James Bond and Britain's Small Wars

Studying the Bond series for my books I found myself increasingly researching post-war Britain--to the point that I wound up writing two books concerned with that in various ways.

Done, I find myself thinking once more about how that history is reflected in the thriller fiction of that era, and not least the Bond series. The books were very much a product of their time--in presenting Britain in reduced circumstances, but nonetheless a global power on the basis of hopes that it could form a union between its perceived special competence at "the game" and the vast resources of the U.S. (embodied in the working relationship of Bond and his CIA colleague Felix Leiter). They are very much of their time, too, in speaking directly to many of the fears of British orthodoxy at the time--of Soviet-Communist infiltration of Western Europe (Casino Royale) and the Empire (Live and Let Die); of the age of the ballistic missile and the nuclear bomb (Moonraker, Dr. No, Thunderball); of the oft-troubled British balance of payments (Diamonds Are Forever); and even that reliance on America from which Britain always hoped for rather more than it got (above all, in You Only Live Twice).

Yet, the crises in which Britain became involved, the numerous end-of-the-empire wars which occupied its intelligence services and armed forces. just about never seem to turn up in the Bond novels and stories in significant ways. Bond never goes to Malaya or Kenya or Iran or Cyprus or any other such real-world hot spot.

Even reference to the conflicts is infrequent and even oblique. As he walks into Blades in Moonraker, Fleming remarks of Bond that the "casual observer" might, on knowing he had something to do with the Ministry of Defence, think he "[m]ay have been attached to Templer in Malaya. Or Nairobi. Mau Mau work"--which is as close as he gets to either of those wars. Later, in "The Hildebrand Rarity," Bond is in the Seychelles, checking out the islands as a possible fall-back point for the Royal Navy, after its prior "fall back" from Ceylon to the Maldives. Why that task? Fleming mentions Communist-influenced labor unions in Ceylon, but really Ceylon's kicking British forces out of the country was part of the broader backlash against British handling of the Suez crisis--not mentioned at all here.

Later, when Bond is meeting Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice to discuss an intelligence sharing agreement with Japan, Bond, insisting on the legitimacy of British interest in the area, at this moment when British forces confronted Indonesia's Sukarno and drew up plans to protect India against Chinese invasion, merely makes vague reference to Captain Cook and the existence of Australia and New Zealand.

I suppose this avoidance of the subject is partly a matter of Fleming's attachment to those settings he knew and loved so well, and which suited his purposes better--Western Europe, North America, the Caribbean. However, it was also a matter of his entertaining his audience in particular ways. The Bond series, like so much of spy fiction since Duckworth Drew, blended adventure and action and intrigue with glamour to offer a particular sort of escape--and a story about Bond really doing "Mau Mau work" would not have been terribly consistent with that. There is a limit to which one can mix escapist adventure with the ugly realities of Empire and war--a lesson that writers seem to have forgotten in this age of relentlessly dark blockbusters.

Paramilitary Fiction and the Military Techno-thriller: The Question of Social Class

In one of the comparatively few scholarly articles written about the military techno-thriller, "Redeeming Vietnam: Techno-Thriller Novels of the 1980s" (which ran in the Autumn 1991 edition of the journal Cultural Critique), sociologist William James Gibson held that the techno-thriller provided a white-collar, middle-class counterpart to working-class populist paramilitary fiction. As Gibson put it, the naval captains, Air Force officers, intelligence analysts and the like who were the heroes of those works "are educated professionals" who "fight with their minds and with the most advanced technology science can develop," but still show, and assure their middle class audience that, they too "have 'what it takes' to fight the enemy"--not least, in bucking the enervated or sell-out Establishment types when the situation demands it.

Jack Ryan is, of course, an obvious example, consistently acting on his own in such a manner. In Patriot Games (1987) it is his own initiative that leads him to the rescue of British royals, and then in the end, his own actions that save his family from retaliation by the terrorists who assassinated them, with the tendency still more pronounced in later book. After the D.C. players abandoned a special-forces in Colombia in Clear and Present Danger (1989), the normally straight-arrow Jack Ryan personally undertook an unauthorized operation to bring them back, not just flying out on the helicopter tasked with the recovery, but personally manning its minigun, with which he mows down dozens of drug cartel soldiers.

Still, the matter strikes me as more complex than Gibson suggests. Before joining the CIA, Jack Ryan was a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch, and a Professor of History at the U.S. Naval Academy, married to an ophthalmic surgeon whose father was a senior Vice-President at the iconic brokerage; but he was also the son of a cop and a nurse who does not get along with his hyper-privileged in-laws.

Indeed, in his confrontation with that Merrill Lynch VP in Patriot Games after the terrorists have put Ryan's wife and daughter in the hospital, Clancy strikes rather a populist note. Joe Muller, "a product of the Ivy League," and quite aware of his "importance in the financial community" acted in a high-handed manner toward Ryan, whom he never forgave for leaving the business, is a classic example of the overbearing, money-and-power obsessed rich man who doesn't understand his son-in-law's "trying to make the world a better place instead of trying to take it over with leveraged buyouts," and doesn't get that there are people he can't bully. Indeed, Clancy pointedly presents Ryan as averse to the man and what he represents, Ryan telling Joe in the same speech that if he stayed on Wall Street like he wanted, "working with [him] every day, moving money from Column A to Column B and pretending it was important, like all the other Wall Street wimps" he would, "hating it," have turned "into another miserable bastard in the financial world." It is not the middle class but another class that Clancy seems to be reassuring when Ryan remarks that, as far as making money there went, "I proved that I could do that as well as you, but I made my pile, and so now I do something I like."

The pattern recurred in such works time and again. Dale Brown's Patrick McLanahan--who, if anything, goes far, far beyond Ryan in loose cannon behavior as his own series proceeds--is imagined along quite similar lines. McLanahan, too, is the son of an Irish-American cop who "knew nothing else but work from age twenty to age sixty," after retirement, in his own cop bar, "The Shamrock." The sons continue both traditions, McLanahan's brother Paul becoming a cop in his turn, while after dad's death selling the bar--"family symbol" and "heirloom" that it is--is out of the question in spite of the unprofitability of the establishment that had dad working side jobs like security guard, and Patrick sacrificing much of his earnings as an Air Force officer to keeping it in business. Indeed, in Shadows of Steel (1996) Patrick, who himself "looked as if he might be more at home in a squad car or on motorcycle patrol than in a bar" is the more out of place because of what has become of the bar, the hang-out for "loud, adrenaline-pumped" beer-and-bourbon drinking cops now frequented by upmarket, touristy types who order "Napa Valley chardonnays . . . specialty espresso coffee drinks . . . cafe mochas . . . veggie appetizers," and expect to get them from decidedly un-McLanahan-like "cool, suave Tom Cruise-look-alike bartenders."

Also like Ryan, his in-laws don't think much of him, and let him know it (in considerably cruder terms than Muller uses--an anti-Irish racial epithet is spoken) when his wife winds up in the hospital due to enemy action in Day of the Cheetah (1989). Appearing two years after Patriot Games, the scene can appear derivative, but that Clancy's scene appeared worth imitating is in itself significant--and in any event, this was far from the last time he was to be in such a situation. Returning to the family home again in The Tin Man (1998), McLanahan goes after not the usual foreign adversaries, but a meth-cooking biker gang that hurt his brother in fairly Mack Bolan fashion (albeit, with the help of a little superhero technology that looks more Batman than Executioner).

For his part, Stephen Coonts' Jake Grafton, who like McLanahan began his adventures in print with an unauthorized air strike against Communist villains (in Hanoi in 1972 in this case) in Flight of the Intruder (1986), is the son of a farmer--not working-class, admittedly, but hardly a member of the elite. And Ralph Peters, if less given to playing up the humble roots of his War in 2020 (1991) protagonist George Taylor (another launcher of unauthorized military strikes in the midst of international crisis), was even more ardent about playing up the privileged backgrounds of many of those with whom he had to contend, juxtaposing him against the man with whom his girlfriend Daisy Fitzgerald is cheating on him, deputy director of the "United Intelligence Agency," "Clifton Reynard Bouquette." At times reading like a caricature of "the other have" in government service, Bouquette is a man who "knew the names of wines and waiters." By contrast Taylor, on account of the scars left by a disease he contracted during a deployment in Africa, "cannot sit in a restaurant without disturbing those around [him]"--and defiantly refuses the cosmetic surgery that would make him more socially acceptable, seeing his face as "the true badge of his service."

The result is that even if middle-class individuals may have "what it takes," the suspicion of moneyed, professional, "Establishment types" is almost as prominent in the techno-thriller as it is in the more overtly blue-collar paramilitary works.

A Genre of Flying Stories?

Looking back at the military techno-thriller, it seems worth remarking that not all combat arms or weapons systems were equally popular with writers, especially in tales more narrowly focused on the doings of particular characters.

I suppose if most people had to name a techno-thriller they would mention The Hunt for Red October--in many ways the book that established the American techno-thriller in the '80s, and certainly the career of the genre's most successful practitioner, so that they would think of it as a genre of submarine stories.

Still, it strikes me that rather more popular than stories of submarines, warships of any other type, or ground units, have been stories of aerial combat. It was the story of a fighter plane's theft, not that of a warship, tank or anything else that proved a critical early prototype of the genre--Craig Thomas' Firefox, which was to have two sequels. Later, Stephen Coonts made his name with flying stories (The Flight of the Intruder, Final Flight), while Dale Brown has managed an unmatched three-decade streak of bestsellers on the basis of the adventures of Air Force officer Patrick McLanahan. If less prominent or consistent, Payne Harrison, Richard Herman, Dean Ing, Barrett Tillamn, R.J. Pineiro, likewise became genre luminaries on the basis of the same theme, while it is worth remembering that Clancy himself, for all his association with naval action, offered plenty of battle in the skies in his books, not least Red October (where A-10s buzz the Kirov, and American Tomcats dogfight Soviet Forgers).

It retrospect it seems plausible that the aircraft-centered story had numerous advantages from a dramatic perspective. One is that an aircraft is a discrete unit, in contrast with an armored unit comprised of many vehicles dispersed over an extended territory--acres, square miles. One could say the same of a warship, of course, but a naval vessel is a large, complex grouping, hundreds or even thousands of personnel spread throughout a vast, compartmentalized hull. The entire vessel and crew may be subordinate to the will of a single captain, but this still diffuses the activity--the officer giving the order not performing the act, or even in the same part of the ship as the people who execute it. Someone in another, unseen part of the vessel loads the torpedo tube--and equally when the ship takes a hit, it is apt to be someone in another, unseen part of the vessel seeing the damage and personally coping with it. All that makes a great contrast with the individualism of a pilot flying an aircraft themselves, and even the small-group dynamics of an aircraft crew--in the case of Coonts' A-6, and even the then-popular B-2 bomber, just two people sitting close together.

Additionally the briskness of aerial warfare—of supersonic jets exchanging even faster missiles as they zip through the sky—may be easier to depict lucidly and make exciting than the slower movement and thicker "fog of war" of a ground unit in the middle of a large battle, or a submarine crew trying to work out from subtle sounds what is going on above and around them as they sit in a steel shell hundreds of feet below the sea. All of this reflected a key aspect of the tales, namely the taste for adventure and romance over the impersonal realities of high-tech, mass warfare.

On Being an "Adult"

Cultural commentators have always inflicted on the world a great deal of inanity about the younger generation not measuring up to their satisfaction. For quite a while (going back, at least, to Generation X) one of their favorite laments has been that the young are not "growing up." That they are not properly "adult."

It is the most obnoxious kind of criticism--nasty and at the same time opaque--because it is unclear just what they mean by "adult."

One may think of an adult as someone who can take care of themselves, and when the situation calls for it, take care of other people and things as well, and therefore be trusted with those responsibilities that have to be borne. That they have given evidence of the qualities this requires--a certain minimum of readiness to put obligations ahead of convenience, pleasure and even interest; a measure of understanding of themselves and of how the world works, and the ability to apply that to those ends.

This seems to me a reasonable thing to expect people to be.

But it does not seem to be what they have in mind at all. Instead they define adulthood in terms of certain external trappings that might be thought to imply all this--with the trappings taking precedence as what they are supposed to imply recedes from attention.

Specifically they have in mind a "middle-class job"--something involving a certain minimum income and stability permitting a suburban existence (putting up with the maintenance and other hassles of detached houses with big lawns is, apparently, part of the "package"), with authority over others and prospects for promotion. They have in mind, too, marriage, children.

Oddly enough, they also tend to make the judgment of "adult" or "not adult" on the basis of what one does in their spare time. Somehow it is adult to watch sports on TV and participate in a "Fantasy Football" league; but not adult to play football on a video game console. And artistic and intellectual pursuits, especially of the "geekier" kinds, are seen as suspect.

All of this gives away the game--the essential shallowness of it. This idea of adult-ness seems nothing so much as nostalgia for a certain image of the '50s--like so much else in the thinking of American conservatives, who consider the '60s and everything after to have been a falling away from all that was good in the world.

It also says much of their class and other prejudices--because the working class, the single, the childless, are consequently less "adult" than others, no matter how much of the adult virtues they actually possess.

And, of course, when they subject the much-maligned millennial to such criticism, they betray their essential bad faith. The thirtysomething college graduate working a minimum wage job as they live at home does not conform to their ideal--but never had a chance. The same social and economic policies that conservatives have relentlessly championed, which have made education synonymous with crushing indebtedness, which have made jobs rare and ill-paid and precarious, and housing out of their reach, all work against their ever having the kinds of households supposedly just given away when people are of age.

Ironically, in their having finished school, taken what work they could find, and accommodated their mode of life to the slighter means that went with the betrayal of the promise of a middle-class life for any and all who graduate college, one could credit these same "young people who refuse to grow up" with exactly those virtues the term "adult" supposedly sums up--and it is perfectly consistent with all this, too, that they should not get the least little credit for it.

Home Improvement: Nostalgic From the Start

Running into the odd Home Improvement rerun on cable, I am time and again struck by how backward-looking that superficially contemporary show was.

In the home and car repair and improvement theme that utterly saturated each episode; in its choice of setting in motor city U.S.A., Detroit; in its "salutes" again and again to everyone wearing a hard hat; it evoked less than the '90s than an earlier generation. I have in mind here the post-war boom--that period when American manufacturing commanded the world market virtually by default, colossal Cold War expenditures cycled money through the economy, and being an auto-owning suburbanite was the picture of the American Dream, exemplified by the industrial centers of the Midwest, where even a good many factory workers were participating in that "middle class" way of life.

The show didn't wear its nostalgia on its sleeve. One didn't see, for example, Tim talking about how much better things were when Ike was in the White House. One got the impression that nothing had changed at all. But it had. American manufacturing, the Midwestern industrial base, the relatively broad prosperity it sustained, and even the way of life with which it was associated, had all been in decline for nearly a generation when Tim the Toolman hit the air waves. Michael Moore, in fact, made his name by putting the very different reality on the big screen in Roger & Me years earlier (while as Home Improvement's run drew to its end, the overtly backward-looking That '70s Show presented a somewhat more realistic vision of that in the travails of Red Forman). And far from the region recovering from these problems, they have all got a lot worse--Moore's native Flint now famous for catastrophic fiscal and administrative failures that have left its residents without potable water in a crisis that has dragged on for year after year.

I don't see anyone using that as a backdrop to a popular prime time broadcast network family sitcom.

The Delay of Bond 25

The latest word about "Bond 25" is that it will start hitting theaters in April 2020.

Assuming the franchise keeps to the schedule, this will be the first time in over three decades that a Bond movie has entered the summer box office fray.

More significant, however, is the fact that an April 2020 release date will mark the second longest gap between one Bond film and the next in the series' nearly six decade history. coming only after the nearly six-and-a-half year gap between Licence to Kill and Goldeneye--a function of not just the production headaches of this like every other long-running, big money franchise, but among other things (not least, the death of producer Albert R. Broccoli), the culmination of a long trend of decline culminating in particularly weak box office performance of Licence to Kill; and the end of the Cold War with all it implied for the spy genre.

Nothing really comparable is operative this time around. (Spectre was considered a letdown, but with nearly $900 million banked it was still one of the more successful installments in the franchise's history, even after adjustment for inflation, while comparison with the preceding film Skyfall was unrealistic, given the exceptional interest, and marketing opportunities, the fiftieth anniversary of the series provided, and which did so much to make it the series' highest earner of all time.) And there seems to be no real consideration of wrenching changes in the series' tone, aesthetic, theme--the course of the rebooted series, if anything, reaffirmed by the choice of Cary Fukunaga to helm and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (groan) to cowrite the script.

Rather the delay has me thinking of how a slower rate of output has been the norm for the series this century. The current plan will mean five Bond films in seventeen-and-a-half years--once every three and a half years, almost twice as long as was the norm pre-reboot. (Forty movies between 1962 and 2002, with that rate maintained even in later periods, two Bond films following Goldeneye in a mere four years.)

It all strikes me as underlining what is too little admitted, what is almost immediately beaten down by the boosters when anyone breathes any such word about any series--the franchise's increasing difficulty staying relevant.

When it started out this was simply not a problem. In the '60s the Bond films, without apparent strain, contributed to and rode a wave of popular fascination with spies and jet age glamour, but what really made the series was something more distinctive to it--the series' invention of the action-adventure blockbuster, both the technique for making such films (the fast-paced, set piece-centered structure that casts logic to the wind, the battery of cinematographic and editing technique that derives the most impact from those thrills).

No one else achieved anything really comparable then, despite wide imitation, which tended to settle for copying its more superficial elements. (A suave superspy? Let's do that, they all thought. But making an action movie to compare with the Bonds was generally beyond them, as a glance at the relatively high-profile Derek Flint movies shows.) This near-monopoly on its style of action movie-making remained the case even after the flood of Bond knock-offs turned into a comparative trickle, so that after the series' period of real originality (that first decade and its first half dozen movies) passed, and the novelty was reduced to an occasional set piece or gimmick that would stick in the popular mind, and it became repetitive of its own successes and derivative of those of others to sustain the glitter of the brand name (unmistakable in the chase-packed, blaxploitation-themed Live and Let Die), there was not a whole lot of real, head-to-head competition. (The French Connection, Dirty Harry, sure, they were hits--but they were doing something fairly different.)

Still, if slow, Hollywood did begin to catch up, Star Wars a signal moment in the process, while by the '80s Hollywood was adroit enough at this that the latest Bond movie could get lost n the summer crowd (up against Rambo and Mad Max and Commando in '85, against Predator and Robocop and Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop in '87, against Indiana Jones and Lethal Weapon again and Batman in '89).

It got tougher still in the '90s, while by the twenty-first century it seemed like there was a new installment in a big-budget action franchise at the multiplex just about every week of the year--while the series' dispensing with much of what had made it distinctive made its standing out all the harder. (Already with Licence to Kill the results were looking like a generic '80s action film--while the producers' discomfort with the flamboyant plots and the self-indulgence of the character cost them much of what personality they had.)

As a result, instead of an assembly line more or less reliably chugging out Bond movie after Bond movie under the same team (director John Glen, who had been with the Bond franchise since the '60s, helmed five Bond movies in a row in the '80s), they have strained to "make it new" (ironically, while following the course of everyone else--"make it dark").

In the '90s changes of directors became frequent, while increasingly selecting the sort of "auteurs" who originally had no place in a franchise dominated by a creative producer (Broccoli a recipient of the Academy's Irving Thalberg Award for a reason). First there was the art-house break-out Lee Tamahori, given the charge of the 40th anniversary film Die Another Day, even before the reboot saw a turn to such directors as Marc Foster, Sam Mendes, and now the aforementioned Fukunaga. Again, the grosses have been good, but I am unconvinced this particular practice has really been all that helpful. There has, too, been the attempt at telling the story of how Bond became Bond, with a certain amount of soap operatic family drama and mythmaking tossed in. Not everyone was a fan of the approach. (I wasn't.) Still, many felt that this worked for Casino Royale, and Skyfall, each of those films giving viewers the sense that each of these was more than "another" Bond film. The reaction to Spectre, however, made fairly clear the limitations of that approach.

Is there much chance that the new team can come up with something, if only enough to give the franchise a bump like The Spy Who Loved Me, rather than continue a downward movement, the way A View to a Kill did?

I put that question to you, readers.

The Historiography of Paramilitary Fiction

I have been reading and thinking and writing a great deal about spy fiction and military techno-thrillers.

It is not really possible to do that properly without giving a fair amount of thought to paramilitary action-adventure--the body of work about which I have had plenty of occasion to survey over the years.

I have found that there are plenty of works on particular series'--like William H. Young's A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction: The Executioner and Mack Bolan (the one which started it all)--and even works on subgenres, like John Newsinger's Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture; comprehensive round-ups of at least key swaths of the work published to date--like Bradley Mengel's Serial Vigilantes of Paperback Fiction; and even a measure of critical examination of the phenomenon as a whole, like James William Gibson's Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America.

The works all have their interest and uses for the researcher, but none of these works amounts to a robust, "big picture" history of the genre's origins and development. My impression is that no one has attempted to produce such a history.

This may seem surprising. But it really isn't, given the way that scholars commonly treat genres of popular fiction. They tend not to take much interest in providing a comprehensive history of the genre, just look at such bits of it as fit within what happens to be fashionable at the moment. And even where a few buck the trend to produce something a little broader in perspective, the pressure to be rigorous, the notorious tendency to specialize it can encourage, leave them hesitate to go too far in putting the puzzle pieces together. This has certainly been the case with science fiction, for example--as I discuss at some length in Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry. The result is that there is a plenitude of rigorous but specialized work, and lots of stuff that affords a wider view but is written in a casual way (a principal reason why, before essaying the post-1980 history of the field that was my initial concern in the book, I had to spend so much time working out what came before).

However, even more fundamental than that is the fact that at the very high peak of its popularity the genre never attracted much serious critical attention. And since that peak the level of attention accorded the genre has receded very sharply indeed--so much so that when Gold Eagle, which is to paramilitary action-adventure what its owner Harlequin is to romance, never seems to have even got its own Wikipedia page. The site's disambiguation page for "Gold Eagle" simply identifies it as an "imprint of Harlequin Enterprises," and links the reader to Harlequin's page. There one finds in the three thousand word main text of the article only the acknowledgment that the company does own, among its other imprints, Gold Eagle, a publisher of "male action-adventure books." That's it--no reference even made to the fact that the company has been shut down, in part, I suppose, because literally no news outlet bothered to report it. (In fact, I only learned about the decision by chancing on a comment about it in a forum on the personal web site of one of its major writers, and afterward independently got confirmation from another of the company's authors--while so far as I can tell, my blog post about it is the most anyone has bothered to write on the subject.) It has likely factored into this that such related genres as the action movie or the techno-thriller have received surprisingly little of their attention, and that, all too often along the lines discussed above (which left me putting a lot of the pieces together myself when writing about James Bond, or Star Wars, or more recently, techno-thrillers).

One can hardly write a brilliant history, or even a bad one, of a body of work they have not even deigned to notice exists.

Science Fiction's Side Stories?

Most of this who dig into the history of science fiction in any systematic way quickly encounter a particular outline of that history, or at any rate, history of its leading theories and tendencies with regard to content and form, the associated movements, debates, the figures and publications with which they are most identified. This has the genre—definable as fiction in some important way founded on speculative science—increasingly cropping up in the increasingly scientifically-minded nineteenth century, with Mary Shelley, with Jules Verne, with HG. Wells, and on into the early twentieth, when, largely through the efforts of Hugo Gernsback in the '20s, this went from being an increasingly common story trait to a genre. He did not long remain its leading light, however, the years after shortly seeing the ascent of "harder," more extrapolative science fiction through Campbell's tenure at Astounding in the '30s and '40s, and the successors who built on his work in their turn in subsequent years, like the more social science-minded Horace Gold at Galaxy—while still others rebelled against it, often by favoring the standards of mainstream and even "highbrow" Modernist and postmodernist literature, as was already increasingly apparent in the '50s, the influential editors Anthony Boucher and Francis J. McComas declaring themselves interested in literature first and the speculative second, and the New Wave led by figures like Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard and Harlan Ellison in the '60s and '70s edging still further in that direction. Afterward has been a fuzzier thing, less defined by dominant figures and audacious movements, and more so by the synthesis of prior streams, by nostalgic evocations of earlier works and themes, and above all by postmodernist experiment at the highbrow end of the field and ruthless commercialization everywhere.

Those reading this history, if examining it closely, find that it is usually written out in a rather casual, even vague way, especially when the "big picture" is their concern. This tends to take the form of "folk history," based on the casual and casually expressed recollections of the story's heroes--an Asimov or Aldiss in their writings about the genre, for example. Not least because they lived within a large portion of the field's history, their works and other acts the stuff of a fair chunk of that history, they frequently show great insight. Still, it is a far different thing from systematically amassing the documentary and other evidence for similarly systematic examination, and rigorously deriving conclusions from that, then presenting it all in such a way that the reader can judge the claims and the evidence and decide for themselves—alas, to be found only in explicitly academic studies of much smaller portions of the history (like the work of Mike Ashley on genre science fiction's earlier days, or Colin Greenland's work on the New Wave).

Writing Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry what I aspired to was a work providing a "big picture" of the genre's history on a more secure basis, in which the more academic studies were of considerable help, but to which end I found myself having to do a good deal of primary-source investigation myself. What, I wanted to know, did Gernsback do that mattered so much? What did Campbell have to say for himself, and why was it revolutionary? And so on and so forth. Would the facts really support the claims I had seen, or would they suggest something altogether different?

Indeed, initially beginning as a history of science fiction since 1980, I found myself having to do so much of this that much of the book wound up recapitulating what happened in earlier decades, just to provide a proper basis for analyzing more recent developments. Still, when all was said and done I found that the facts did indeed support the familiar outline. And so what I ended up with, rather than something radically different, just tweaked the outline here and there (I was surprised to see Gernsback incluing masterfully, surprised to see that most of those writers we think of as "New Wave" didn't really get what Ballard was talking about), fleshed parts of it out more than I'd seen others do, sourced it with, I think, more than the usual caution, but the essentials were the same.

In the end, it seems just to say that the outline is reasonably faithful to what actually happened. However, at the very least the experience reminded me that the outline is also far from complete. Certainly the key figures, the key movements, in the history, were all real enough, and sincere enough in promoting their theories, tastes, standards, which did exercise their influence in the generally acknowledged ways. And in covering all that I had occasion to discuss a good deal else, not least the genre's treatment of those themes that it handles as no other form of literature can (utopia and dystopia, catastrophe and transcendence); the broader development of media, popular culture and politics, with which science fiction constantly interacted; and the standing of the genre in relation to the cultural mainstream, mass audience, upmarket reviewers and academic critics alike.

Still, much else was going on around, alongside and even underneath all this.

I think, for instance, of how the old Gernsbackian science fiction, flowing into the stream of old-time pulp fiction alongside more grounded work like Doc Savage, laid the foundations for the rise of the comic strip and comic book superhero--and the fantasies to which they all spoke--or the odd kinship between science fiction and the hard-boiled crime tradition that eventually gave us noir. I think of how, at the same time that he was refining and promoting his vision of rigorously extrapolative, thought experiment science fiction, John Campbell was preoccupied by elitist fantasies of ubermenschen rising above, transcending, the common herd, and ideas which seemed to speak to that--Scientology, General Semantics, psi. I think of how science fiction has so often been a kind of scientists' equivalent of chivalric fantasy, and how alternate history has been bound up with wish-fulfillment--perhaps, the fulfillment of very dark and disturbing wishes indeed when we look at the genre's serving up one scenario of Nazi victory in World War II after another.

And I think that it is about this side of the genre's history--side stories, perhaps, from the standpoint of the "main line," but interesting and significant for all that--is what I will increasingly write about when I turn to the subject again.

Science Fiction as Chivalric Literature?

The chivalric tale of the Middle Ages and after glorified and flattered the feudal warrior-aristocracy. Likewise science fiction has glorified and flattered the scientist, and in much the same way—by presenting an utterly false picture of what they do. Far from the knight-errant doing great deeds in the pursuit of fortune and glory ever having existed, David Graeber suggests in his brilliant anthropological-historical-political economic study Debt that the image may be an adaptation of the merchant's pursuit of his trade for an aristocratic culture. There is, too, the disinterest of such fiction in how wars are actually fought and won (or lost). Such mundane matters as numbers and logistics are given short shrift, while personal heroics are all.

Similarly, instead of endeavoring to depict the reality of science as a cumulative, collective enterprise, increasingly institutionalized, it presents science as a ruggedly individualistic endeavor. The image goes hand in hand with the gross exaggeration of its figures' abilities, presenting heroes and villains alike who, for instance, are unable to go a day without idly throwing together some mind-boggling machine that will change the world, often in the course of action-adventure befitting the knight-errant. (Thus in Skylark Three Richard Seaton, while journeying in a starship of his own construction, builds a machine capable of near-instantly imparting perfect command of a foreign language to its user just to have something to do—and of course, conveniently get the heroes through the obstacles that crop up soon enough.)

Along with the power of the scientist in the lab, science fiction exaggerates the power of the scientist in society, perhaps even more than the old chivalric tale did the power and influence of its aristocrats. The knight, as an aristocrat, was a member of the ruling elite of his day, with even an impoverished nobleman legally set apart from and above the commoners, and as a matter of law enjoying all manner of privileges they do not, with such examples as tax exemption, priority in assignment to government posts and disproportionate voting rights in the legislature enduring fairly late into modern times.

No such claim can be made for the scientist. They have no special legal status, and indeed, not much privilege of any kind at all as anyone familiar with the abundance of underemployed and underpaid adjunct professors and postdoctoral fellows, or the hell the lucky few who land steady work go through to get some grant money, can attest. Indeed, for all the pious esteem for science and its practitioners it is not the genius in the lab but the possessor of great wealth, the head of the vast bureaucratic machine, who wields power and enjoys supreme status. Moreover, to the extent that education was a qualification for the position such figures attained rather than a badge of the privilege that positioned them to achieve such heights, they were far more likely to be trained in law or management than science, of which they frequently know little or nothing.

Indeed, the fantasy epitomized by the Edisonade was arguably that a talented scientist could through their skills win their way to the possession of such wealth, and the headship of such organizations (never mind the fact that, at that point, they would likely cease to do any real scientific work). Or that, even if they do not become a "tai-kun," their knowledge will make them the man or woman of the hour when it turns out that, contrary to what everyone else may have believed, what they were working on all this time was not useless. (Think of every disaster movie, every alien contact movie, every grandiose B-science fiction movie plot, period. Crisis strikes! And then a Man in Black shows up on the doorstep of some scientist who had previously been toiling quietly in obscurity to say "You'll have to come with us" and whisks them off to the White House to tell the President of the United States what to do. Not exactly how things went with climate change, was it?)

Of course, all that being the case, one might wonder: why should anyone bother to flatter scientists in this way? Certainly one reason is that, to a greater degree than later, people who were scientists, or at least had scientific training, played critical roles in establishing science fiction as a genre, while also regarding scientists as an audience worth courting. The individual who might be credited with a greater role than anyone else in bringing that about, Hugo Gernsback, was an electronics industry entrepreneur promoting amateur radio, who began his career as a publisher with what was initially a glorified catalog for his wares, Modern Electrics--in the pages of which he first presented Ralph 124C 41+ to the world. Things worked the other way as well, Gernsback not just using his stories to promote science, but apparently looking to scientists as an audience for his stories, certainly by the time of Amazing Stories. (In his editorials in that magazine he was emphatic about the potential of a writer's speculations, even quite ill-informed and fantastic ones, to inspire a scientist or technologist to the achievement of genuine breakthroughs, a not-so-subtle call on them to pay attention.) During his tenure at Astounding Science Fiction and Fact John Campbell, generally regarded as Gernsback's successor, was likewise scientifically trained (an MIT physics graduate) who saw science fiction as a quasi-scientific enterprise, with his scientist-writers (biochemist Isaac Asimov, aeronautical engineer Robert Heinlein, inventor Murray Leinster) performing thought-experiments and writing up the reports as stories in the pages of his magazine--and Campbell making much of the fact that scientists did read his magazine.

With scientists publishing and writing stories promoted on such grounds, and looking for a readership among scientists and engineers, it was natural enough that there should be a certain wish-fulfillment there, in line with a sense that if the world was not like that, then it ought to be and, perhaps, also that it would be, manifest in the much fawned-over ultra-Competent Men who filled the pages of their magazines. (The plus at the end of Ralph's name was, in his future, the equivalent of an aristocrat's title, an honor bestowed upon the most accomplished of the scientific workers who were society's most esteemed members.) And of course, if the genre changed, much, these editors and their writers had such a wide and enduring influence on the field that it would be unsurprising if others did not follow in their footsteps in this respect (the more so as, again, so many later science fiction writers were scientists as well).

However, where the long run is concerned a more persuasive explanation seems to me to be that even if the scientist's position in society does not rate it, such flattery has been immensely useful to people who do have real power. The powerful today, at the heads of those corporate and government bureaucracies, do need scientific laborers, and they have long looked to tales like these to attract young people to scientific careers in spite of the long and rigorous education required, the scarce economic support for those going this route, and the lack of glamour and modest remuneration generally awaiting them at the end of that road. And certainly the idea that the economic elite have got where they are through scientific-technological genius has been handy in legitimizing the ever-more inordinate wealth and status they enjoy. The boosters of great wealth prefer that Americans picture Silicon Valley rather than Wall Street—and that they think Silicon Valley's billionaires are that because of super-human technical skills rather than the blend of privileged social backgrounds and "street smarts" that let them seize the main chance provided by long government subsidy of the computer field and the unleashed demons of high finance. Indeed, one could say that in the end the glorification and flattery of the scientist has, even on that level, really been all about them.

Counterfactuals as Wish-Fulfillment

In considering the historical counterfactual E.H. Carr argued in his classic What is History? that when facing a major turning point in the course of events historians do

discuss alternative courses available to the actors in the story on the assumption that the option was open, [but] go on quite correctly to explain why one course was eventually chosen rather than the other.

One could always suppose that another course was taken, which may in many cases be "theoretically conceivable," but imagining that history actually did take them is "a parlour game with the might-have-beens of history" which does not "have . . . anything to do with history" as such, or with the historian's job.

If the devotion to counterfactuals was parlor game rather than serious historiography, then what did it mean that so many devoted so much time to it? Reading Carr's book one can see a political game being played on two levels. One was the broadly philosophical—namely, right-wing hostility to those who see rationally discernible tendencies within history, or even simply argue for cause-and-effect, above all the Marxists to whom they were so bitterly hostile, and conservative historians have championed counterfactuals precisely for that reason. (Indeed, it seems worth noting that their most prominent advocate of recent years has been neoconservative Niall Ferguson, who explicitly stated in a self-declared "manifesto"--to be found in his introduction to the Virtual History anthology devoted to the theme--that he regards counterfactuals as valuable because they are an "antidote" to "determinist" views of history, and associated political ideologies of which he disapproves, in his list of which he pointedly includes "the class struggle" and "socialism.")

The other is the shallower level of specific events, with the counterfactual tending to be a wish-fulfillment, a tendency that, again, was heavily political, and reflected in the propensity to choose certain subjects over and over again, rather than others that, from the more standpoint of thought-experiment, seem equally worthy. Carr in particular noted the tendency of such writers to choose the Russian Revolution rather than, for example, the Norman conquest of England or the American Revolution, no one wishing to "reverse the results" or "express a passionate protest against" the latter, while the anti-Communist certainly wished to do so against the former. As a result, "when they read history" they let "their imagination run riot on all the more agreeable things that might have happened," and become "indignant with the historian who goes on quietly with his job of explaining what did happen and why their agreeable wish-dreams remain unfulfilled," driving them to come up with their preferred version.

It is equally hard to argue with Carr on this point, with the tendency to treat the Russian Revolution in this way hardly less strong a half century on, historians who otherwise show more restraint unable to help themselves when writing of that subject, lamenting the "might-have-beens." (To cite one telling, recent example, Adam Tooze does so repeatedly in The Deluge where the Russian Revolution is concerned, but never anything else.)

It seems to me that what can be said of the historian's counterfactual can still more be said of the science fiction writer's alternate history, less bound by the demands of historiography, more susceptible to being mere wish-fulfillment. Considering what Carr has said of the counterfactual's intellectual roots it does not seem implausible that the genre developed and flourished in a context of anti-Communism, or that it coalesced into a genre in a period when such sentiment was at its height, were mere coincidences.

Still more than that, Carr's remarks have me wondering about that most popular topic of that genre, an Axis victory in World War II. Previously considering the matter I thought there was a mix of reasons, namely the combination of the conflict's familiarity, the way its scale and complexity afford numerous possibilities for it playing out differently in ways of significant consequence, and the fact that despite the diversity of understanding and interpretation of the conflict, a broad gamut of opinions accepts to a certain, crucial extent, the Nazis as villains, and the fight against them a "good war." However, given the strong case for alternate history as wish-fulfillment it seems that one must ask—has this genre been catering to closet, or perhaps not so closet, Nazis all this time?

This may seem an appalling charge to make. By and large the genre's major works have, naturally, been deeply anti-Nazi, from C.M. Kornbluth's "Two Dooms" and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle forward. Still, if the Nazi victory is presented by the authors with distaste, seeing it presented at all may still afford a certain satisfaction to those who would be sympathetic to the outcome (especially when such presentation can scarcely take other forms); while the distaste of such "liberals" and "lefties" for the scenario may add to their enjoyment. It seems all the worth considering given that, as Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies have argued in The Myth of the Eastern Front, a considerable subculture exists within the U.S which romanticizes if not the Nazi cause, then the Wehrmacht which was its military instrument—partly as a result of the extent to which senior German generals from that conflict were allowed to write the record in English of the conflict, and the post-war desire to rehabilitate a conservative West German Establishment for the sake of the anti-Communist crusade.

Considering this issue one might also consider the second most common subject in alternate history (or at least, in American writing about it), namely a Confederate victory in the U.S. Civil War. There would seem to be more, not less, sympathy for such an outcome in the U.S., more openly expressed; and one might guess, a larger number of people who would similarly take pleasure in its presentation.

Both these tastes would seem to be reflected in the way a good many readers have taken S.M. Stirling's Draka novels. The books, which picture the emergence of an extremely militarist, racist culture (one with considerable Southern input, and which out-Nazis the Nazis) in southern Africa that goes on to conquer the world, appeal to both pro-Nazi and pro-Confederate fantasy. Stirling insists that his books are a dystopia, but even if one grants that he means what he says, Stirling himself has remarked in interviews that many a fan has expressed the wish to "move there."

It seems quite possible that the "Dominion of the Draka" is not the only dystopia of which that can be said.

The Military Techno-Thriller: A History

One little secret of writing--writers often have occasion to wonder if anyone is reading what they produce at all. (Indeed, the subject of how much scholarly and scientific research goes completely unread by anyone has turned into a genre of scholarly and scientific writing itself.)

Where my two pieces on the techno-thriller from 2009 are concerned (one for Strange Horizons, the other for the gone-but-fondly-remembered Internet Review of Science Fiction), I have found that not only did people look at them, but that they have gone on doing so for a decade after their first appearance--David Axe back in December closing a piece on the latest crop of China-themed techno-thrillers by quoting my SH article on the subject.

A decade is a very long time in Internet years, and without false modesty I think it reflects the fact that only so much is written about this genre--one reason why I have since developed what I had to offer in those two pieces into a book offering a fuller history of the military techno-thriller genre, from the first flickerings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the emergence of the invasion story in the late Victorian era, and the broader development of the "future war" story in the hundred and fifty years since.

Now The Military Techno-thriller: A History is available in print and e-book formats from Amazon and other retailers.

Get your copy today.

The Evolution of the Thriller

Last year I published a pair of papers over at SSRN about the declining presence on the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly bestseller lists of both spy fiction and military techno-thrillers after the 1980s--and along with this, the shift of the thriller genre away from high politics and international affairs, to domestic settings and "ordinary" crime (and in particular, legal thrillers, serial killer profiler thrillers, forensic thrillers).

The articles were more concerned with empirically checking the (widely held) impression that this was going on against the available data rather than explaining it or discussing its implications.

However, it seems to me that there are a number of such explanations.

One may be that the genres themselves were a bit played out. As I have argued for a number of years, by the 1970s the spy genre had been around for three generations, about the normal lifetime of a literary genre, and showing it--not least in its increasing tendency to look backward, and in its penchant for self-parody and for borrowing from other genres to make new hybrid genres (because what it had to offer itself was looking less fresh).

The military techno-thriller seemed fresher and newer in the '80s, but it, too, was part of that very old tradition, and it seems to me that its essential requirements (politico-military scenarios, novel weaponry) were limiting, enough that it, too, was getting a bit worn-out by the '90s.

Another is that this was a matter of the Cold War's end. The plain and simple truth is that international politics only became a major theme of American popular fiction in the '60s because of that conflict, and it was only natural that its passing would mean a decline in such interest.

However, alongside these issues of exhaustion or diminished topicality there is the matter of the sort of reading experience these books offered. Thrillers about spies, techno-military crises and the like are "big picture"-oriented and information-heavy, particularly regarding the "machinery of civilization." In this they tended toward what Goethe and Schiller called the "epic." This is, in fact, part of their appeal for many. (It was certainly part of their appeal for me.)

But I suspect most readers are looking less for the epic than the "dramatic" (Goethe and Schiller's term again)--fiction offering the reader close identification with with a protagonist whose struggles they follow with baited breath, and never mind all the big picture, informational stuff that tends to get in the way of that kind of experience. It seems to me that domestic settings, ordinary legal and criminal stuff, fits in with those more easily than flying missiles and Presidents on the hotline to the Kremlin, reading about which the quotidian and character-type stuff only gets in the way. (I admit it: reading Jack Ryan novels I was never really interested in Jack Ryan's home life, just the crisis stuff and high-tech stuff and action stuff.)

The tilt toward dramatic rather than epic apart, it may even be that people were inclining more toward easy-to-read books--which the techno-thrillers, with their multiple plot threads and density with technological and other material detail often were not, the reader having to keep track of too much, process too much. (Jack Ryan is only on the page for a third of The Hunt for Red October, and in the paperback edition, does not show up for a hundred pages amid all the diplomatic and military maneuvering of a full-blown superpower chess game where A-10s buzz the Kirov battle-cruiser, and American and Soviet naval aviators shoot it out in the sky.)

I suspect this all the more looking at the work of perhaps that most dramatically inclined of the era's bestselling spy novelists, John le Carre. His fiction was indeed character-oriented, but his oblique, Show-don't-tell-oriented prose style made a very heavy demand on the reader, so much so that in high school I found him nearly unreadable, and even after having become a fan, am astonished that he managed to sell so many books. (As Raymond Benson declared some time ago, by the '90s Ian Fleming would have been deemed "too hard" for the broad market--and his prose was a walk in the park compared to le Carre's.)

I suspect all this, too, looking at the other sorts of popular fiction that have flourished in recent years--like that penchant for young adult-oriented dystopias. As I argued in Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry, what we tended to get in works like Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games and Veronica Roth's Divergent were dystopias with little-to-no politics (!) or world-building, information-light stories that were narrowly focused and intimate in their presentation of protagonists with whom our identification was everything; and as young adult stories, all the easier to read.

Why Nothing Ever Seems to Go Viral

As Hit Makers author Derek Thompson explained in an interview with Forbes, for something to go viral means the product or idea in question "spread through many generations of intimate sharing." People who liked it shared it with other people, who in their turn shared it with other people, who in turn shared it with other people, again and again in short sequence, rapidly multiplying the number who saw it (and shared it) in a manner analogous to the spread of an epidemic from Patient Zero.

Of course, for anyone looking for an audience--and who isn't?--the prospect of such success is enormously attractive. But it also turns out that, as Thompson himself remarks (and as many a frustrated marketer has doubtless come to suspect), it almost never happens.

When I consider how social media works this seems to me the more obvious. Take Twitter, for example, which makes certain data conveniently available to everyone with an account--among that data, the number of "impressions" they made in a given period, which is to say, the number of times the item appears on screen in front of a follower, whether or not they look at.

Based on the numbers I have seen (not just my own) someone who Tweets something can expect impressions from it equivalent to 1-3 percent of their followers. Someone with a thousand followers, for example, might expect to score ten to thirty impressions per Tweet.

Not an impressive figure, is it?

And remember, impressions are just that, a thing far short of the deeper concept of "engagement," about which Twitter also provides figures to its users. This is the Twitter user interacting with the Tweet some way--if only by clicking on it.

As it happens, the rates of engagement-per-impression are not very high. An engagement rate of 0.9 percent--in other words, a less than one in a hundred chance of an impression leading to engagement--is considered a good, solid rate.

As this includes such things as accidental clicks, or multiple engagements by the same person (who might click on it, and like it, and Retweet it), one may safely assume that the odds of any one person really taking an interest in any single Tweet presented them is lower.

So 0.9 percent, of 1-3 percent, and you might get one engagement for every ten thousand followers you have, with the more substantive engagements, like likes and Retweets, apt to be a fraction of that. One in several tens of thousands.

Ninety-nine percent of Twitter users have 3,000 followers or less. Far too few for anyone to expect that their own followers will engage any one Tweet in a meaningful way, let alone Retweet the Tweet. Apparently 0.1 percent have 25,000 followers or more, enough to have a reasonable chance of their Tweet being Retweeted. Still, given the aforementioned figure one can expect that only 0.1 percent of their followers has a similarly sized following (25 people). And given that only one in tens of thousands of those followers of their followers might Retweet, the odds that one of their followers with a large following of their own will Retweet any of their Retweets are very slim indeed.

The result is that the chances of any one Tweet getting a Retweet, and still more a second Retweet, are minuscule. The chances of one Retweet leading to another leading to another Retweet, again and again, in line with the "going viral" model, are a minuscule fraction of that.

The figures of which I write here are averages. Of course, averages contain wide divergences. Some will do much better--but others will do much worse. And it is worth remembering that the bigger one's following, the lower the engagement rate they are likely to have (if someone is famous enough to have millions of followers, a lot of them are likely to be pretty casual), offsetting at least somewhat the benefit of their bigger following from the standpoint of the Tweet's wider propagation.

On top of that some argue that the continuing fragmentation of the media--social media most certainly included--is making anything's going viral even less likely than before. But it was never all that plausible a thing to hope for in the first place.

Reflections on Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front

I recently revisited Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. The book is not a sprawling epic in the manner of War and Peace but a compact (175 pages in my paperback edition) chronicle of the experiences of its narrator, a young enlistee in the German army, by the start of the story already in the field a good while, through the remainder of the conflict.

As might be expected given the book's reputation, to say nothing of the stuff of the more serious war literature generally, it depicts the gruesome destruction of bodies and minds, the narrowing of horizons amid it all, the sharpening of the little pleasures they steal (often literally) in the quieter moments--a fine meal, a few hours in the company of a woman. The alienation of the foot soldier trying to hold onto life and limb and sanity from talk of the "big picture," and from the civilians they are (often justly) sure cannot understand what they have been through. The baggage and the scars they bear forever after. The martinet sergeants and medical corp quacks and corrupt officers and, just off-stage, businessmen thriving financially far behind the lines. Still, familiar as it all is, Remarque's crisp treatment expresses it all with great clarity and force.

Naturally the Nazis hated it, and not solely because it tells the truth about war rather than glorifying it, but because it gave the lie to their "stab in the back" propaganda. (As the novel proceeds one sees the German army ground down, and in the concluding chapters, finally overwhelmed by superior Allied resources and manpower.)

The Nazis' hatred of Remarque's book, in fact, started a long-running conflict between the German government and Universal over it in which Hollywood, frankly, disgraced itself, subordinating even what artistic freedom the Hays Code left to foreign profits. (Ben Urwand tells that story in some detail in his very worthwhile The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With Hitler.)

Today one might imagine the book to be no more popular than that with their heirs, of whom we now see and hear so much more than we did just a short while before, in Germany and everywhere else. Any reader of recent historiography (for instance, neocon court historian Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War) quickly sees the evidence that the right-wingers seeking to rehabilitate that war, and war more generally, have been getting the upper hand.

That seems to me all the more reason to take a look at this deserved classic if you haven't seen it, and reason for a second look if you already have.

Rewatching the '90s?

I recently had occasion to think about how we never left the '80s in the really important things--in our economics and politics, the right-wing backlash, the financialization and inequality and the rest going on and on and on.

To my surprise, this is even the case with television, as I am reminded when I run across a rerun of a TV show from the '90s. The Pretender, for instance.

This may sound odd. The long opening credits sequences have been discarded--for the sake of cramming in more commercials, I'm sure, no matter what anyone says. There is less inclination to standalone episodes and more toward arcs (albeit shoddily assembled ones). There is much pompous display of self-important edginess and middlebrow pretentiousness (the indie movie sensibility come to the small-screen).

But simply happening on an episode in the middle, especially if no one is holding a cell phone or making an ostentatiously current pop culture reference, none of this is necessarily apparent. What is apparent is the way people look and talk, the hair and the clothes, the ring of the dialogue--even the texture of the images--they don't scream '90s the way a show from the '80s or '70s or earlier does. It might have been made yesterday. Or so it seems to me.

But then I actually am old enough to remember when the '90s was new.

I wonder, does that factor into all this?