superpower intent on acquiring Pacific Rim Lebensraum is from our contemporary image of a stagnating country in danger of being unable to keep itself peopled, as its supposedly ultra-conformist young people are now derided as NEETs, hikikomori, "parasite singles" in what the more prominent social commentators belatedly realized was not a purely Japanese trend!)
Cussler's espousal of these ideas to the point of building a thriller around them can seem the more significant in that, if Japanaphobia had been a theme of American popular culture for years (with Black Rain a hit and a grown-up Marty McFly being fired by his caricature of a Japanese boss the year before Dragon hit bookshelves), Cussler was still probably ahead of the curve, his book preceding by years other bestsellers emergent from that mood such as Michael Crichton's Rising Sun or Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, and so not just a sign of the times, but a likely influence on them. Indeed, I got the feeling that Clancy (whose applause for Cussler's novels I see in the front matter of my paperback copy of this book) not only read this one, but was considerably influenced by it as he wrote Debt of Honor--in the care he took to dissociate the villains from the Japanese government and the people, behind whose backs they for the most part operate; the attempt at nuclear blackmail in defense of the country's economic position; the Japanese-American intelligence agent key to exposing the villains' plans; and even the assault by vengeful Japanese villains on American legislators (the kidnap of Congressman Mike Diaz and Senator Loren Smith, perhaps, the germ of the idea for Debt's finale).
These days any attempt to make a movie of Dragon seems unlikely in the extreme--given how Hollywood has twice attempted to launch a Pitt franchise, and each time seen it end in very costly failure, while I suspect that, addicted as the studios are to sequels and prequels, reboots and remakes, Hollywood these days is less prone than before to adapt material that has appeared in book than in other forms (for the simple reason that fewer and fewer people read books these days, the interest of yesteryear's bestselling thrillers have a short half-life, and the Pitt franchise being rather a less hot "property" than it was in the early 2000s).3 Still, we are hearing reports of plans for a Debt of Honor movie.
I suspect that if such reports have any substance to them, and the movie actually gets made, it will bear no resemblance to that book in this respect, not least given the present attitude toward Japan in the U.S. press. Cussler's book is heavy on evocations of Japan's wartime aggression and atrocities; of the fact that that Japanese Establishment responsible for them never lost power (war criminals' remaining in power, and seeing their descendants follow them to the same high places) or ceased to defend its crimes; and of the equally factual reality that that Establishment hypocritically attacks Western racism and colonialism while denying its own racism and insisting on the "uplifting" character of its colonialism. By contrast today the American press can seem more eager to see Japan rearm than the Japanese people themselves, with that people's anti-militarism leaving American commentators scratching their heads--ever obtuse toward how people actually feel in Japan, and the neighboring countries, where memories of the war do not line up neatly with what seems convenient to American neoconservatives.
1. One might add that Cussler and his characters repeatedly compare the brown paint job of the cars in question to the color of "fertilizer," and at at least one point, more directly compare it to the substance “fertilizer” is intended to evoke.
2. As it did of China, Japan demands of the U.S. concessions of strategic territory it regards as particularly significant to its interests and ambitions (outright cession of not just Hawaii but California, just as Japan had demanded the cession of the Fukien province on the opposite side of the Strait of Formosa); and cession of control over government finances and the direction of its economy, not least by demanding accept Japanese administrators in key government positions. As Cussler makes no reference to the 1915 demands I have no idea whether they were a model for him here or not. (Cussler displays little interest in Japan's imperialism prior to World War II, and is all too reflective of the kind of comment available to most Americans at the time in that the experts tended in general to have no knowledge or interest in Japanese history, about which little was available in English--as many an anime fan learns when their interest is stoked in, say, the Shinsengumi and tries to read up on them.)
3. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels had been around for three decades in the early 2000s, but this particular action-adventure series, like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, weathered the end of the Cold War and the broader collapse of the action-adventure fiction market rather better than most of the competition. Moreover, the coincidence of its release with one of the twenty-first century's most catastrophic events would seem to have helped make 2001's Pitt novel, Valhalla Rising, a stronger than usual seller; while the success of Doug Liman's adaptation of The Bourne Identity seems to have strengthened the interest of Hollywood in the rights to comparable thriller series (like Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series, which got a movie version in 2007, and the Pitt novels, which got their second crack at the big screen in 2005's Sahara). No such inducements to Hollywood's giving Pitt another chance have been seen since.
Rather than merely choosing enemies for his hero according to those politics and then getting on with the story, Cussler is quite emphatic about the view that the economic challenge from Japan, and the Japanese, characterizing Japan as engaged in economic warfare against a United States whose leaders and people consistently failed to see that they were in fact in a war and act accordingly. Indeed, in a piece of particularly striking symbolism (not a word one uses often when discussing Dirk Pitt novels) the villains use as a critical component of their scheme for blackmailing the United States into political and economic submission Japanese-made cars imported into the U.S.--American commentators at the time regarding such vehicles as key symbols of Japanese industrial success and American decline.1 Similarly pointed is the reference Cussler makes to Japanese theft of American aerospace secrets, another then-significant but long since forgotten fear, as the furor over the FSX fighter program demonstrated--which program, incidentally, Cussler references more than once (on one occasion, informing them that a squadron of FSX fighters escort the villain's aircraft back to his home country). Meanwhile all these acts lead up to the villains' proceeding beyond economic warfare to the other kind, with their superiority in robotics becoming a key basis for their subjecting the U.S. to a latterday equivalent of the "Twenty-One Demands" the Japanese government attempted to impose on China during World War I.2 However, long before that point Cussler repeatedly made his view explicit in the remarks of the good guys, be it Pitt's longtime girlfriend Senator Loren Smith grilling a Japanese financier in committee, or the normally cool Pitt's own uncharacteristic political rant when they are alone together that prompts from her the joking suggestion that he follow his father, and her, into the U.S. Senate.
In the process, as was customary in Japan-themed thrillers of the early ‘90s like this one, Cussler retailed the stereotypical and simplistic cultural comment about Japanese society of the approved, "Establishment," experts to whom the mainstream media loves giving a vast platform, and then never calls out when they prove disastrously wrong. Thus we read here plenty about how the Japanese have always been and always will be a closed, culturally homogeneous, individuality-stifling society of ultra-conformists who "know their place"; follow harder, more ruthless leaders who brook no nonsense about rights, egalitarianism and democracy; and cheerfully sacrifice themselves on demand at their leaders' behest; in contrast with open, free-wheeling, diverse, tolerant, liberal, democratic America--such that many an American conservative, if deeming the Japanese irreconcilably Other and threatening, still seems to deep down envy them their model. (Thus does Pitt's rant at one point accuse Americans of "overconsuming" and preferring the "fast buck" over the foundations of prosperity and sovereignty as against the Japanese opposite--with the implication that some fault of the American culture evident in its people as a whole is the cause of the matter, and elite interests had nothing to do with the "fast buck" mentality and the supposed overconsumption. Thus does a different character, surveying a fully robotized Japanese workplace, think to himself of the "workers" operating "twenty-four hours a day without coffee breaks, lunch, or sick leave," and gratuitously add the cheap shot that such a setup would be "inconceivable to an American union leader"--implicitly endorsing the right-wing scapegoating of the '80s that held the "coddling" of the American workers whose unions were at that time being squashed to be what was holding the country back.)
It was a less than one-dimensional view of Japan that (a few token remarks about the villains not representing their country's people aside) overlooked the reality that all societies are complex, divided, conflicted, with Japan's no exception--as the "experts" should have better appreciated at the time, and would have appreciated at the time, had they bothered even to pay attention to the (Japanese) cartoons and (Japanese) video games their own children and grandchildren were growing up on. Now it all looks still more foolish. (After all, what a far cry this image of a hyper-dynamic but overcrowded superpower intent on acquiring Pacific Rim Lebensraum is from our contemporary image of a stagnating country in danger of being unable to keep itself peopled, as its supposedly ultra-conformist young people are now derided as NEETs, hikikomori, "parasite singles" in what the more prominent social commentators belatedly realized was not a purely Japanese trend!)
Cussler's espousal of these ideas to the point of building a thriller around them can seem the more significant in that, if Japanaphobia had been a theme of American popular culture for years (with Black Rain a hit and a grown-up Marty McFly being fired by his caricature of a Japanese boss the year before Dragon hit bookshelves), Cussler was still probably ahead of the curve, his book preceding by years other bestsellers emergent from that mood such as Michael Crichton's Rising Sun or Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, and so not just a sign of the times, but a likely influence on them. Indeed, I got the feeling that Clancy (whose applause for Cussler's novels I see in the front matter of my paperback copy of this book) not only read this one, but was considerably influenced by it as he wrote Debt of Honor--in the care he took to dissociate the villains from the Japanese government and the people, behind whose backs they for the most part operate; the attempt at nuclear blackmail in defense of the country's economic position; the Japanese-American intelligence agent key to exposing the villains' plans; and even the assault by vengeful Japanese villains on American legislators (the kidnap of Congressman Mike Diaz and Senator Loren Smith, perhaps, the germ of the idea for Debt's finale).
These days any attempt to make a movie of Dragon seems unlikely in the extreme--given how Hollywood has twice attempted to launch a Pitt franchise, and each time seen it end in very costly failure, while I suspect that, addicted as the studios are to sequels and prequels, reboots and remakes, Hollywood these days is less prone than before to adapt material that has appeared in book than in other forms (for the simple reason that fewer and fewer people read books these days, the interest of yesteryear's bestselling thrillers have a short half-life, and the Pitt franchise being rather a less hot "property" than it was in the early 2000s).3 Still, we are hearing reports of plans for a Debt of Honor movie.
I suspect that if such reports have any substance to them, and the movie actually gets made, it will bear no resemblance to that book in this respect, not least given the present attitude toward Japan in the U.S. press. Cussler's book is heavy on evocations of Japan's wartime aggression and atrocities; of the fact that that Japanese Establishment responsible for them never lost power (war criminals' remaining in power, and seeing their descendants follow them to the same high places) or ceased to defend its crimes; and of the equally factual reality that that Establishment hypocritically attacks Western racism and colonialism while denying its own racism and insisting on the "uplifting" character of its colonialism. By contrast today the American press can seem more eager to see Japan rearm than the Japanese people themselves, with that people's anti-militarism leaving American commentators scratching their heads--ever obtuse toward how people actually feel in Japan, and the neighboring countries, where memories of the war do not line up neatly with what seems convenient to American neoconservatives.
1. One might add that Cussler and his characters repeatedly compare the brown paint job of the cars in question to the color of "fertilizer," and at at least one point, more directly compare it to the substance “fertilizer” is intended to evoke.
2. As it did of China, Japan demands of the U.S. concessions of strategic territory it regards as particularly significant to its interests and ambitions (outright cession of not just Hawaii but California, just as Japan had demanded the cession of the Fukien province on the opposite side of the Strait of Formosa); and cession of control over government finances and the direction of its economy, not least by demanding accept Japanese administrators in key government positions. As Cussler makes no reference to the 1915 demands I have no idea whether they were a model for him here or not. (Cussler displays little interest in Japan's imperialism prior to World War II, and is all too reflective of the kind of comment available to most Americans at the time in that the experts tended in general to have no knowledge or interest in Japanese history, about which little was available in English--as many an anime fan learns when their interest is stoked in, say, the Shinsengumi and tries to read up on them.)
3. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels had been around for three decades in the early 2000s, but this particular action-adventure series, like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, weathered the end of the Cold War and the broader collapse of the action-adventure fiction market rather better than most of the competition. Moreover, the coincidence of its release with one of the twenty-first century's most catastrophic events would seem to have helped make 2001's Pitt novel, Valhalla Rising, a stronger than usual seller; while the success of Doug Liman's adaptation of The Bourne Identity seems to have strengthened the interest of Hollywood in the rights to comparable thriller series (like Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series, which got a movie version in 2007, and the Pitt novels, which got their second crack at the big screen in 2005's Sahara). No such inducements to Hollywood's giving Pitt another chance have been seen since.
Review: Dragon, by Clive Cussler
MILD SPOILERS AHEAD
As a reader of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels I have long felt that Cussler hit his peak with his early 500-pagers--his first cracks at what book critics in the '70s were, in the wake of bestsellers like those of Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum and Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, calling "super-thrillers." Those books were specifically 1986's Cyclops, 1988's Treasure, 1990's Dragon, and 1992's Sahara.
Of the four I have tended to think Dragon the weakest. In fact, where I read the other three straight through, cover to cover, on first picking them up, I remember skimming long stretches of Dragon--and only recently picked it up again.
I think I still like the other three better. But my impression of this one is more favorable than before--even if looking at the book again I am reminded of what I did not like about it so much. If there is vigor, briskness and ingenuity here, Cussler had also been very productive for two decades at the time he wrote this one and, like most writers at that stage of things, was reusing significant elements of his older work. The derelict ship in the book's opening sequence, the associated marine disaster, the involvement of Asian shipping in it, very obviously recall the plot of Deep Six. So does the structure of what follows--not least in its failings. The opening incident has a very great deal to commend it--a robust combination of suspense, action and gadgetry that includes the book's finest "set piece," with the manner of Pitt's involvement in the disaster giving a stronger than usual dramatic edge to his desire to get the culprits (it isn't just "Someone killed my favorite second cousin" this time), while also laying key groundwork for the finale. Still, at bottom the kind of thing that in a Bond film would probably be packed into the few minutes of the pre-credits scene, here it takes up almost a quarter of the book before the investigation and associated adventure properly begins. Moreover that adventure has a comparatively disjointed feel. An early display of self-assertion on Pitt's part apart, the book consists of a weary Pitt time and again being told to take a long flight out to some scene to perform some incredibly unlikely and hazardous task by government officials previously unknown to us who are the ones actually managing the crisis and solving the mystery as they send Pitt off after this clue or to perform that task. (Indeed, I could not think of any prior Pitt adventure which was not only so scattershot--a quality epitomized for me by the junket to Germany--but in which Pitt was so passive.)
Moreover, where such disjointedness in thrillers of this type is so often a matter of a writer trying to cram in more action than the frame of the narrative can hold, the book, while offering plenty of adventure, danger and violence, is relatively light on "action," if one thinks of this as physical confrontation, and especially interpersonal combat, between hero and villain. The good guys have their first proper brushes with the enemy only a third of the way in, and Pitt his first contact with enemy agents after page 200 of my 542 page paperback edition, after which there is still less than we tend to get in the bigger Pitt books. The principal car chase has Pitt pursuing a vehicle with no human inside it, while there is just one proper shootout, and that shoehorned in that action-cramming way (the villains electing to send what feels like a platoon of ninjas to take Pitt out, just because he seems "a threat," resulting in a set piece that could have been easily excised without doing the slightest damage to the narrative). Indeed, if Pitt's personal motive for "getting to the bottom of things" are stronger than usual, the way in which things play out mean that there is no final face-to-face confrontation with any of the villains, these in the end destroyed impersonally or left to others with which to deal. (The final fate of the figure set up as "the big bad" is very anticlimactic, particularly given that Cussler gives us a suitably Bond movie-like capture-the-hero-and-then-chat-with-him-over-a-luxurious-dinner scene before that.)
From the standpoint of flow and of focus the result is a far cry from what we got in, for example, Sahara, once the Calliope gets upriver. Still, if it does not work in every way on the whole it tends to work very well indeed. Disjointed as the narrative was, I still kept turning the pages, in part because Cussler keeps the pace brisk (helped in this by the frequent changes of scene the structure allows), while if feeling like a collection of bits the bits, even the shoehorned bits, tend to be very good (as with that shootout with the ninjas), such that the reuse of old elements is often to superior results (Dragon never dragging the way Deep Six often did). If that still does not quite put it on a level with favorites like Sahara, Treasure or Cyclops, it pleasantly surprised me again and again by reminding me just how good these adventures were at their very best, and still beats just about anything else in the Dirk Pitt series for sheer entertainment.
As a reader of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels I have long felt that Cussler hit his peak with his early 500-pagers--his first cracks at what book critics in the '70s were, in the wake of bestsellers like those of Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum and Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, calling "super-thrillers." Those books were specifically 1986's Cyclops, 1988's Treasure, 1990's Dragon, and 1992's Sahara.
Of the four I have tended to think Dragon the weakest. In fact, where I read the other three straight through, cover to cover, on first picking them up, I remember skimming long stretches of Dragon--and only recently picked it up again.
I think I still like the other three better. But my impression of this one is more favorable than before--even if looking at the book again I am reminded of what I did not like about it so much. If there is vigor, briskness and ingenuity here, Cussler had also been very productive for two decades at the time he wrote this one and, like most writers at that stage of things, was reusing significant elements of his older work. The derelict ship in the book's opening sequence, the associated marine disaster, the involvement of Asian shipping in it, very obviously recall the plot of Deep Six. So does the structure of what follows--not least in its failings. The opening incident has a very great deal to commend it--a robust combination of suspense, action and gadgetry that includes the book's finest "set piece," with the manner of Pitt's involvement in the disaster giving a stronger than usual dramatic edge to his desire to get the culprits (it isn't just "Someone killed my favorite second cousin" this time), while also laying key groundwork for the finale. Still, at bottom the kind of thing that in a Bond film would probably be packed into the few minutes of the pre-credits scene, here it takes up almost a quarter of the book before the investigation and associated adventure properly begins. Moreover that adventure has a comparatively disjointed feel. An early display of self-assertion on Pitt's part apart, the book consists of a weary Pitt time and again being told to take a long flight out to some scene to perform some incredibly unlikely and hazardous task by government officials previously unknown to us who are the ones actually managing the crisis and solving the mystery as they send Pitt off after this clue or to perform that task. (Indeed, I could not think of any prior Pitt adventure which was not only so scattershot--a quality epitomized for me by the junket to Germany--but in which Pitt was so passive.)
Moreover, where such disjointedness in thrillers of this type is so often a matter of a writer trying to cram in more action than the frame of the narrative can hold, the book, while offering plenty of adventure, danger and violence, is relatively light on "action," if one thinks of this as physical confrontation, and especially interpersonal combat, between hero and villain. The good guys have their first proper brushes with the enemy only a third of the way in, and Pitt his first contact with enemy agents after page 200 of my 542 page paperback edition, after which there is still less than we tend to get in the bigger Pitt books. The principal car chase has Pitt pursuing a vehicle with no human inside it, while there is just one proper shootout, and that shoehorned in that action-cramming way (the villains electing to send what feels like a platoon of ninjas to take Pitt out, just because he seems "a threat," resulting in a set piece that could have been easily excised without doing the slightest damage to the narrative). Indeed, if Pitt's personal motive for "getting to the bottom of things" are stronger than usual, the way in which things play out mean that there is no final face-to-face confrontation with any of the villains, these in the end destroyed impersonally or left to others with which to deal. (The final fate of the figure set up as "the big bad" is very anticlimactic, particularly given that Cussler gives us a suitably Bond movie-like capture-the-hero-and-then-chat-with-him-over-a-luxurious-dinner scene before that.)
From the standpoint of flow and of focus the result is a far cry from what we got in, for example, Sahara, once the Calliope gets upriver. Still, if it does not work in every way on the whole it tends to work very well indeed. Disjointed as the narrative was, I still kept turning the pages, in part because Cussler keeps the pace brisk (helped in this by the frequent changes of scene the structure allows), while if feeling like a collection of bits the bits, even the shoehorned bits, tend to be very good (as with that shootout with the ninjas), such that the reuse of old elements is often to superior results (Dragon never dragging the way Deep Six often did). If that still does not quite put it on a level with favorites like Sahara, Treasure or Cyclops, it pleasantly surprised me again and again by reminding me just how good these adventures were at their very best, and still beats just about anything else in the Dirk Pitt series for sheer entertainment.
Conan the Barbarian on the Screen: Reflections
These past few years there was talk of bringing Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian back to the screen--but then there always is (live-action and animation, film and television, etc., etc.), with nothing much usually coming of it. So it seems to have gone with the latest plans for a TV series.
It may be just as well, since I doubt that anything they are likely to make would be very satisfying to fans of the franchise--with the 2011 film exemplary. I recall looking forward to it more than I usually did to revisitations of such material because I had recently read my way through the entirety of Howard, and in the process found out just how much John Milius' film differed from it. The stuff about Conan's childhood and upbringing, the rambling about "will" recycled from Milius' Apocalypse Now script (Why does no one ever notice this?), the use of Thulsa Doom (a Kull the Conqueror character rather than a Conan the Barbarian one), the whiff of '70s/'80s action movie formula I was later to discuss in my book on paramilitary action-adventure--made clear to me that, much as I liked the 1982 movie, and have tended to groan at the thought of new takes on old classics, there actually was room for such a take here.*
Alas, the makers of the later film decided to remake the 1982 movie rather than go back to Howard and do something with that, and the result fell pretty flat.
Taken as a simple action movie I remember it working well enough. Still, I didn't care to see more of Conan's childhood. (Indeed, I don't usually care to see action heroes "before you knew them," with this going especially for Conan, to the point that even though after finishing the Howard originals I was eager to read more, knowing that L. Sprague de Camp's tales turned in exactly that direction made me lose all interest in them. And they spent a quarter of the movie on exactly that.) Meanwhile, the vigor, the barbaric splendor, the epic feel that were for all the departures from the original true to Howard (and characteristically Milius) were gone, leaving something much more generic, much less memorable (with, I think, those who think the replacement of the "tangible aesthetic . . . and practical effects" right about this costing the film something).
So does it often go with remakes, which in eliding aspects of the old fail to come up with anything as compelling--the attainment of contemporaneity coming at the price of distinction, underlining the artistic pointlessness and commercial crassness that are hallmarks of the all too common enterprise. And certainly to go by what we have heard of recent remake attempts, it is hard to imagine material less likely to survive contemporary handling than Conan.
* Ironically, 1997's Kull the Conqueror actually used more of the Conan material, drawing heavily on the plot of the one novel Howard wrote, The Hour of the Dragon--to its benefit, though I would not credit it with doing that book justice. (I have said it before many a time but will say it again--for all their flaws the pulp adventures of old were way, way more satisfying reads than today's bloated pop fiction.)
It may be just as well, since I doubt that anything they are likely to make would be very satisfying to fans of the franchise--with the 2011 film exemplary. I recall looking forward to it more than I usually did to revisitations of such material because I had recently read my way through the entirety of Howard, and in the process found out just how much John Milius' film differed from it. The stuff about Conan's childhood and upbringing, the rambling about "will" recycled from Milius' Apocalypse Now script (Why does no one ever notice this?), the use of Thulsa Doom (a Kull the Conqueror character rather than a Conan the Barbarian one), the whiff of '70s/'80s action movie formula I was later to discuss in my book on paramilitary action-adventure--made clear to me that, much as I liked the 1982 movie, and have tended to groan at the thought of new takes on old classics, there actually was room for such a take here.*
Alas, the makers of the later film decided to remake the 1982 movie rather than go back to Howard and do something with that, and the result fell pretty flat.
Taken as a simple action movie I remember it working well enough. Still, I didn't care to see more of Conan's childhood. (Indeed, I don't usually care to see action heroes "before you knew them," with this going especially for Conan, to the point that even though after finishing the Howard originals I was eager to read more, knowing that L. Sprague de Camp's tales turned in exactly that direction made me lose all interest in them. And they spent a quarter of the movie on exactly that.) Meanwhile, the vigor, the barbaric splendor, the epic feel that were for all the departures from the original true to Howard (and characteristically Milius) were gone, leaving something much more generic, much less memorable (with, I think, those who think the replacement of the "tangible aesthetic . . . and practical effects" right about this costing the film something).
So does it often go with remakes, which in eliding aspects of the old fail to come up with anything as compelling--the attainment of contemporaneity coming at the price of distinction, underlining the artistic pointlessness and commercial crassness that are hallmarks of the all too common enterprise. And certainly to go by what we have heard of recent remake attempts, it is hard to imagine material less likely to survive contemporary handling than Conan.
* Ironically, 1997's Kull the Conqueror actually used more of the Conan material, drawing heavily on the plot of the one novel Howard wrote, The Hour of the Dragon--to its benefit, though I would not credit it with doing that book justice. (I have said it before many a time but will say it again--for all their flaws the pulp adventures of old were way, way more satisfying reads than today's bloated pop fiction.)
Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin, Masters of the Novelized Wargame
In learning that Tom Clancy, while getting the byline on the cover, had a cowriter in wargame designer Larry Bond, one may wonder which of them had the greater hand in producing what is for many the definitive techno-thriller of its kind Given how no later Clancy novel hewed so much in the direction of a "novelized wargame" one may suspect that it was more Larry Bond's book than Clancy's--and the impression is for me confirmed by the three novels Larry Bond did write afterward in which he did get the byline (while a cowriter of his own got the "junior partner" treatment, Patrick Larkin). These are, of course, 1989's Red Phoenix, 1991's Vortex, and 1993's Cauldron.
Some may think that when I write of Bond as writing a novelized wargame I say this derisively. I do not. The books' emphasis on the "big picture," on the unfolding of their scenario and the movement of the "pieces," was for me their great virtue. In contrast with some of their colleagues the author(s) had no pretense to being Flaubert--and wasted little time trying to interest me in characters who were simply not all that interesting, or impress us with stylistic flourishes (apart from occasional awkward attempts to dramatize reactions by having characters theatrically "shake their heads" or frown in the middle of a train of thought). Bond was astute enough to start his stories with a bang, and get the shooting going in a big way a third of the way in, with the narrative ranging from the councils of government to the skullduggery of spies and commandos and coup plotters, and later, from the frontlines of mechanized battles to dogfights in the air to the bridges of warships, and even events on the "home front" as well. The generally brief scenes changed quickly, and as the above suggests, the techno-military action was plentiful and varied, while the authors made a point of keeping us apprised of the larger situation, adding up to a satisfyingly comprehensive view. In the course of those books I was unlikely to encounter anything quite so over-the-top exciting as, for example, Dale Brown offered at his best, but the Bond-Larkin books were, for me at least, the most consistently and broadly engaging; books that were easy to get into, and which tended to proceed relatively smoothly afterward, avoiding clunkiness and turgidity even as they ran to over five hundred pages in hardcover.
Certainly this characterizes the first of those books. As the title's evocation of Red Storm Rising suggests, this is the most Red Storm Rising-like of the books, with U.S. and South Korean forces battling an invasion of the South by the Soviet-backed North, and the novel offering a wide-field view of the action by land, sea and air as seen through a long list of "dramatis personae" (the authors' own term, in the listing of them he offers at the front of his book). In considering that scenario I think it worth noting that while scenarios of conflict on the Korean peninsula were to become very well-worn, they were still comparatively fresh at the time of his book's release (much more so than Soviet tank armies rolling through the Fulda Gap, or Soviet moves on the Persian Gulf). The scenarios, if never very plausible, was also more so than it would later be, when the North Koreans lost Soviet backing and saw their economy wither, while the South grew only richer, more politically stable, and stronger (one of the world's most industrialized and wealthiest countries, facing off against one of the world's poorest). One result is that as a Red Storm Rising-in-miniature (a major regional conflict rather than a world war-level conflict) it is competently executed, and even comes with a twist ending. Indeed, the comparative ease of following events along, perhaps not unrelated to the more manageable scale of the scenario (recalling Red Storm Rising I realize I understood things at sea and on Iceland well enough, but generally had just a vague idea of things on the ground in Germany as I read my way through), and its relative novelty, meant that even if it did not reach the heights of the big book from 1986 (what here could compare with that earlier novel's Battle of the Atlantic?), I actually liked it better overall.
Still, I find the other two books the Bond-Larkin team produced the more original and striking in their ways. In opting for the rarely utilized setting of southern Africa, Vortex did not simply relocate the familiar U.S.-Soviet clash to a new region, but went for something a bit less familiar and a bit more complex. Here apartheid is on its way out in South Africa, but a senior hardliner, Karl Vorster, schemes his way to a seizure of power he uses to try and turn back the clock, complete with a reconquest of newly independent Namibia. Cuba's Fidel Castro, just as he did when South Africa previously attacked its neighbors, responded by intervening militarily, sending his armed forces to help the Namibians resist the invasion--and drawing Soviet support in after him. This sets in motion what, due to the unwillingness of the U.S. to either back the new South African government, or side with the Cubans in stopping it, becomes a complex, multi-sided game in which the United States aims to prevent both Vorster's victory, and the Soviet bloc's getting the upper hand in the region. Moreover, the novelty and intricacy were complemented by a greater than usual plausibility for the genre (and indeed, probably these authors' best-grounded scenario thus far). At the same time, if I did not usually read Bond's books for their characters, there was a bit more than the usual of such interest here. Vorster and his clique made more than usually memorable villains, while along with the well-wrought geopolitical maneuvering and military action I found myself looking forward to catching up with foreign correspondent Ian Sherfield as he pursued his story on the ground.
The third book, Cauldron, was not quite so original--at least at first glance. It was a fairly straightforward collision of two sides, with the U.S. fighting a plain and simple war to stop an invasion of an ally--or in this case, allies. That the enemy, in this case, was a Franco-German-led "European Confederation" ("Eurcon") may also seem fairly typical of the early '90s, with anxiety about U.S. industrial decline, German reunification, the apparent consolidation of the European Union, and questions about the cohesion of the Western alliance amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and fears of a turn from free trade to neomercantilist trading blocs leading to a spate of U.S. vs. Germany techno-thrillers.
It has to be admitted that the scenario looks rather strained today. Still, apart from displaying their usual competence in handling the techno-military side of things, Bond-Larkin were more sophisticated than any of their colleagues about laying the groundwork. (Indeed, I found myself wondering whether he had not been looking at theories of international politics not normally associated with the genre--the sort of stuff that uses words like "imperialism.") Here the West Europeans, particularly a France and Germany whose going their own way precipitates the collapse of the NATO alliance, turn the newly ex-Communist states of Eastern Europe into semi-colonies, an unstable, uncomfortable arrangement in a situation of deepening trade war, and deepening global economic downturn, which in turn contributes to an influx of refugees from the global South. Callous and exploitative mishandling of the refugee crisis by EurCon triggers a revolt in Hungary against their client government, prompting aggressive military intervention by French forces that soon has them more broadly fighting the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and then staging an outright invasion of those nations to keep them under Confederation control. The U.S., with what remain to it of its European allies, intervenes to stop their aggression, while EurCon strikes up a deal with Russia (weakened, unstable, but still very heavily armed), raising the risk of things getting even uglier, fast . . .
Of course, things (fortunately) did not work out quite the way laid out in the novel. Still, Bond's greater than usual sensitivity to some of the forces that drive international politics gives the book a greater than usual interest almost thirty years later, especially with a heavily industrialized Germany treating its European "partners" as a periphery, imposing unpopular economic terms from above, and even rearming for the sake of a greater "world role," while trade war resurges and the ultra-right is on the march everywhere.
Afterward, quite naturally, I looked forward to Bond's next book offering something similar, the more so as by that point I had read pretty much all of the books of the '80s and early '90s that had looked promising, and there was not much new material of the type coming out. (In the mid-1990s Stephen Coonts and Harold Coyle were on hiatus, at least where this genre was concerned; Payne Harrison seemed to have moved on; etcetera, etcetera.) However, like their colleagues, Bond and Larkin changed tacks at this point, with the next (and last) two books Bond would write with Larkin (or with anyone for the next decade), following a more conventional course in The Enemy Within.
The Enemy Within was undistinguished by any great originality of premise, or sophistication in establishing it, such as had been so much an asset in the last two books. What it boiled down to was that the Iranians (in spite of what seemed a change of government holding out the hope of better U.S.-Iranian relations) were after control of the Gulf, pure and simple--a well-worn cliché years earlier. And they were contriving to narrow the U.S. edge by tying up American forces at home so as to give them a window of opportunity in which to make their move. (As it happened, Bond's former cowriter Clancy would have a story identical in these details out the same year, Executive Orders, even if the precise means the Iranians used to achieve the end were different.) And by tale's end it proved to be not Red Phoenix-Vortex-Cauldron stuff, but more conventional spies-and-commandos stuff, with an implausible load of melodrama, with the hero and villain having a history culminating in treachery and mortal conflict, and a love story prominent in the narrative's unfolding, and the hero going rogue at the eleventh hour to stop the bad guy who used to be his friend as in so many '80s action movies. Not what I hoped for from Bond and company, it was still a brisk enough read that I was not unentertained, and quickly polished it off, but looked ahead to the next one in the hopes that it would offer a return to the older approach.
Alas, it was a sequel to The Enemy Within, continuing the adventures of that book's heroes, Peter Thorn and Helen Gray, with a scenario that was still more thoroughly standard B-movie, down to the heroes having to go rogue, and stop the villains all by their lonesome, in a raid on the enemy facility in which they go in guns blazing against vastly superior opposition but somehow mow down lots and lots of enemies with their guns as that enemy for some reason can't shoot straight to save their lives (literally). I was not, of course, entirely averse to such, but, again, it was not what I had been hoping for, the more in as this kind of fare was already so much more commonplace than what the Bond-Larkin team used to do, and a Clive Cussler, or Matthew Reilly, did it with more flair, too. Along with the fact that my enthusiasm for the techno-thriller was on the wane, I am not sure that I would have rushed out to pick up Bond's next afterward--but as it was Bond, like so many of his colleagues before him, went on hiatus too. He did not produce another collaboration with Larkin, and indeed, nothing at all for six years. The next novel to appear under Bond's name was the Jim DeFelice-coauthored First Team series, which debuted in 2004, after which Bond began to produce the Jerry Mitchell submarine novels as well (2005). Indeed, the body of Bond-authored or coauthored work in the twenty-first century was, in fact, to become quite considerable (17 novels in 2004-2018, over one a year on average). One was even a sequel to Red Phoenix, 2015's Red Phoenix Burning. They did, undeniably, find readers. Yet, as with so much else in the twenty-first history of the print techno-thriller, in regard to originality, flair, commercial weight and pop cultural impact, it was a mere epilogue to the genre's resurgence in the 1970s, boom in the 1980s, and bust in the 1990s.
Some may think that when I write of Bond as writing a novelized wargame I say this derisively. I do not. The books' emphasis on the "big picture," on the unfolding of their scenario and the movement of the "pieces," was for me their great virtue. In contrast with some of their colleagues the author(s) had no pretense to being Flaubert--and wasted little time trying to interest me in characters who were simply not all that interesting, or impress us with stylistic flourishes (apart from occasional awkward attempts to dramatize reactions by having characters theatrically "shake their heads" or frown in the middle of a train of thought). Bond was astute enough to start his stories with a bang, and get the shooting going in a big way a third of the way in, with the narrative ranging from the councils of government to the skullduggery of spies and commandos and coup plotters, and later, from the frontlines of mechanized battles to dogfights in the air to the bridges of warships, and even events on the "home front" as well. The generally brief scenes changed quickly, and as the above suggests, the techno-military action was plentiful and varied, while the authors made a point of keeping us apprised of the larger situation, adding up to a satisfyingly comprehensive view. In the course of those books I was unlikely to encounter anything quite so over-the-top exciting as, for example, Dale Brown offered at his best, but the Bond-Larkin books were, for me at least, the most consistently and broadly engaging; books that were easy to get into, and which tended to proceed relatively smoothly afterward, avoiding clunkiness and turgidity even as they ran to over five hundred pages in hardcover.
Certainly this characterizes the first of those books. As the title's evocation of Red Storm Rising suggests, this is the most Red Storm Rising-like of the books, with U.S. and South Korean forces battling an invasion of the South by the Soviet-backed North, and the novel offering a wide-field view of the action by land, sea and air as seen through a long list of "dramatis personae" (the authors' own term, in the listing of them he offers at the front of his book). In considering that scenario I think it worth noting that while scenarios of conflict on the Korean peninsula were to become very well-worn, they were still comparatively fresh at the time of his book's release (much more so than Soviet tank armies rolling through the Fulda Gap, or Soviet moves on the Persian Gulf). The scenarios, if never very plausible, was also more so than it would later be, when the North Koreans lost Soviet backing and saw their economy wither, while the South grew only richer, more politically stable, and stronger (one of the world's most industrialized and wealthiest countries, facing off against one of the world's poorest). One result is that as a Red Storm Rising-in-miniature (a major regional conflict rather than a world war-level conflict) it is competently executed, and even comes with a twist ending. Indeed, the comparative ease of following events along, perhaps not unrelated to the more manageable scale of the scenario (recalling Red Storm Rising I realize I understood things at sea and on Iceland well enough, but generally had just a vague idea of things on the ground in Germany as I read my way through), and its relative novelty, meant that even if it did not reach the heights of the big book from 1986 (what here could compare with that earlier novel's Battle of the Atlantic?), I actually liked it better overall.
Still, I find the other two books the Bond-Larkin team produced the more original and striking in their ways. In opting for the rarely utilized setting of southern Africa, Vortex did not simply relocate the familiar U.S.-Soviet clash to a new region, but went for something a bit less familiar and a bit more complex. Here apartheid is on its way out in South Africa, but a senior hardliner, Karl Vorster, schemes his way to a seizure of power he uses to try and turn back the clock, complete with a reconquest of newly independent Namibia. Cuba's Fidel Castro, just as he did when South Africa previously attacked its neighbors, responded by intervening militarily, sending his armed forces to help the Namibians resist the invasion--and drawing Soviet support in after him. This sets in motion what, due to the unwillingness of the U.S. to either back the new South African government, or side with the Cubans in stopping it, becomes a complex, multi-sided game in which the United States aims to prevent both Vorster's victory, and the Soviet bloc's getting the upper hand in the region. Moreover, the novelty and intricacy were complemented by a greater than usual plausibility for the genre (and indeed, probably these authors' best-grounded scenario thus far). At the same time, if I did not usually read Bond's books for their characters, there was a bit more than the usual of such interest here. Vorster and his clique made more than usually memorable villains, while along with the well-wrought geopolitical maneuvering and military action I found myself looking forward to catching up with foreign correspondent Ian Sherfield as he pursued his story on the ground.
The third book, Cauldron, was not quite so original--at least at first glance. It was a fairly straightforward collision of two sides, with the U.S. fighting a plain and simple war to stop an invasion of an ally--or in this case, allies. That the enemy, in this case, was a Franco-German-led "European Confederation" ("Eurcon") may also seem fairly typical of the early '90s, with anxiety about U.S. industrial decline, German reunification, the apparent consolidation of the European Union, and questions about the cohesion of the Western alliance amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and fears of a turn from free trade to neomercantilist trading blocs leading to a spate of U.S. vs. Germany techno-thrillers.
It has to be admitted that the scenario looks rather strained today. Still, apart from displaying their usual competence in handling the techno-military side of things, Bond-Larkin were more sophisticated than any of their colleagues about laying the groundwork. (Indeed, I found myself wondering whether he had not been looking at theories of international politics not normally associated with the genre--the sort of stuff that uses words like "imperialism.") Here the West Europeans, particularly a France and Germany whose going their own way precipitates the collapse of the NATO alliance, turn the newly ex-Communist states of Eastern Europe into semi-colonies, an unstable, uncomfortable arrangement in a situation of deepening trade war, and deepening global economic downturn, which in turn contributes to an influx of refugees from the global South. Callous and exploitative mishandling of the refugee crisis by EurCon triggers a revolt in Hungary against their client government, prompting aggressive military intervention by French forces that soon has them more broadly fighting the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and then staging an outright invasion of those nations to keep them under Confederation control. The U.S., with what remain to it of its European allies, intervenes to stop their aggression, while EurCon strikes up a deal with Russia (weakened, unstable, but still very heavily armed), raising the risk of things getting even uglier, fast . . .
Of course, things (fortunately) did not work out quite the way laid out in the novel. Still, Bond's greater than usual sensitivity to some of the forces that drive international politics gives the book a greater than usual interest almost thirty years later, especially with a heavily industrialized Germany treating its European "partners" as a periphery, imposing unpopular economic terms from above, and even rearming for the sake of a greater "world role," while trade war resurges and the ultra-right is on the march everywhere.
Afterward, quite naturally, I looked forward to Bond's next book offering something similar, the more so as by that point I had read pretty much all of the books of the '80s and early '90s that had looked promising, and there was not much new material of the type coming out. (In the mid-1990s Stephen Coonts and Harold Coyle were on hiatus, at least where this genre was concerned; Payne Harrison seemed to have moved on; etcetera, etcetera.) However, like their colleagues, Bond and Larkin changed tacks at this point, with the next (and last) two books Bond would write with Larkin (or with anyone for the next decade), following a more conventional course in The Enemy Within.
The Enemy Within was undistinguished by any great originality of premise, or sophistication in establishing it, such as had been so much an asset in the last two books. What it boiled down to was that the Iranians (in spite of what seemed a change of government holding out the hope of better U.S.-Iranian relations) were after control of the Gulf, pure and simple--a well-worn cliché years earlier. And they were contriving to narrow the U.S. edge by tying up American forces at home so as to give them a window of opportunity in which to make their move. (As it happened, Bond's former cowriter Clancy would have a story identical in these details out the same year, Executive Orders, even if the precise means the Iranians used to achieve the end were different.) And by tale's end it proved to be not Red Phoenix-Vortex-Cauldron stuff, but more conventional spies-and-commandos stuff, with an implausible load of melodrama, with the hero and villain having a history culminating in treachery and mortal conflict, and a love story prominent in the narrative's unfolding, and the hero going rogue at the eleventh hour to stop the bad guy who used to be his friend as in so many '80s action movies. Not what I hoped for from Bond and company, it was still a brisk enough read that I was not unentertained, and quickly polished it off, but looked ahead to the next one in the hopes that it would offer a return to the older approach.
Alas, it was a sequel to The Enemy Within, continuing the adventures of that book's heroes, Peter Thorn and Helen Gray, with a scenario that was still more thoroughly standard B-movie, down to the heroes having to go rogue, and stop the villains all by their lonesome, in a raid on the enemy facility in which they go in guns blazing against vastly superior opposition but somehow mow down lots and lots of enemies with their guns as that enemy for some reason can't shoot straight to save their lives (literally). I was not, of course, entirely averse to such, but, again, it was not what I had been hoping for, the more in as this kind of fare was already so much more commonplace than what the Bond-Larkin team used to do, and a Clive Cussler, or Matthew Reilly, did it with more flair, too. Along with the fact that my enthusiasm for the techno-thriller was on the wane, I am not sure that I would have rushed out to pick up Bond's next afterward--but as it was Bond, like so many of his colleagues before him, went on hiatus too. He did not produce another collaboration with Larkin, and indeed, nothing at all for six years. The next novel to appear under Bond's name was the Jim DeFelice-coauthored First Team series, which debuted in 2004, after which Bond began to produce the Jerry Mitchell submarine novels as well (2005). Indeed, the body of Bond-authored or coauthored work in the twenty-first century was, in fact, to become quite considerable (17 novels in 2004-2018, over one a year on average). One was even a sequel to Red Phoenix, 2015's Red Phoenix Burning. They did, undeniably, find readers. Yet, as with so much else in the twenty-first history of the print techno-thriller, in regard to originality, flair, commercial weight and pop cultural impact, it was a mere epilogue to the genre's resurgence in the 1970s, boom in the 1980s, and bust in the 1990s.
The Decline and Fall of the Gag Comedy Film
What ever happened to the gag comedy? It seems to me that the genre had a golden age in the '70s, evident in such hits as the Mel Brooks and ZAZ (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker) had in that period (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Airplane!). Both remained productive even after, of course (Brooks at least having cult hits with History of the World, Part I (1981) and Spaceballs (1987), ZAZ bigger films like The Naked Gun), while others got in on the action, like Carl Reiner with The Man With Two Brains (1983), and Keenan Ivory Wayans in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988).
Still, by the '90s the genre was looking tired--in part, one supposes, of the approach having been exploited for so long, in the main by the same filmmakers (even if here and there you saw someone have some success, as Mike Myers did with Wayne's World (1992) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)). The genre had a bit of a revival with Wayans' Scary Movie (1999) by the end of the decade, but so far as I know no one seems to think the next wave of movies could really be compared with the first, with, quite the contrary, the most conspicuous producers of such film, the Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer team, not getting a particularly favorable treatment by the entertainment press. (Indeed, at the time of this writing the first sentence of the Wikipedia article regarding their critical reception reads: "The critical reception of Friedberg and Seltzer's films has been overwhelmingly negative.") The movies still get made, of course--but you are far more likely to find them on streaming than at "a theater near you."
What happened? Apart from the way the genre ran down, or particular "bad movies" turning the public off of the form, I think the culture changed. Gag comedies tended to be structured around a parodic narrative spoofing some well-known cinematic genre. In doing so Brooks and ZAZ had the benefit of an audience they could assume to share a longer pop cultural memory, all as pop culture continued to churn out material that, on some level, at least had some claim to novelty, enough of it to launch if not a new genre then a new wave of films that would make its own clichés off of which to play rather than reusing those of another era. Thus Brooks and ZAZ offered parodies of the Western, Universal Studios-style horror, the old-time historical epic, the post-Star Wars space movie boom, exploitation films, the Airport-style disaster movie, and so on (while in 1980 ZAZ could expect an appreciable number of their viewers to remember who Ethel Merman was). By contrast Friedberg and Seltzer, limiting themselves to what they could expect a relatively young audience to personally recall, in a time in which pop culture has become more fragmentary, and more ephemeral, and tended to rework the old rather than coming up with the new (arguably to diminishing returns), leaving them that much less to work with--just grab-bags of recent pop cultural material they often ended up merely referencing rather than mining for comedy, probably because no more could be done with it.
As that pop culture changed it may have not only deprived gag comedy-makers of material, but also obviated their approach, because now, in at least some degree, everything was a parody, everything was a gag comedy--to the point that the deadly serious Daniel Craig Bond films brought in a new Q who quipped that they don't make the old-style gadgets anymore, while Star Wars: Episode VIII was a long exercise in flippancy toward the saga. Listening to the throne-room dialogue I imagine a good many people must have thought: "This isn't Star Wars. This is Spaceballs!" And how do you make a Spaceballs out of a movie that is already Spaceballs? Would it be worth bothering to do so even if you could?
One may say that not just the niche that gag comedies had occupied disappeared, but so had the whole pop cultural ecosystem of which they were a part.
NOTE: This item is a follow-up to my earlier post about "The Rise of the Gag Comedy."
Still, by the '90s the genre was looking tired--in part, one supposes, of the approach having been exploited for so long, in the main by the same filmmakers (even if here and there you saw someone have some success, as Mike Myers did with Wayne's World (1992) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)). The genre had a bit of a revival with Wayans' Scary Movie (1999) by the end of the decade, but so far as I know no one seems to think the next wave of movies could really be compared with the first, with, quite the contrary, the most conspicuous producers of such film, the Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer team, not getting a particularly favorable treatment by the entertainment press. (Indeed, at the time of this writing the first sentence of the Wikipedia article regarding their critical reception reads: "The critical reception of Friedberg and Seltzer's films has been overwhelmingly negative.") The movies still get made, of course--but you are far more likely to find them on streaming than at "a theater near you."
What happened? Apart from the way the genre ran down, or particular "bad movies" turning the public off of the form, I think the culture changed. Gag comedies tended to be structured around a parodic narrative spoofing some well-known cinematic genre. In doing so Brooks and ZAZ had the benefit of an audience they could assume to share a longer pop cultural memory, all as pop culture continued to churn out material that, on some level, at least had some claim to novelty, enough of it to launch if not a new genre then a new wave of films that would make its own clichés off of which to play rather than reusing those of another era. Thus Brooks and ZAZ offered parodies of the Western, Universal Studios-style horror, the old-time historical epic, the post-Star Wars space movie boom, exploitation films, the Airport-style disaster movie, and so on (while in 1980 ZAZ could expect an appreciable number of their viewers to remember who Ethel Merman was). By contrast Friedberg and Seltzer, limiting themselves to what they could expect a relatively young audience to personally recall, in a time in which pop culture has become more fragmentary, and more ephemeral, and tended to rework the old rather than coming up with the new (arguably to diminishing returns), leaving them that much less to work with--just grab-bags of recent pop cultural material they often ended up merely referencing rather than mining for comedy, probably because no more could be done with it.
As that pop culture changed it may have not only deprived gag comedy-makers of material, but also obviated their approach, because now, in at least some degree, everything was a parody, everything was a gag comedy--to the point that the deadly serious Daniel Craig Bond films brought in a new Q who quipped that they don't make the old-style gadgets anymore, while Star Wars: Episode VIII was a long exercise in flippancy toward the saga. Listening to the throne-room dialogue I imagine a good many people must have thought: "This isn't Star Wars. This is Spaceballs!" And how do you make a Spaceballs out of a movie that is already Spaceballs? Would it be worth bothering to do so even if you could?
One may say that not just the niche that gag comedies had occupied disappeared, but so had the whole pop cultural ecosystem of which they were a part.
NOTE: This item is a follow-up to my earlier post about "The Rise of the Gag Comedy."
The Rise of the Gag Comedy Film
It seems to me that the gag-based comedy film (the comedy that rather than using gags was a showcase for gags), like the action film (the film that rather than including action is, likewise, a showcase for action), emerged in the '60s, and began to become a Hollywood staple in the '70s, with a similar logic at work in both--a post-television elevation of image over conventional narrative in more fragmentary work, with an onslaught of momentary shocks prevailing over the traditional pleasures of storytelling, to the point of such storytelling being merely a connecting thread between one shock and the next. In the action movie those shocks were intended to thrill, in the gag-based comedy to keep the audience in stitches. Still, the similarity was such that, reading the remarks of reviewers of the old Bond movies so critical to the emergence of both genres, critics just encountering the action movie thought they were looking at some sort of gag comedy (with the view of From Russia, With Love, a relatively serious Bond film, taken at the time for some kind of parody of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, in spite of the Bond novel having come first).
Such thinking, one might imagine, may have also made it seem the more natural for Hollywood to emphasize spoofing of the Bond series so much in trying to capitalize on its popularity--with the ultimate expression of that how Charles K. Feldman's Casino Royale, at one point conceived as a tough noir helmed by The Big Sleep director Howard Hawks, ended up the biggest and silliest of such comedies, and itself a key moment (though none but myself and Robert von Dassanowsky seem to think so) in the development of the gag comedy form.
It seems notable that, just as the befuddlement of those critics looking at the first Bond films, and the slowness of Hollywood to assimilate Bondian filmmaking (Star Wars was the breakthrough here, fifteen years after Dr. No, and just as the Suits failed to understand Bond they failed to understand Star Wars initially--simply thinking SPACE! where in the '60s they had thought SPIES!), it took onlookers some time to get used to gag comedy, if perhaps less. The pre-middlebrow Woody Allen was important here (scripting Feldman's earlier What's New, Pussycat? and making films like What's Up, Tiger Lily?), and Mel Brooks and ZAZ (the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team) more deeply and enduringly associated with it--the former hitting an early career peak with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, the latter with Airplane! (while the spirit of such comedy was so pervasive that the Salkinds' Superman, to go by the legends surrounding the script, would seem to have nearly gone in this direction).*
Just as with the innovators who made the action movie what it is today it is not the kind of place in film history in which the middlebrow are apt to take an interest, but it is a place nonetheless meriting some attention.
* Of course, others were involved--like Richard Lester in his films with the Beatles, and Monty Python, especially as they moved their work from the small screen to the large, but the focus here is on Hollywood's own offerings.
Such thinking, one might imagine, may have also made it seem the more natural for Hollywood to emphasize spoofing of the Bond series so much in trying to capitalize on its popularity--with the ultimate expression of that how Charles K. Feldman's Casino Royale, at one point conceived as a tough noir helmed by The Big Sleep director Howard Hawks, ended up the biggest and silliest of such comedies, and itself a key moment (though none but myself and Robert von Dassanowsky seem to think so) in the development of the gag comedy form.
It seems notable that, just as the befuddlement of those critics looking at the first Bond films, and the slowness of Hollywood to assimilate Bondian filmmaking (Star Wars was the breakthrough here, fifteen years after Dr. No, and just as the Suits failed to understand Bond they failed to understand Star Wars initially--simply thinking SPACE! where in the '60s they had thought SPIES!), it took onlookers some time to get used to gag comedy, if perhaps less. The pre-middlebrow Woody Allen was important here (scripting Feldman's earlier What's New, Pussycat? and making films like What's Up, Tiger Lily?), and Mel Brooks and ZAZ (the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team) more deeply and enduringly associated with it--the former hitting an early career peak with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, the latter with Airplane! (while the spirit of such comedy was so pervasive that the Salkinds' Superman, to go by the legends surrounding the script, would seem to have nearly gone in this direction).*
Just as with the innovators who made the action movie what it is today it is not the kind of place in film history in which the middlebrow are apt to take an interest, but it is a place nonetheless meriting some attention.
* Of course, others were involved--like Richard Lester in his films with the Beatles, and Monty Python, especially as they moved their work from the small screen to the large, but the focus here is on Hollywood's own offerings.
The Scientist in Balzac's Human Comedy: David Sechard in Lost Illusions
As I remarked not too long ago Balzac was an admirer of scientists and inventors, and a supporter of technological progress--with this, in fact, making him more critical rather than less of a money-dominated society, as we see in Lost Illusions. In Part III, "The Sufferings of Inventors," printer David Sechard, in an era where the demand for printed matter, and the material on which it is to be printed, are exploding, pursues the development of a new technique of paper-making.
Sechard's efforts are ultimately successful, but circumstances compel him to sell his innovation to richer businessmen prepared to destroy him to have control of the technology, such that they have the principal benefit of the development--all as Sechard's "discovery . . . [is] assimilated by the French manufacturing world, as food is assimilated by a living body," his development a tributary stream into a broad Mississippi of technological progress rather than a singlehandedly epoch-making occurrence. And after the hardships he had put himself and his wife through he gives up invention, "bidd[ing] farewell for ever to glory," and occupying himself with other pursuits.
In all that, as in so much else, Balzac's thinking is far, far truer to the history, and sociology, of science and technology than the conventional view prevailing at present, which desires to reduce that whole history to nothing but a series of Edisonades where inventors are invariably rewarded with demi-god-like glory and riches in this life, and eternal remembrance in a Pantheon of All-Time Greats after.
Sechard's efforts are ultimately successful, but circumstances compel him to sell his innovation to richer businessmen prepared to destroy him to have control of the technology, such that they have the principal benefit of the development--all as Sechard's "discovery . . . [is] assimilated by the French manufacturing world, as food is assimilated by a living body," his development a tributary stream into a broad Mississippi of technological progress rather than a singlehandedly epoch-making occurrence. And after the hardships he had put himself and his wife through he gives up invention, "bidd[ing] farewell for ever to glory," and occupying himself with other pursuits.
In all that, as in so much else, Balzac's thinking is far, far truer to the history, and sociology, of science and technology than the conventional view prevailing at present, which desires to reduce that whole history to nothing but a series of Edisonades where inventors are invariably rewarded with demi-god-like glory and riches in this life, and eternal remembrance in a Pantheon of All-Time Greats after.
The "Cynical" Balzac
Balzac is, like pretty much every author who has dared to say a critical word about the social order, routinely charged with the crime of "cynicism"; while like pretty much every author against whom the charge is made undeserving of the charge.
Balzac was absolutely scathing in his criticism of a world where there was "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.'" But it was the cynicism of that world that he condemned, in part because of all those things that he happened to value--not least, human connections and human virtues. The way modern society corrupted and destroyed all that--cynically--was what he exposed and attacked, with the result that if the genteel folk of the salons regarded him as a monster, those fed up with the official lies and the hypocrisy have ever since found in his honesty, and his feeling, a breath of fresh air.
And that— was what seemed "cynical" to "respectable" opinion that did not like attention being called to such realities, of which it was defensive then and remains defensive now, such that he is less read today than he might be if he had their approval.
Indeed, it says everything that Henry James, at best an epigone of French realists like Balzac who willfully abandoned all that was best in them--indeed, while personally laying against Balzac the charge that he lacked a moral sense--became the god of Anglo-American letters.
Balzac was absolutely scathing in his criticism of a world where there was "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.'" But it was the cynicism of that world that he condemned, in part because of all those things that he happened to value--not least, human connections and human virtues. The way modern society corrupted and destroyed all that--cynically--was what he exposed and attacked, with the result that if the genteel folk of the salons regarded him as a monster, those fed up with the official lies and the hypocrisy have ever since found in his honesty, and his feeling, a breath of fresh air.
And that— was what seemed "cynical" to "respectable" opinion that did not like attention being called to such realities, of which it was defensive then and remains defensive now, such that he is less read today than he might be if he had their approval.
Indeed, it says everything that Henry James, at best an epigone of French realists like Balzac who willfully abandoned all that was best in them--indeed, while personally laying against Balzac the charge that he lacked a moral sense--became the god of Anglo-American letters.
Of Money and Obsession: Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans
Emile Zola, in explaining his conception of the "experimental novel" (he meant "experimental" not in the sense of unreadable avant garde prose, but the novel as quasi-scientific thought-experiment based on scientific knowledge of objective reality), referred to Balzac as the "father" of the form, specifically citing his book Cousin Bette as a model of such experimental rigor in its treatment of the theme of adultery.
Striking a work as Cousin Bette is in that regard, I found Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, if perhaps a less satisfying work when taken as a whole, the book's first two parts are in their way a more forceful treatment of the interaction between money and "passion" of that kind as the Baron de Nucingen burns through francs by the hundreds of thousands in pursuit of a woman he scarcely glimpsed one night in the woods.
Striking a work as Cousin Bette is in that regard, I found Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, if perhaps a less satisfying work when taken as a whole, the book's first two parts are in their way a more forceful treatment of the interaction between money and "passion" of that kind as the Baron de Nucingen burns through francs by the hundreds of thousands in pursuit of a woman he scarcely glimpsed one night in the woods.
"The Rectification of Names" and George Carlin
The Analects of Confucius contain an interesting dialogue on the "rectification of names" as a priority in administration, on the grounds that language must be "in accordance with the truth of things" for the sake of carrying on "affairs . . . to success"--so much so that "the superior man requires . . . that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."
Alas, in this day and age it can seem as if, in this culture as in probably every other, language is nothing but a collection of evasions and obfuscations, by and large for the most unvirtuous purposes--a refusal to acquiesce in which makes one an incomprehensible eccentric at best to most of the others they will meet.
George Carlin refused to acquiesce in that manner. And in that, I think, one could regard him as a "superior man" who did far more the sake of contemporary culture than just about all the literati of the mainstream today put together.
Alas, in this day and age it can seem as if, in this culture as in probably every other, language is nothing but a collection of evasions and obfuscations, by and large for the most unvirtuous purposes--a refusal to acquiesce in which makes one an incomprehensible eccentric at best to most of the others they will meet.
George Carlin refused to acquiesce in that manner. And in that, I think, one could regard him as a "superior man" who did far more the sake of contemporary culture than just about all the literati of the mainstream today put together.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the State of the World Today
I came relatively late to the minor pop cultural phenomenon that was Mystery Science Theater 3000 (henceforth, just MST3K for brevity's sake), catching its last three seasons on what was then still the Sci-Fi Channel.
It is not the sort of thing that would appeal to me as much today--it fundamentally comes down to three actors (two of them playing robots) mocking a bad movie as they sit through it. And even back when it had appealed to me not everything worked--especially when the film did not seem to merit the mockery the jokes tended to fall flat. Still, at its best it was hilarious--to the point that some of their quips seem to have stuck in my memory years and decades later.
At the end of the little group's viewing The Deadly Bees, when the house that was the principal setting of the film goes up in flames, Crow T. Robot quips that the house "was made of typing paper and oily rags."
I think of that line a lot.
Like after hearing each and every report about the world--about the climate and the environment generally, about the state of the economy, about the international order.
We are reminded with truly distressing frequency that the "house" we live in is likewise made of typing paper and oily rags.
It is not the sort of thing that would appeal to me as much today--it fundamentally comes down to three actors (two of them playing robots) mocking a bad movie as they sit through it. And even back when it had appealed to me not everything worked--especially when the film did not seem to merit the mockery the jokes tended to fall flat. Still, at its best it was hilarious--to the point that some of their quips seem to have stuck in my memory years and decades later.
At the end of the little group's viewing The Deadly Bees, when the house that was the principal setting of the film goes up in flames, Crow T. Robot quips that the house "was made of typing paper and oily rags."
I think of that line a lot.
Like after hearing each and every report about the world--about the climate and the environment generally, about the state of the economy, about the international order.
We are reminded with truly distressing frequency that the "house" we live in is likewise made of typing paper and oily rags.
What is All the "Cringe" Comedy Really About?
One of the more oft-used words to describe the kind of comedy we have tended to see on twenty-first century TV has been "cringe." Associated with shows like The Office, watching it we will see Michael Scott say something terribly offensive, and appall everyone around them, while being completely oblivious to what he did--with a good time had by, if not all, at least those who like this kind of comedy.
Why has this kind of comedy become so popular in this period?
One possibility that occurs to me is that this is a matter of twenty-first century class politics. These days it seems that "punching down" in comedy is treated as daring, even heroic. ("Look how edgy I'm being!" they say as they beat up on an oppressed group. "I'm a free speech hero!")
Especially given the prevailing attitude toward class, punching down at people who seem awkward by the "upper middle class" (to use Michael Lind's term, "overclass") standards that are thought of as society's standards--who are so much more likely to be from lower class backgrounds as to make this a form of mockery of the less affluent--is fair game.
And we see it the more insofar as comedy these days so rarely punches up.
Why has this kind of comedy become so popular in this period?
One possibility that occurs to me is that this is a matter of twenty-first century class politics. These days it seems that "punching down" in comedy is treated as daring, even heroic. ("Look how edgy I'm being!" they say as they beat up on an oppressed group. "I'm a free speech hero!")
Especially given the prevailing attitude toward class, punching down at people who seem awkward by the "upper middle class" (to use Michael Lind's term, "overclass") standards that are thought of as society's standards--who are so much more likely to be from lower class backgrounds as to make this a form of mockery of the less affluent--is fair game.
And we see it the more insofar as comedy these days so rarely punches up.
Are People Really Self-Publishing Millions of Books Each Year?
Recently I was surprised to read that the number of "new" books self-published annually was in the millions.
Why?
My conjecture (it is hard to get beyond that given the paucity of data and analysis out there) the self-publishing boom we saw circa 2010 (when e-book readers arrived on the market, when publishing services like Amazon's came into the business) prompted a Great Drawer Clearing. Meanwhile, deceived by our "success story"-addicted media, a great many people who never had a chance of becoming authors the traditional way fancied that maybe they could make a career this way.
Still, much as agents and editors and anti-populist critical snobs snivel about "everyone" thinking they are a writer, there was only so much stuff in those drawers, with the most likely candidates probably putting out the most likely stuff first. At the same time those who had been gulled into believing that some revolution was here, the power in the hands of the authors, quickly learned otherwise. It was not a case of "Publish it, and they will come." Rather you published it and it just sat there, very few self-published writers selling anything to people who were not friends and family (I dare say, more than usually supportive friends and family). There was thus less apparent incentive to bring out old stuff, let alone write new stuff--less and less all the time as the market grew ever more cluttered while people read and read less, supply and demand moving in opposite directions, with the limitation of the e-books so critical for the self-published to a relatively small part of the market, and the unrelenting hostility of the gatekeepers toward the self-published not helping in the least, among much, much else that made the road steeper rather than easier.
It seemed to me the case, too, that young people have been less inclined to dabble in long-form writing than their forebears (with, indeed, the "decline" of the English major seeming to me to reflect decreasing interest), while people of all ages seem to have been devoting time and energy to activities very different from writing books or anything at all, to a much greater degree than even a few years ago. (Wanting to express themselves they "micro-blog" on Twitter, or vlog on YouTube, rather than "blog" in the old way.)
Nothing I have yet seen has convinced me that this picture of the situation is inaccurate--while the aforementioned figure can conceal a lot of ambiguity, given that it is less than clear just what counts as a "book" (a lot of self-published work not even purporting to be that--short stories sold individually probably lumped into the figure), let alone a new one (given the ambiguities of reissue with self-published work the author can edit any time). The result is that I can easily picture, for example, the number of items that resemble what most think of as books hitting the market for the first time in this way in any given year as rather smaller--with the kind of decline I have talked about not ruled out.
Why?
My conjecture (it is hard to get beyond that given the paucity of data and analysis out there) the self-publishing boom we saw circa 2010 (when e-book readers arrived on the market, when publishing services like Amazon's came into the business) prompted a Great Drawer Clearing. Meanwhile, deceived by our "success story"-addicted media, a great many people who never had a chance of becoming authors the traditional way fancied that maybe they could make a career this way.
Still, much as agents and editors and anti-populist critical snobs snivel about "everyone" thinking they are a writer, there was only so much stuff in those drawers, with the most likely candidates probably putting out the most likely stuff first. At the same time those who had been gulled into believing that some revolution was here, the power in the hands of the authors, quickly learned otherwise. It was not a case of "Publish it, and they will come." Rather you published it and it just sat there, very few self-published writers selling anything to people who were not friends and family (I dare say, more than usually supportive friends and family). There was thus less apparent incentive to bring out old stuff, let alone write new stuff--less and less all the time as the market grew ever more cluttered while people read and read less, supply and demand moving in opposite directions, with the limitation of the e-books so critical for the self-published to a relatively small part of the market, and the unrelenting hostility of the gatekeepers toward the self-published not helping in the least, among much, much else that made the road steeper rather than easier.
It seemed to me the case, too, that young people have been less inclined to dabble in long-form writing than their forebears (with, indeed, the "decline" of the English major seeming to me to reflect decreasing interest), while people of all ages seem to have been devoting time and energy to activities very different from writing books or anything at all, to a much greater degree than even a few years ago. (Wanting to express themselves they "micro-blog" on Twitter, or vlog on YouTube, rather than "blog" in the old way.)
Nothing I have yet seen has convinced me that this picture of the situation is inaccurate--while the aforementioned figure can conceal a lot of ambiguity, given that it is less than clear just what counts as a "book" (a lot of self-published work not even purporting to be that--short stories sold individually probably lumped into the figure), let alone a new one (given the ambiguities of reissue with self-published work the author can edit any time). The result is that I can easily picture, for example, the number of items that resemble what most think of as books hitting the market for the first time in this way in any given year as rather smaller--with the kind of decline I have talked about not ruled out.
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