Why Are We Still Talking About James Bond in 2020?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Reason No One is Reading Your Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet it goes on flourishing.

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

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

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

And so on and so forth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get your copy today!

The Trajectory of Robert Ludlum's Career

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sixty-Six Years After Casino Royale

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

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

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

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

Review: Anthony Horowitz's Forever and a Day

MILD SPOILERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Excesses of Critics

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

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

Now, to begin properly:

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

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

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

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

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

On Johnny Depp's Mortdecai

I recently caught Mortdecai on cable--and found the film a pleasant surprise. Enough of one that I found myself remembering the severity of the critical hostility to it when it came out, and speculating about why they went so over the top in bashing the movie.

I suppose a significant reason was that the movie starred Johnny Depp, over whom the entertainment press has fawned, but against whom it turned years ago, to a ludicrous degree, with one predictable result the excessive bad-mouthing of anything he appears in. (Actually watching Pirates of the Caribbean 4, or The Lone Ranger after hearing their moaning and groaning, that excess was very clear.) That fact aside, the movie was a January "dump month" release of an adaptation of which many of the critics, and their audiences, likely knew nothing (a now comparatively obscure British comic novel of the '70s). This did not invite hostility the way Johnny Depp being in it did as leave the film vulnerable, with the same going for other aspects of the movie--its simply having no lobby in the commentariat that might attack detractors on some political grounds.

I might add that the film's retro aspect, its subtle evocation of something yesteryear, its working in the style of a kind of comedy they do not make much anymore--there were comparisons with The Pink Panther, and they were totally on the mark--probably did not serve it well with the less cinematically literate critics, perhaps especially because of what may have been the most unexpectedly Pink Panther-like aspect of the film of all, Depp's performance as the titular figure, Charles Mortdecai. What Peter Sellers did with the French detective Jacques Clouseau, Depp did with his British aristocrat. I thought it worked brilliantly, and having since read the first of Kyril Bonfiglioli's Mortdecai novels, think it was entirely fitting.

But I suspect the joke went over the heads of many of those critics who thought this "strange," for reasons extending beyond cinematic illiteracy to idiot snobbery. A certain sort of American--and the kind who become film critics for upmarket review pages tend to be so inclined--seem to hear Received Pronunciation, and hear in it their social and intellectual superior, if not their Lord and Master. (This is the sort I suspect bizarrely turned the stale Heritage drivel of a Conservative peer of the House of Lords who came into the Kitchener name via marriage into a cultural phenomenon in the United States.) Seeing such a figure depicted thus was bewildering to them, and perhaps even offensive. A less stupid person, however, would not have that reaction.

How Did Robert Ludlum Become a Mega-Seller?

Looking back at the history of spy fiction one is struck by British domination of the field for most of its history, where significant, genre-founding and genre-reinventing innovation, the authorship of the classics that stood the test of time, and its largest commercial names, are concerned. William Le Queux virtually invented it in the form in which we know it in Secrets of the Foreign Office, and continued to lay down its foundations in subsequent works like Spies of the Kaiser, along with Erskine Childers, E. Phillips Oppenheim and Joseph Conrad. Following these the writers we tend to remark are Sax Rohmer, John Buchan, H.C. McNeile, W. Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, William Haggard, John le Carrè, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth . . . as Americans, if taking occasional and sometimes more than occasional interest, only occasionally produced a book like The Manchurian Candidate before going on to other things.

This changed in the 1970s, however, with that decade and the next seeing two American authors of spy fiction enter that uppermost rank of really commercially successful authors, the Flemings and le Carrès and Forsyths, namely Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy.

I have, of course, got in my two cents on Clancy's success (which had at least as much to do with the boom of the techno-thriller as spy fiction, more narrowly defined). I have given less thought to Ludlum's, but the recent turn of my research and writing has me doing so now.

It strikes me that, in contrast with Fleming (whose sales went through the roof when Bond became a screen hit in the early '60s), or le Carrè (whose career it appears was helped greatly by Martin Ritt's film version of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold shortly after the book hit the market), or Forsyth (whose first novel Fred Zinnemann turned into another commercial success and instant classic), or the later Clancy (whose early Jack Ryan novels John McTiernan and Philip Noyce turned into major hits in a critical period for his career, while shortly after Clancy exploded in the world of video gaming with Rainbow Six), Ludlum did not get a significant boost out of cinematic or other multimedia success during his commercial peak in print. (There were two major feature films based on his work in the '80s, as it happened, helmed by legendary thriller directors--Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend, and John Frankenheimer's The Holcroft Covenant--but both were commercial and critical flops, while the TV versions of his work, like the 1988 Richard Chamberlain-Jaclyn Smith miniseries version of The Bourne Identity, could do only so much for him.)

And where his writing was concerned he managed to be less accessible than most pop-oriented writers (the way Forsyth and Clancy were, with their transparent prose and straightforward storytelling), without winning critical plaudits (the way le Carrè did), and not wholly without reason. The convoluted plots, and the manner in which he sometimes withheld information, could make his stories hard to follow without their being particularly accomplished artistically. Indeed, Ludlum's prose has been much derided as overdone and melodramatic.

1. The market for American spy fiction was opening up. In the '60s Americans became really big consumers of spy fiction for the first time. They consumed mainly imports--Fleming, le Carrè--but it did suggest opportunity for local product, and Ludlum came out in '71, virtually the first of that crop of Americans to make names for themselves here (James Grady, Charles McCarry, Trevanian).

2. At the start of the decade Frederick Forsyth established the fashion for "super-thrillers"--novels twice as long as had been usual for spy stories and the like--with The Day of the Jackal. As it happened, Ludlum was inclined to big books from the first, and the books went on getting bigger as the decade proceeded. (Looking at those '70s-era novels it seems that most of the competition was behind the curve that way.)

3. Where content was concerned Ludlum was relatively in tune with the times, politically and aesthetically. Suspicion of the security state and of corporate power, international terrorism, and World War II nostalgia were all big in the '70s. Indeed, he did not hesitate to be blatantly topical, writing prominent recent and present day figures into his plots. (In 1977's The Chancellor Manuscript he spun a tale about the then-recent death of J. Edgar Hoover, while the plot of 1980's The Bourne Identity centered on the hunt for Carlos the Jackal.) He also handled the political material in a manner palatable to the broader public. (He was, after all, a centrist in a way that would be less fashionable in the '80s, but hardly as dangerous to one's career as, for example, was the case for Trevanian.)

Jet-setters were popular subject matter, too, and he capitalized on this as well. (Ludlum's heroes were commonly international professional types, whose adventures abroad tended toward the sort of touristy European spots Americans would like to go on vacation.) And the '70s all saw the thriller increasingly shift from mystery-suspense to paramilitary-style shoot 'em up action-adventure, another wave Ludlum rode. (Just compare the suburban head games of The Osterman Weekend to the ample gunplay of The Bourne Identity.)

In short, his early arrival on the scene with distinctly American, rather large, and from the standpoint of theme and style, topical and fashionable, novels, were plenty to give him a shot at the big time, so to speak, and it proved more than enough.

Thoughts on the Upcoming Film Version of Without Remorse

I remember I was a relative newcomer to the techno-thriller genre when Tom Clancy's Without Remorse (1993) hit the stores.

Still, by that point I had already developed certain preferences. It seemed to me that Clancy was more interesting when he was writing wide-view portraits of geopolitical maneuverings involving submarines and space systems (like in, say, The Cardinal of the Kremlin) than when he was writing character-centered stuff where the "heavy artillery" is something carried in the hand (as in Patriot Games). And while this was long before I had grown cynical about prequels, especially the kind devoted to the "making of" some action hero (action heroes are wish-fulfillment figures, after all, and where their past is concerned less tends to be more), I still was not all that interested in a story of Clark's youth. Or intrigued by the associated decision to drop the genre's accustomed present-day emphasis to go back in time a couple of decades to the "last months of the Vietnam War" setting that seemed to me less appealing imaginatively than a contemporary scenario, the more so as, in the early '90s, the Vietnam theme seemed overfamiliar, even stale, as far as this sort of tale went.

I gave the book a chance, though. And it was more or less what I expected. It confirmed me in my impression that Clancy's always bloat-inclined novels bloated more severely and obviously when he was writing these more personal, smaller-scale stories than when he was writing the global scenarios, which at least had more threads to cut back and forth among, and material for interesting info-dumps, and bigger action. It confirmed me in my sense, too, that Clancy was prone to be generic when working outside the rather narrow specialty for which he is best known (as writers usually are). Still, it had its interesting bits, among them the way it worked as a sort of homage to the paramilitary fiction genre already in swift decline circa 1993, not least because of its combination of that genre's principal themes, even obsessions in one tale--the '70s fixation on special forces-trained vigilantes going to war with the Mafia on the streets of America, and the '80s fashion for stories about special forces raid into Southeast Asia to rescue Americans taken prisoner by Communist forces during the Vietnam War.

For the most part, though, I have not given the book much thought since, and was surprised to learn that Hollywood plans to have a Without Remorse movie out in September 2020.

This was, in part, because I thought Hollywood had cooled on silver screen adaptations of the Ryanverse. After all, there had already been two reboots which imagined a young Jack getting his start, first with Ben Affleck back in the 2002 The Sum of All Fears, and then Chris Pine in the Kenneth Branagh-helmed Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, the latter backed by only a modest budget and given a modest dump-month-of-January release that led to a modest gross of the kind that does not have the Suits rushing to finance a sequel--which unsurprisingly meant that the other Clancy-based film projects were stuck in development hell the last time I checked, Without Remorse specifically included. Meanwhile the franchise seemed to be doing all right on the small screen with the Amazon Prime series now in its second season, so that I figured this would be the industry's emphasis for the time being.

But of course, that was an underestimation of its insane vehemence in exploiting any and every IP, especially anything action-y to do with the '80s, abiding by their preferred version of the old adage "If the millionth time you don't succeed, reboot, reboot, reboot again." We've just had Rambo 5 and Terminator 6, even though nobody asked for them, and Top Gun 2 is coming our way next summer, despite the extremely questionable timing for such a movie, as Scott Mendelson pointed out just a short time ago, if the film simply serves up more of the original in "a shameless nostalgia-driven fan bait enterprise," it will "be both thin gruel and morally irresponsible considering the times we live in," but if it seriously examines what "overseas engagement" has meant in the decades since that original's release, it would probably offend "the very fans who have wanted this flick for 30 years."

Given the prevailing logic, more Ryanverse seems like a comparatively easy decision next to that.

For the time being not much seems to be available on the project. The word is that there has been filming in Berlin, but that may not signify much about the plot. (After all, these days film shooting locations are determined by the chase after government subsidy, and the German government has long been remarked for generosity here.)

Still, if the prior rebooting of Ryan is anything to go by, and there seems good reason to think it is, the makers of the film will have to set aside that homage-to-paramilitary-action-adventure aspect because it simply does not lend itself well to updating. (What real equivalents have there been to '70s Mafia-fighting and '80s MIA-hunting? None, because the genre sputtered out afterward.) Which makes me wonder what they will replace it with. Perhaps they have a concept. But then again perhaps not. After all, not having an interesting angle on the material never stopped a Hollywood producer from flogging an old IP one more time.

All the same, I expect I will be getting in another two cents on the matter over the course of the year.

Review: Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story, by Ernest Mandel

Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 152.

Ernest Mandel, whom I was surprised to see writing about crime fiction (as a scholar he is known in the main for his work in economic theory and political economy), promises in the subtitle of his book a specifically social history of the genre to which he here turns his attention.

He delivers on that promise, detailing what now seems the familiar "main line" of the crime story while explaining its development in terms of changes in social life. As Mandel tells it, the genre's beginning in early modern times with the criminal as a hero, oft a romanticized one, such as we see in picaresque fiction like Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, expressed a sense of revolt on the part of the bourgeoisie (among other groups) against the feudal order of the day.

That changed as the feudal order declined and fell. The result was that by the nineteenth century there was less tendency to romanticize the criminal. There was, however, still a measure of sympathy, sufficient that the crime story was presented not as a mere tale of individual villainy, but as a social criticism--as in William Godwin's Caleb Williams, or Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. As Mandel explains it, in an era where people were locked up for debt bourgeois anti-statism didn't just mean an unwillingness to pay their share of the tax burden, but a genuine suspicion of state police power and military establishments as well; while the comfortable and even the conservative had not yet become Panglossian about capitalism. (Balzac was a conservative "legitimist"--a monarchist who favored the rule of the traditional Bourbon house--but reading Pere Goriot one can see a robust, critical social understanding that made him Karl Marx's favorite novelist, and which two centuries later Thomas Piketty found it worthwhile to cite in his formidable analysis, Capital for the Twenty-First Century.)

Of course, the nineteenth century was the time when the bourgeoisie, as they grew richer, more powerful, more established, with society increasingly remade in their image and organized around their needs, made a Great Leap Rightward, from revolutionary to conservative and even reactionary. And crime fiction reflected that shift, the social criticism falling away, and the genre's sympathies instead increasingly with those who upheld an order they took ever more for granted as right and good--the detective who uncovers and punishes crime--while the criminal was demonized. (One might say that Inspector Javert and Jean Valjean switched places, certainly by the time that Sherlock Holmes appeared on the scene.)

The crime story was touched, too, by the rise of organization, bigness, professionalism--on both sides of the law. The police became bureaucratized, their vast, scientific machinery, with its files and forensics, routinely grinding out the truth in "procedural" fashion. At the same time crime became larger-scale and more sophisticated, an illicit equivalent of the Big Business so evident and powerful elsewhere, which itself increasingly partook of the illicit: "Legitimate business," seeing laissez-faire replaced by an increasingly high-tax, high-regulation state, increasingly broke the law as a matter of course; as in an age of international conflict and domestic unrest, of formally and permanently institutionalized spy and counterspy, the state's activities in turn became criminal in character; with each associating with, aligning itself with, corrupting, the others, all as organized crime reinvested its profits in legal endeavors and illegally bought politicians, and as business and government in their turn looked to crime for special services.

Lone detectives, lone heroes, were increasingly out of their depth in all this. The cops no longer needed the services of a Holmes, his genius superfluous, while anyway he could hardly be pictured taking on an Al Capone. Indeed, as the corruption of business and government proceeded, such an enemy became too big even for such as Red Harvest's Continental Op--big enough for the local corruption of Personville ("Poisonville"), Montana (after setting the gangsters on each other, he advised Old Wilson to send in the National Guard), but not what seemed an increasingly rotten global system (the Governor's cleanness in the matter a thing that could no longer be assumed). In the fiction of the '70s, by which point this sense of a corrupt system had come to be something close to conventional wisdom, the prevailing note was a cynicism that inclined writers to a different sort of hero, and a different sort of ending--heroes who were disaffected, but able to do only so much about the situation that left them so. Trevanian's Shibumi (1979) seems a notable example. Its protagonist Nicolai Hel may be the most skilled assassin on Earth, but even he cannot rid the world of the oil syndicate's conspiracy. The best he can do is exact a personal revenge on his enemies, and restore his little bit of peace in the world--a purely individual revolt that in Mandel's view is all rather "petty-bourgeois" and necessarily negative in contrast with genuine political, social change. Thus the genre seems to have hit a dead end.

Having published his analysis in 1984 Mandel's tracing of the history ends there. And one can only wonder what he would have made of the development of this still quite salable genre three decades since. But as it stands it is a formidable and, I think, extremely useful, analysis. Shorter and less comprehensive in its survey of the material than, for instance, Julian Symons' Bloody Murder, it is far more rigorous in tracing the genre's evolution, to say nothing of presenting a picture of the social factors shaping it. It is interesting, too, for having a somewhat more international perspective than works like Symons (the Belgian Mandel casually referencing a good deal of French, German and other continental work English-language readers are unlikely to have even heard of, but which adds to the strength of his historical analysis). The result seems to me indispensable for anyone looking for the big picture of the history of this important genre.

PARAMILITARY ACTION-ADVENTURE FICTION: A HISTORY

We are all familiar with the idea of the action hero as a latterday avenger with a gun—Dirty Harry, Chuck Norris' screen heroes, Rambo. Yet, how did the idea of such heroes emerge in the first place? Why did it explode as it did in the 1970s and, still more, the 1980s, defining the Hollywood action films of that decade? And why did it fall out of fashion?

PARAMILITARY ACTION-ADVENTURE FICTION: A HISTORY examines all these questions, and much more, as it traces the rise of paramilitary action heroes in the tensions and fears underlying the civil image of the nineteenth century, through the stresses of the world wars and the Cold War, to the emergence by the 1960s of commandos fighting undeclared wars on the streets of urban America—and the evolution of that image in the half century since.

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

Get your copy today!

Are We Seeing Trolls Where They Aren't?

It is widely recognized that, from the standpoint of how people treat each other, the Internet is a good deal worse than real life, which is none too great these days. (Those adhering to the smug, stupid "Nothing ever changes" sort of irony might dismiss that, but it seems impossible that a global civilization facing multiple, systemic crises all ar ibce is not somehow a little nastier because of it.)

Because our manner of interfacing with others through the Internet seems to encourage reacting rather than thinking.

Because we are dealing with strangers all the time--and often strangers whose faces we never see, and voices we never hear, who are just a handle above a comment.

Because the Internet allows people who are deep down pure vileness a round-the-clock opportunity to abuse others with complete impunity, and they make the most of it.

Because after being brutalized by the same vermin, other people who are not pure vileness get nastier themselves.

A signal example is people's attitude toward disagreement online.

In ordinary, offline, real life inflicting totally unsolicited disagreement on a complete stranger in highly public fashion would ordinarily be considered a severe breach of etiquette, if not civility.

This does not necessarily mean that this is completely out of the question, no matter what the circumstances. But it does mean that at an absolute minimum we should display some circumspection about doing it. We should be sure that we are right and they are wrong, at the very least. (Alas, too many of those who go around "correcting" others fail to realize that to correct someone else they actually have to be correct themselves--and that they fail that test MISERABLY.) We should be sure that the wrong on their part merits the breach on our part. (Even if they are clearly wrong and we are clearly correct this is not always the case.) And we should display some caution in our approach, making the correction no more unpleasant than it has to be. (Rather than, for instance, jumping down other people's throats, giving full vent to their nastiness at any and every opportunity like the complete and utter assholes they are.)

How much of that do you see?

A lot less than there should be.

There is No Such Thing as Respectful Disagreement

Can there be such a thing as respectful disagreement?

Well, let's consider what that word "respect" means. We can boil it down to two possible definitions.

1. Deference.

2. Esteem.

Obviously you can't disagree with someone and defer to them at the same time. To defer is to accept their judgment. So according to that definition of respect, no, one cannot disagree respectfully.

Still, that leaves the possibility of respectful disagreement when we are using ths second definition, "esteem." Still, let us consider what disagreement entails.

To disagree is to say to someone "You are wrong."

And to do that is invariably to call into question their intelligence, their judgment, their training, their experience, their knowledge and skill; to criticize them and make them feel "less than"--not least, less than the speaker, who is claiming to know more than they. The questioning, the criticism, the claim to knowing better may be very slight. And it may occur when we are engaged in dialogue with someone we ordinarily esteem (and to whom we might even usually defer). But esteem it is not. You may disagree with someone you respect, but the disagreement itself is not respectful.

That brings us to another point, which I think Carl Sagan summed up nicely in his last book, the justly classic The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

Arguments from authority carry little weight--authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

No one in a scientific argument--for that matter, no one engaged in serious discussion premised on logical appraisal of the real world--has any right to demand deference. Facts and logic come ahead of anything and everything else.

But there is still the matter of basic human consideration. Of not going out of our way to be nasty.

I suspect that were there more consideration, people would be less insistent in their demands for respect, reasonable and unreasonable.

On Action Hero Prequels

The pop culture of our time appears to be dominated by relentless, shameless exploitation of a small set of rather tired IPs--mainly because this is what is most conducive to the short-term profit of those in the media industry, regardless of what audiences may actually want. And part of that is the way that we have become deluged with prequels, not least prequels about action heroes.

"But don't you wonder how those heroes came to be what they are?" those selling the prequels will ask leadingly, as if we could not deny it.

I, for one, do deny it.

I don't read an action-adventure novel, or watch an action movie, and wonder "How did the hero become who they are?"

In fact, I'd rather not know.

Perhaps this is just a matter of my talking as a member of a video game-playing generation, but it seems to me that where ordinarily fleshing a character out fully makes them more "real" to us, enabling us to care about them, action heroes (save for those in the more pointedly artistic efforts where the story really is more than just an excuse for a bunch of action scenes and we actually do care about it), tend to be vehicles for the fantasies of the writer and reader--a sort of print, textual "avatar," lending itself to a different sort of audience identification than the dramatic one we learn about in Literature 101, with the fact the more significant because we are not there to get entangled in their personal drama, but rather to thrill vicariously to the external action. (To extend the metaphor, someone else may be pushing the buttons on the controller, but we are there with them nonetheless as they jump off the cliff to escape pursuers or drive the car or do any of that other stuff.)

The more we know about the figure, the more character-like and the less avatar-like they become, which may well increase the dramatic interest, but in the process make the action less engaging. Whatever one may say of the superiority of character drama to set pieces, an action film becomes something else when we care more about the characters than the action. (That Ian Fleming never bothered much about Bond's past until he had to write an obituary for him in the character's eleventh adventure seems to me testament to this reality.)

Prequels raise these issues in especially pointed form, because they are all about knowing more about the character, while bringing still more troubles in their train. Certainly looking at a superheroic figure, and looking back at them when they were not superheroic, when they were ordinary or even awkward naifs whom we see just starting to learn to do what they do, is the opposite of the entertainment their adventures give us--and tends to diminish them in this way as well.

And that is even where the writer succeeds in pulling off the whole conventional characterization thing. A great many writers who happen to be great action-adventure storytellers do not do this kind of thing particularly well--and arguably cannot, and not simply because even accomplished writers are apt to do some things well and other things not so well. This is also because, in writing, as in so much else of life, "less is more." The writer of fiction, after all, is not documenting reality, just giving us the illusion that they are. The writer cannot really "know" everything there is to know about their subject, however much hack teachers of writing may insist otherwise--and carefully retailing the absolute best of what they know, while maintaining strategic silences over what they do not know, where prequels have them doing the opposite, gabbing along and usually giving themselves away again and again, at the expense of those illusions.

Because of the law of diminishing returns, again operative in writing just as it is operative elsewhere. The odds are that the writer has told us the most interesting part of the story already--and anything else they tell us will be less interesting.

Because superheroics (and I would count even, for example, Mack Bolan's being a "perfect" sniper as a sort of superhero ability) mix uneasily, if at all, with the real world in which really three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood characters are rooted. (Indeed, while it may not be fashionable to favor DC over Marvel these days, it does seem to me that there is something to be said for Superman's living in Metropolis, and not New York.)

And because, when they are doing this years, or even decades, after the character first came along, not only will the material be that much less fresh, but consistency the less likely. Even if it was the same original writer doing the job, they are probably not the same person, thinking the same things, that they did when starting out. And when we have, oh, another writer who never even met them just doing a job decades or generations later, the resemblance is apt to prove very superficial indeed.

In fact, I remember how for a patch I was enthusiastically reading my way through Robert Howard and had finished his whole output of Conan the Barbarian tales. I found that L. Sprague de Camp wrote some Conan stories and looked them up. As soon as I found out that he went back to Conan's teenage years I lost absolutely all interest. For all I know de Camp may have written excellent continuations. But the angle he pursued is just that unappealing to me.

Thus has it been for me ever since.