The Unevenness of Technological Development, and the Vision of RethinkX

Amid the steady analytical output from the RethinkX think tank the principal document tying the implications of their studies of energy, transport, cellular agriculture and other technologies remains their Rethinking Humanity report of September 2020, which argued that order-of-magnitude price drops in the cost and natural resource inputs required to produce the goods of five "foundational sectors" in economic life--food, energy, transport, materials and information--will, with virtually mathematical certainty, mean a crisis in human existence as radical as the transition from prehistoric to civilized times, which the authors predict happening in the next two decades. As the cliché had it the crisis spelled not only the possibility of bitter conflict and great danger, but also opportunity, with the optimistic outcome the authors of the study envisioned the end of civilization’s unequal and brutal "Age of Extraction" with its hierarchies and exploitation, and the beginning of an "Age of Freedom."

There is, of course, no need to rehash the argument here. Apart from the fact that anyone who would like can download a copy of the sophisticated but highly readable document free of charge from the authors’ own web site I have already got in my two cents on the matter. I only raise all this as background to my mention here of the particular dimension of the issue I find myself thinking about now, namely the profoundly different rates of change across those five sectors. After all, there is no question but that the pace of technological change, the drop in costs, in information, has far, far outpaced any such trend in the other areas. Indeed, even as the price of producing, copying, storing, processing and transmitting information has fallen at mind-boggling rates over recent decades the prices of all the rest have remained stubbornly high, as we were painfully reminded during the food-and-fuel crisis of ‘06-’08, and are reminded yet again during what may be the even sharper inflationary shock we are all now living through.

The fact can seem a cruel irony. After all, while there is no questioning the great practical amenities the digital age has provided, many of which benefit those who have been particularly disadvantaged in various ways (cellular telephony, for example, may well have sped the development of modern communications infrastructures in developing nations), it would seem that from the standpoint of the world’s ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed billions, and even the budgets of all but the most affluent "First Worlders," there is far more desperate need of cheap food, materials, energy and transport than of those amenities. It may also seem that the revolutionizing of information so far ahead of the others, with society so little changed, has meant that even the potentials of the revolutionizing of merely the informational sector are far from being as fully realized as they might have been. Consider, for example, how once upon a time it was hoped that Internet access might be a public good, but instead one must pay vast sums to service providers, and get in return heavily surveilled, algorithm-fiddled, ad-choked Internet where we can’t avoid running into paywall after paywall after paywall. Consider how, as the pandemic recently showed, telecommuting had made so little advance after a generation of everyday Internet usage.

Still, as anyone familiar with the history knows the progress of technology has never been even (thus in the nineteenth century did we have newfangled steam locomotives delivering goods to train stations to be picked up by drivers of the same sort of horse-drawn carts people had been using for millennia), and alas, never revolved around the needs of those who have least, and most need their lot ameliorated. More significantly, the developments in the other four sectors they anticipate would seem to depend on the gains in information technology discussed here, from the vision of cheaper transport summed up in Transportation-as-a-Service (reliant on advances in artificial intelligence), to the prospect of cheaper production and fabrication of materials (which utilizes computerized 3-D printing). The result is that the successes in information technology may well prove to have been a prerequisite for what follows, reminding me of something claimed by a famed futurologist whose ideas I have been considering for decades--Ray Kurzweil. As he acknowledged the changes in technology were overwhelmingly coming in the area of computers, but computers will change everything. Should that prove true RethinkX may turn out to have done an even better job than Kurzweil of explaining how such a thing came to pass.

Review: The Aquitaine Progression, by Robert Ludlum

In its premise The Aquitaine Progression is consistent with the familiar Ludlum formula. (An American East Coast bourgeois in Europe finds himself caught up in an international conspiracy, and on the run from both the bad guys and the authorities as he tries to stop the villains.) Likewise many of the factors plugged into the formula likewise familiar. (The collision of war veteran and antiwar protestor, mad American generals who were spendthrift with their soldiers’ lives in an Asian land war and mad French generals who had opposed De Gaulle, the ghosts of World War Two and Algeria and Vietnam, the use of terrorist outrages to pave the way for an international fascist takeover. Even old Carlos gets a few mentions, as do the Sonnenkinder, the latter proving the more significant.) Indeed, some of the borrowings seem particularly specific. (Joel Converse’s history so much recalls that of Quinn O’Brien from The Chancellor Manuscript that it can seem as if Ludlum decided to take what was a supporting character in that earlier book and build a novel around him--the way that Ludlum arguably did with Stefan Varak from the same book when creating The Parsifal Mosaic’s Michael Havelock.)

However, this time around Ludlum is clearly attempting to do something different with these elements. Perhaps in part because those elements are so familiar Ludlum discards the element of mystery of who the bad guys are and what they want. In contrast with, for example, the mere hints Ludlum offered at the outset of The Holcroft Covenant, the identity of the villains, and their intentions, are entirely clear from the start in this book, to the protagonist as well as to the reader. (In fact, rather more mystery surrounds the identity of those sponsoring the hero's fight against them.) The result is that the hero’s task is, even more than before, not unmasking the villains but simply stopping them. And perhaps because the hero is the familiar Ludlum type in important ways, Ludlum modifies the figure significantly--while investing more heavily than usual in character development. Unlike the protagonists of his prior three novels--Brandon Scofield, Jason Bourne, Michael Havelock--Joel Converse is no professional super-agent. (Where Quinn took his law degree to the FBI Converse is just the lawyer operating in the world of international business he appears to be.) However, unlike many of Ludlum's earlier, non-secret agent heroes he has a deep familiarity with violence. Converse was a naval aviator in the Vietnam War who, after being shot down, was captured and, escaping from a prisoner of war camp, learned to elude pursuit, learned to stalk enemies and kill in cold blood, right in the jungle--and then back in civilian life tried (never entirely successfully) to put all that behind him. The nightmare experience, it might be added, also made his enmity toward the villains in this book and their intentions deeply personal. (It was their chief who was ultimately responsible for what proved to be Converse’s fateful mission, just part of a pattern of psychopathic madness on the part of General "Mad" Marcus Delevane in what seems to me, of all the ‘80s-era Ludlum novels, the one that comes closest to the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam outrage that fueled ‘70s-era thrillers like Trevayne and The Chancellor Manuscript.) Also unlike many of the later Ludlum heroes Converse is neither single nor a widower, but a divorcee whose prior marriage (of course, unhelped by all the wartime baggage) is much more than a minor biographical detail.

Joel’s experience of the war, and the broken marriage, are important personal history for the purposes of the protagonist's development, and critical, too, to the unfolding of the plot--as well as what makes Ludlum’s taking one more "go" at this type of tale of more than the usual interest. Apart from providing a more than usually realized, and motivated, hero, it matters when Ludlum this time around (initially, at least) eschews the action movie heroics. Joel's principal weapon against the enemy is not a gun but the law--the search for entirely legal means with which to disrupt the machinations of the villains (why else turn to an accomplished international lawyer rather than one of the spy/commando types?)--while when violence does come into the picture Ludlum handles it as the clumsy and ugly acts of confused, panicked, often damaged men, with consequences not easily left behind, legally or psychologically, the more in as when Joel reaches out to people he knows for help in his battle and is dismissed with psychobabble about having "mentally regressed" to the traumas of his past. To Ludlum's credit it all rings true, and gives what could easily have been standard thriller stuff more than the usual frisson and force and bite.

Seeing it all I actually wondered if we were not going to see a return to the intensity and edge of the Ludlum of the ‘70s. Alas, after the midpoint of the book all this becomes less evident, the story becoming more conventional, a straightforward, thriller mechanics-oriented man-on-the-run tale without the hope of big revelations up ahead, while Joel comes to act the part of the hyper-efficient secret agent, capably dispatching enemy after enemy. The individual bits are rendered competently enough, while Joel's flight derives some compensating interest from its parallels with his wartime experience. Still, it is in the end standard chase stuff, with the middle third or so of the book having the hero getting cornered and having to trick and fight his way out and then running until he gets into another corner more times than would have served the book best, with scene changes that might have provided relief absent for very long stretches, even as the overall story comes to sprawl excessively. There come to be simply too many minor characters introduced late in the narrative to pose some minor threat or play some minor role in advancing the struggle against the villains before getting knocked off. Then when the hero, who is "back in from the cold" well before the story’s end, turns from flight to counteroffensive against his enemies, too much hinges on those supporting characters’ ability to conjure armies of helpers with the required esoteric skills at everything from computing to the application of plastique, the last reflecting just how far that return to the conventional goes. Putting it bluntly, after all that time Joel spent assembling his legal brief that was his actual mission, which he pursued down to the end, his finally stopping the villains still comes down to a thrown-together commando raid that seems generic and anticlimactic after all that came before. Meanwhile the villains’ schemes, while not completely prevented from causing havoc, come off as whimper rather than bang, the more in as the rot the book described as leading up to it was (limited) rot within the Establishment rather than the rot of the Establishment the way it was in those fiercer ‘70s-era novels.

The end result is that the book does not quite realize the promise of its first half, while being an object lesson in the problem of trying to stretch the lean old spy thrillers into quarter-of-a-million-word monsters like these. Still, at its best I found The Aquitaine Progression more engaging than any of his other post-’70s books, and certainly a far stronger performance than Ludlum’s third and final crack at the "Fourth Reich Rising" scenario a decade later in 1995’s The Apocalypse Watch.

Review: The Parsifal Mosaic, by Robert Ludlum

Coming right after The Bourne Identity The Parsifal Mosaic seems to significantly follow that book’s pattern, opening with a scene of violence marking a break with the protagonist’s prior life, after which the protagonist pursues the mystery of their personal past as an American security state which, convinced that an important former agent has become a menace, pursues them with shoot-to-kill the order of the day, all of which is of course tied up with something bigger. Also as with Bourne the scenario is of the more nationalistic than post-Watergate variety--a particularly extreme version of the "Commies have infiltrated the government!" hysteria scenarios of the Cold War. (The Sonnenkinder of The Holcroft Covenant were too obviously a thriller device, even in the eyes of those fearful of fascism’s resurgence, but in Cold War America urban legendish nonsense about armies of Soviet sleeper agents was the kind of thing in which a good many people were ready to believe--and as Russiagate shows, still are.) This time around, however, the treachery reaches into much higher places, and the stakes are literally the highest such thrillers offer--heading off a threat of all-out nuclear war between the two superpowers.

Intricate political scenarios, especially at the international level, have generally not been a strength of Ludlum’s. (Even when he did a better job, as with Trevayne and The Chancellor Manuscript, the setting was domestic.) That we see such a scenario working out up close makes it harder to overlook the implausibilities--the more in as Ludlum treats it all at such length, The Parsifal Mosaic the first of his six hundred pagers (or at least, close to it, my copy of the original hardback ending on exactly page 599).

Compounding the problem is that the book as a whole is awkwardly structured.

The story starts with a defining moment in the life of "Consular Operations" agent Michael Havelock. Having learned that his lover, Jenna Karas, is working with the KGB he is forced to personally gun her down on a beach in Spain. Sickened by her betrayal of him, and by his betrayal of her (he did love her, after all, and he cold-bloodedly murdered her), he calls it quits and retires to an academic existence. But of course it is the case that like Michael Corleone in the third Godfather film, just when he thinks he is out when they pull him back in. The entreaties of various recruiters fail to bring him back to the Great Game, but something else does the trick in short order--Havelock, incredibly, spotting Karas in a train station in Rome. She’s alive! he realizes. And she knows he knows that she knows that he knows that . . . And off he goes after her as she desperately tries to evade the man who shot at her on that beach, Havelock determined to find out how he has been deceived, and why, while American intelligence determines to stop him.

During this phase of the book--which lasts more than half of its six hundred pages--there is an abundance of incident, but very little forward progress of the story. Rather the mechanics of pursuit, evasion, surveillance, combat are, a few hints of more apart (a Soviet mole in the upper reaches of government, the odd behavior of an American Secretary of State whose stature is basically the legend of Henry Kissinger times twenty, the fear that somehow this will lead to nuclear war), pretty much all the narrative has to offer. It is only after the midpoint of the book that Havelock succeeds in tracking Jenna down, and that they start investigating the conspiracy that brought them to this state. The biggest revelations come early, after which the remainder of the book consists mainly of Havelock trying to find a mole whose identity is unambiguously revealed to the reader well before the end (even if there are a few other surprises in store), and never packs quite the dramatic punch that it should because responsibility for Havelock's betrayal ultimately ends up being so diffused.

The result is that The Parsifal Mosaic feels like two, or two-and-a-half, smaller thrillers strung together, each of which runs longer than it ought as a result of the number of links in the chains being longer than would have been optimal, and a fair amount of overwriting, with many a lengthy scene or subplot amounting to less than the space allotted it ought to have warranted. (Havelock’s attempt to intercept Jenna at the Franco-Italian border was overlengthy, the description overly complicated. Meeting with a man in New York who has important information for Havelock about Karas’ whereabouts Havelock realizes that he is a Nazi criminal whose atrocities he personally witnessed as young Michal Havlicek back in Czechoslovakia during the war, now living here under a false identity--but in spite of adding yet another dramatic shock the fact is actually quite unimportant to the story. And so on.)

As might be hoped, for all the overwriting and overreaching Ludlum’s skill with the mechanics is by no means absent, and the book does have its moments. The scenes depicting Havelock’s discovery that he has been lied to by his own people in Rome and his readiness to turn on his bosses have real bite, while the revelation of the secret at the heart of the crisis was memorable. So was the dramatic irony of a significant meeting between an unsuspecting Havelock and the man the reader learned was the mole almost a hundred pages earlier as the story approaches its climax. While I found Secretary of State Anthony Matthias an exceedingly unconvincing creation (the product of not much more than Ludlum’s rather characteristically centrist tendency to portray the power elite as the superhuman "brilliant" and "best" of the meritocracy he is so sure exists), the surrogate father/son, mentor/protégé relationship between him and Havelock was not without its interest. And if the book lacked the edge that contributed to Ludlum’s best (works like Trevayne, The Gemini Contenders, The Chancellor Manuscript--and among the books of the ‘80s, The Aquitaine Progression) in favor of McCarthyish hysteria about Soviet sleeper agents and suchlike he at least displays more nuance than many another writer handling such themes did. (Ludlum, at least, acknowledges that "Commies" became that in reaction to the horrors of history as others had experienced it--"A God who threatens eternal fires if one rises up against a living hell is no God for nine-tenths of mankind" says a Soviet defector who never abandoned his loyalty to the ideology, even after he broke with his government--while Ludlum more generally allows the moderates in the Soviet government ready to work with the hero in averting the danger their ideological affinity rather than requiring them to break with it in order to be recognized as men of conscience.) All the same, there were a good many times when the book tried my patience, when it was easy to put it down and say "I’ll just come back to this later," and in the end it seemed less than the sum of its parts, again leaving me thinking that Ludlum’s earlier, leaner narratives were more satisfying than those that followed.

Review: The Holcroft Covenant, by Robert Ludlum

Reading my way through other long sequences of books by popular authors I have often noted that they often produce a number of fairly varied works in the earlier part of their career from which they distill a formula with which they tend to stick afterward. Thus did Ian Fleming produce very different works in Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever, and From Russia, with Love--and then extract from them the formula that he used in subsequent books like Dr. No and Goldfinger and Thunderball, which in their turn provided much of the material for the formula seen in the classic Bond movies of the '60s (the international travel, the megalomaniac villains with their high-tech, geopolitically consequential plots, etc.).

So does it seem to me to go with Ludlum, with books like The Scarlatti Inheritance and The Rhinemann Exchange and The Gemini Contenders providing a body of work Ludlum distilled into the formula that he came to be known by, with the first true example 1978's The Holcroft Covenant--with its international range, and especially its use of West European settings; its globally consequential conspiracy in which international terrorism is an instrument of the villains, but not in the way most of the public thinks; its action movie heroics and its romantic subplot; ticking off all the boxes.

Being the first The Holcroft Covenant is, as one might expect, fresher in feel than many of the books that would follow it, but Ludlum's increasing tendency to overwrite, and clutter the narrative with the melodramatic tics for which he is notorious (italics, exclamation points, "Madness!" and "Maniacs!" and so forth), is also quite evident, more so than before. I might add that the mystery is diminished by the biggest revelation arriving at the beginning, namely that Noel Holcroft is actually the son of the Third Reich's banker, who in his contrition over his involvement in its crimes embezzled vast sums for the sake of helping the victims after the war, and left the responsibility for completing that task to him, while the would-be architects of a Fourth Reich about which we learn at the opening very soon prove to have other plans for the plan. Of course, Holcroft is slower to learn all of this than the reader (indeed, in the early part of the story, annoyingly slow to realize that the fact that people are constantly being gunned down and poisoned around him has anything at all to do with him and his present situation). All the same, even he figures it out eventually, as a result of which fact Ludlum's tale this time around has less to do with unraveling the mystery of "What is it all about?" than with the mechanics of stopping the villains, with Holcroft’s effort to get the funds released and keep them from the Neo-Nazi plotters running nearly five hundred pages. Still, Ludlum manages to hold the reader's attention through it, while the book's twist ending is by itself plenty to make it memorable. ("How about a Bond novel where the bad guys win?" I once wondered. So it goes here.) Indeed, while I am not particularly enthusiastic about sequels it seems to me that this book more than any other by Ludlum merited one--but then that would have taken Ludlum out of his usual territory into science fiction-land, and unsurprisingly Holcroft, unlike four of Ludlum's other novels to date, never got such a follow-up.

The Enlargement of the German Defense Budget: What Does it Mean?

In recent years I have generally refrained from attempting to offer comment on immediate events, especially in a news-y sort of way--my researches instead tending to be somewhat more long-term in their orientation (as with my recent stuff on British policy). This is, in part, because I like to take my time and give myself a chance to be thorough when attempting a piece of analysis, but also the generally lousy job the media does in supplying information that would provide a basis for an analysis that would be better than superficial in the extreme and, quite likely, outdated just ten minutes later (as the "analysis" the media itself tends to give us shows). What I have seen of its coverage of the current war in Ukraine, absolutely true to the pattern, has been exceedingly vague and extremely short on explanations or insight, even given the unavoidable uncertainties and rapid unfolding of the situation. (Consider how much we are actually being told in the headline-grabbing stories about the fight for Chernobyl, or the Battle of Kiev--not much of substance.)

However, one development did catch my eye as worth mentioning here, precisely because it seems that something can and should be said about it, namely the German government's announcement of increases in its defense spending. According to what we are now hearing it means to raise its defense spending to over 2 percent of its GDP by 2024--though we are not told much in those pieces of why 2 percent should represent a significant benchmark, or what it would mean in terms of Germany's particular economic position. The other figure we are seeing is 100 billion euros--with a glance beyond the headlines (for example, at the actual Febraury 27, 2022 speech by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz from which the press has derived these little factoids) indicating that the 100 billion euros would be a "one-off sum" out of the 2022 budget to provide a "special fund for the Bundeswehr" that would pay "for necessary investments and armament projects."

What do the numbers really mean?

According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Germany's defense expenditure averaged 1.2 percent a year in 2011-2020, if generally rising in recent years (so that it was just a hair under 1.4 percent a year in 2020, and in 2021, it seems, a hair over 1.5 percent). The result is that in the decade of the '10s it averaged an expenditure of 40 percent less than the 2 percent mark, and in 2021 spent a quarter or so less.

What does that mean in currency terms? Well, using the World Bank's GDP figures (in this case, the constant 2015 dollar series), adjusted for inflation using its own deflator, that would work out to an extra $290 billion in 2020 dollars devoted to the German armed forces over the decade of the '10s had it spent at that level. And today, given a German GDP of about $3.8 trillion, it would translate to a German defense budget in the $80 billion+ a year range (as against the under $60 billion to which the rising trend of German defense spending brings its efforts today). This might well make Germany the world's number three defense spender after only the U.S. and China.

Still, impressive as it is that would be considerably less than the other figure we are seeing, the 100 billion euro figure, which at today's rate of exchange equals $113 billion, about twice Germany's already elevated recent expenditure--more like 3 percent of the country's GDP than 2 percent—which, especially if, as implied in Scholz's speech, it comes on top of the defense appropriation for the year (producing a budget well to the north of $160 billion), would change Germany's place in "the league tables" from "maybe third biggest" defense spender in the world to "definitely third biggest by a long way."

The result is that Germany is publicly announcing what may well be a tripling of its defense spending this year to levels (4+ percent of GDP) unseen since the Cold War era, as well as a longer-term commitment to elevated spending at some uncertain level, with the 2 percent+ figure cited as the target from 2004 forward indicating a much raised floor--with this particular way of communicating the budget increase, one might add, carrying a particular meaning for the country as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. By common agreement 2 percent on defense is their minimum obligation, a minimum of which they have tended to fall short. In the past Germany was no exception, but here it declares that this will no longer be the case in what its government presumably hopes will be taken by allies, and non-allies, as an indicator of, besides its commitment to a more forceful posture, the NATO alliance (as one might expect, a major theme of Scholz's speech).

These are big numbers, intended as, among much else, a big political signal, which I suspect will not be the last, with other NATO members (the French, the already high-spending British) plausibly announcing their own increases--testimony to the extraordinary events of the present, and extraordinary in their own right.

I have said it before but it bears repeating. The 1990s, and their illusions, are now far, far behind us as history, the end of which was another of those '90s-era illusions, marches on.

The Half-Life of the Interest of Popular Fiction

I recall seeing a data set which showed that of some 60 million copies of works of fiction sold in the first half of 2018, some 3.6 million were classics--6 percent or so in a period that I have no reason to regard as unrepresentative. That is scarcely more than the reported sales of just those books with James Patterson's name on their covers (not long ago credited with accounting for about 4 percent of the total), which means that Patterson alone was coming close to matching the sales of every famous old author you have ever heard of put together, from Jane Austen to Emile Zola.

Comparisons aside, this works out to not much more than a copy a year for every forty to fifty Americans. Moreover, consider the reasons for the sales. How many of them are for students in school assigned the books? How many for restocking libraries? And how many to make a coffee table or a book shelf look good? In short, few of even this small percentage of sales are a matter of individuals voluntarily, seriously choosing to read the works in question. Meanwhile, even those who do pick up such books without some educator demanding it do so because they feel they "have" to do so as self-respecting persons of education and culture, many in the most "middlebrow" fashion. The result is that those who pick up such books very often because they genuinely enjoy even a part of "the canon" is very small indeed.

Why raise this all too familiar point again? The reason is that it seems a useful point of comparison with the sales of those books that have become old without becoming classics. Sales of these are harder to glean from the available data. But it seems that even the popular books of yesteryear acquire the disadvantages of age without the advantages of being classics, commercially as in other ways. One is not assigned to read them in school, and librarians feel less obliged to keep copies in stock. Meanwhile individuals looking to show off are less likely to think they can impress anyone by having them on their coffee table or their book shelf, and few will feel they "have" to read them for any reason. All that automatically means fewer sales, and even beyond sales, less chance of their being noticed by those who might actually find them interesting. And when people do happen upon them, in contrast with those approaching Important Literature, with which all but the most callow are prepared to show some patience because even if it is not all that entertaining when they first pick it up it (perhaps, because it has come down to us from another time, with different standards) it may yet prove worth their while, no such case is made for popular fiction. Facing it their demand to be entertained immediately, significantly and fluently is uncompromising, and it must be admitted that given the narrowness of most personal tastes, very little is likely to make the cut.

All of this affects all fiction. (Certainly those who insist that anything they pick up conform to a 2020s' standard of "wokeness" will find very, very little older fiction bearable.) However, I suspect that it is a particular problem for the thriller genre, and especially thrillers of the "high," big picture type. Political thrillers derive much of their interest from the topicality of their premise--and that tends to decline very quickly. (I recently read a Customer Review of a Robert Ludlum novel from the 1980s in which the reviewer complained about the book's being set in the 1980s, as if the reader were somehow cheated by that! Such a complaint is of course absurd--but reflective of how easily such work loses its interest.)

Meanwhile, with visual media leading and print fiction following, the expectation has increasingly been of brisker, more action-packed thrillers; and in line with the demand for action and briskness (and not only that) the books easier to read. (Back in the '60s, the '70s, even the '80s John le Carrè managed to be among the top bestsellers of his day. Now even a Robert Ludlum likely would not make the cut. Besides the problem posed by how today's superabundance of spy-fi sets the standard with regard to pacing and thrills, he expects his readers to know words like "pavane" and "bromide," which is totally a deal-breaker in an age in which Dan Brown sets the standard with regard to prose.)

Indeed, looking back the fact that I read so much of those thrillers strikes me as having been a matter of picking up the '80s-era hits of Clancy and Ludlum and Cussler back when those books’ authors were, if already passing their peak of popularity, still fairly new, and those writers still fairly prominent on the bestseller lists; in my having a stronger-than-average in their themes; and in the early ‘90s being a period before visual media so totally supplanted those sorts of thrillers in their niche; all of which went to form a rather different interest. But formed that interest was, and so here I am writing about those authors and their books all these decades later, long after, to all evidences, general interest in them has decayed to nearly nothing.

Is Bad Sci-Fi Holding Technological Progress Back?

Ordinarily we hear about how science fiction has encouraged technological progress--how science fiction writers set forth ideas long before scientists and engineers took them up as objects of practical work and maybe even played a part in their doing so, how science fiction stories inspired scientists to pursue scientific careers in the first place, and so forth. (Indeed, Hugo Gernsback, who more than any other single individual may be credited with having made science fiction a genre in the publishing-pop cultural sense, pointed to exactly such justifications for the view of science fiction as more than entertainment.)

However, it seems to me that there is another side to the story, all too evident in the kinds of stories science fiction tends to tell--not least, horror stories which treat scientific and technological progress as a transgessive, cosmic order-upsetting act, inevitably, brutally, deservedly punished, epitomized by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Indeed, writing about the way fiction has tended to depict robots in particular Isaac Asimov coined the term "Frankenstein complex" to refer to what he saw as a psychological hang-up over the prospect of "robot rebellion," "robot apocalypse" and the like, and consciously opposing himself to that trend, pointedly wrote other kinds of stories depicting robots as part of a positive future. In that object he succeeded admirably--but that success has not always been acknowledged, or his intentions respected. Indeed, when Hollywood inevitably adapted the famed collection of those stories, I, Robot, what the filmmakers wound up giving the audience was, in contrast with a tidy, rational, progressive Asimov future a spectacle of robots on the rampage as beleaguered humans blasted away at them with machine guns. Of course anyone who actually followed the storyline amid all the stuff blowing up and all the robots coming at the viewer like horror movie monsters saw an attempt at something more nuanced--the traumatized anti-robot bigot Del Spooner recognizing the humanity in the machines--but all the same, it was a flashy, high-concept summer blockbuster sold on the basis of action-adventure rather than ideas, in line with a genre revolving around grandiose spectacle based on large-scale physical destruction and reptile-brained appeals to fear and prejudice.

That said, one may wonder just how much difference it all makes. A recent Pew Research Center study affirmed the impression that far more Americans are exposed to science content via entertainment than actual news. It also reported that on the whole they think it does their understanding and attitudes toward science no harm. They even report that those polled regard the media as depicting science quite positively. Still, I can't help suspecting a gap between what they may think in the abstract, and the way they actually react when looking at a particular scientific or technological prospect, with the conversations I have had with actual people in actual life consistently persuading me that Hollywood blockbuster-variety Luddism has had rather a deeper effect on their thinking and feeling in regard to these matters than they admit, or even realize. It is hard to see how it could have acted as anything but a drag on progress in an age that has had far too little of it.

Review: Trevayne, by Robert Ludlum

In reading my way through Robert Ludlum's canon I was particularly late in coming to Trevayne. This was in part because it is one of his older and less commonly available books, to which I had generally been less attentive, but also because, published pseudonymously (under the name "Jonathan Ryder"), it seemed to be somehow off of the main track of his work. Actually reading it, however, my impression proved incorrect. Certainly the Ludlum formula had yet to take shape. Here the titular protagonist is a happily married family man for whom any extracurricular involvements are out, he is brought into the mess at the book's center by rather undramatic mutual agreement (albeit in far from full awareness of the facts), and the book is set entirely in the U.S. rather than a globetrotting adventure. Moreover, the book's thrills come from suspense-building plotting--from the hero's detective work and menacing (if, in the immediate term, non-violent) personal confrontations with the powerful and corrupt individuals he finds in his way as he goes about it--rather than action-adventure, the incidents of actual violence coming late, often off-stage, and just about never describable as "action," with the sole exception not involving Trevayne in any physical way. (Indeed, the cover art of my 1988 paperback edition of the book seems so inconsistent with the story as to merit some remark here. The image beneath the title is of a man in a suit facing toward us sprawling out his limbs as he is shot in the back by a soldier with a rifle in front of the dome of the United States Capitol--putting me much more in mind of the famous scene from The Day the Earth Stood Still than anything actually inside the novel, as if someone had accidentally switched the cover of the book with that of a novelization of that film. These things happen, you know--as the lawsuits testify.)

Still, Trevayne seems to me a milestone in Ludlum's career. This is the first of Ludlum's books in which we get a sense of the hero as a lone individual (save perhaps for a few helpers) up against an enemy that is truly, overwhelmingly vast. Indeed, the type of conspiracy Ludlum presented here--the reach of the vast defense contractor collectively known as "Gennessee Industries," which vast as it is proves to itself only be the tip of an iceberg--was shortly to reappear as Inver Brass in The Chancellor Manuscript and The Icarus Agenda. It also significantly anticipated the Pentagon corruption in The Gemini Contenders and the ascent of corporate power envisioned in The Matarese Circle.

As one might guess from such parallels one may rank it with The Chancellor Manuscript as one of his more critical works--while being remarkable even among these in ways besides its originality. One reason is that while Ludlum's fortè has rarely been verisimilitude in his presentation of the details of machinations in high places, in Trevayne he was rather more than usually sophisticated and convincing in his portrait of the conspiracy's tentacles, and the detective work that led Andrew Trevayne to it. The picture Trevayne uncovers certainly has its less plausible touches (not least the extent to which he had it all coming back to one company) but all the same, the way subsidiaries stand in back of other subsidiaries, obscuring complex ownership arrangements and the influence that goes with them; the links between "legitimate" business and organized crime, and the extension of such corruption into organized labor and high politics; the revolving door between the public and private sectors, and the ways in which the private sector exercises public power; the way elder statesmen hailed as a democracy's best and brightest speak the platitudes of government by, of and for the people in public to the applause of all the respectable and sneer at the idea in private; the way the "practical," "pragmatic" office-holders make their peace with such things, and in the hope of doing some good, and maybe even actually doing so, become implicated in the corruption themselves, facilitating it; are all too in line with unseemly realities, and rather credible in the portrayal, with this even going for the minutiae of accounting and engineering and law Ludlum references. It matters, too, that rather than such things being briefly mentioned background details, as in Ludlum's later, more action-oriented Ludlum novels, in this book--which devotes so much less attention to the mechanics of manhunts and being on the run and shootouts--Trevayne and his team's working their way through the bowels of the empire that is Gennessee is the heart of the matter.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, while the novel seemed to me less visceral than some of his other works (The Matlock Paper, The Chancellor Manuscript, struck me as angrier) the book may actually be the more radical intellectually, not least in the sense it gives of such villainy works, how powerful they are, how high up and how deep the corruption goes, while this time the hero himself gets compromised and coopted. One consequence is that the ultimate issue of the contest is far from certain at the book's end, Trevayne's hope that he could ultimately get the better of them only drawing his more deeply into their trap. In fact it seems significant that the last words of the book are their expression of their self-assurance--and one is allowed to wonder if Trevayne's children, a bit more radical politically than he (which radicalism he and his wife were prone to brush off as childish and callow), were not right after all about the limits of what one man could do playing by the rules of the System when he took up the President's offer to chair what had seemed an essentially pedestrian subcommittee investigation of defense contracting and found himself up against far, far more than he bargained for. Also unsurprisingly, even after the success of Doug Liman's adaptation of The Bourne Identity had Hollywood snapping up the film rights to various Ludlum novels I do not remember a single word about its taking an interest in this book. However, I think Ludlum would have left a more interesting and more substantial body of work had he given us more books like this one, and fewer shoot 'em ups and reiterations of and sequels to the same.

Review: The Gemini Contenders, by Robert Ludlum

Robert Ludlum has more than once incorporated an element of family epic into his books, particularly his World War II-themed work, as with The Scarlatti Inheritance, and later did so again in The Holcroft Covenant. Yet in 1976's The Gemini Contenders he wrote out an actual multi-generational saga about the Fontini-Cristi family, the first half of which tracks the Fontini-Cristi's first two generations all the way through that conflict.

As it happens, that is not Ludlum's only divergence from the usual. This time, bound up with the world war, is another secret war, being waged in the pursuit of a religio-historical mystery that we are told could be of world-historic significance--the contents of the vault delivered by the Greek Orthodox Order of Xenope to the Fontini-Cristis for safekeeping.

Today I suppose that Dan Brown would be the obvious point of comparison--as this novel similarly presents a conflict of religious orders intriguing and killing over the possession of a secret they believe would shake the world if ever it got out. But of course Ludlum did it a generation earlier here, quite differently--and, I thought, considerably better. The family epic approach--which intertwines an intrigue running through three generations with two of the century's major wars and comes down to a struggle between twin brothers with utterly opposed political ideals and ambitions in highly charged conflict--gives his narrative a far greater dramatic interest than Brown's book had. Additionally the revelation at the end of the novel regarding "What it was all about" seemed to rather more interesting, and handled in a rather more sophisticated fashion. (This being the '70s Ludlum could afford to be less smarmily conciliatory toward "faith" after raising the clash of "faith and reason," and more lucid about just what such a secret's getting out would mean in actual life. As one character says, the secret of the vault both changes everything, and changes nothing.)

I even preferred Ludlum on the level of prose. This being an early Ludlum novel the narration is comparatively efficient and the manifestation of his well-known tics (the italics, exclamation points, etc.) was less frequent, while even when his writing was not all one might have hoped for Ludlum at least sounded like an adult writing for other adults--whereas the idea of a "Young Adult" version of The Da Vinci Code seemed superfluous to many (myself included).

Review: The Matlock Paper, by Robert Ludlum

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

In Robert Ludlum's third novel, 1973's The Matlock Paper, the FBI, looking to identify the leader of a powerful drug trafficking network in the northeastern U.S., determining that Connecticut's "Carlyle University" is central to the activity, enlists one of that university's professors, James Matlock, to help in their investigation--and promptly plunged into a conflict between parties of which he knows nothing, and for which he is woefully unprepared and unequipped.

As is generally the case with the early Ludlum The Matlock Paper is more a suspense story than an action story, if one with the danger and violence and piling up of bodies beginning rather early on and coming more consistently afterward than in his two preceding works. On that level the book is efficient and effective. Moreover, while I generally find that even the better thrillers are more satisfying in their mechanics than in their explanations of what in the end the intrigue was all about--and Ludlum was no exception in that regard--this time around he gets a good many points for at least having a surprise to spring on us. As it turns out the big network was organized and run by the administrators of New England's universities in an attempt to save their institutions financially in an era in which government and private donors were not willing to give them the resources they needed to go on. And in the end Matlock is caught between Little Ivy university presidents-turned-Pablo Escobars and the Black nationalist movement's military wing's answer to the Navy SEALs operating out of a frat house named "Patrice Lumumba Hall" (in a Little Ivy-type liberal arts college in the early 1970s!), and forced to make a temporary alliance of convenience with whichever seems the more survivable to him.

The scenario may seem ridiculous, but then as Ludlum's characters so often scream the "Madness!" of "Maniacs!" is pretty much what makes a Ludlum plot a Ludlum plot, and all things considered it seems to me that there is more than just over-the-top plotting in this image of Matlock caught in between president Adrian Sealfont and Black radical Julian Dunois--the political symbolism unmissable, a centrist nightmare of a country caught in between a traditional Establishment sinking to the very depths of corruption on the one hand and "extremist" radicals on the other. Distinctly '70s, the book seems about as unlikely as any of Ludlum's works for a film adaptation, but I'm sure that someone is trying to make something of it anyway, with such an effort perhaps looking more plausible amid the "Madness!" and "Maniacs!" of 2022--which, I must admit, have me wondering what Ludlum, were he alive and still working, would be producing after looking at today's American political scene.

Announcing . . . The Secret History of Science Fiction

Back in 2015 I published a history of science fiction--Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry--tracing what we commonly discuss as the "main line" of American (and to a lesser extent, Anglo-American) genre science fiction from the moment of its emergence as a genre in the 1920s largely centering on the activities of Hugo Gernsback, through the Golden Age and the New Wave, down into the twenty-first century, trying to explain what has too often been recounted as hazy fan lore in a more rigorous, lucid way.

All these years later I don't feel as if I have much to add to what I presented in that book in regard to the main line of the genre's development. But I have found myself taking an interest in many an aspect of genre history in back of that main line or underneath it--like what really kept science fiction stories selling in the old days, and how fandom has been having the same fights over and over and over again since the 1950s, and how in our time, however much some pretend otherwise, science fiction has become much more a thing that people watch or play than something they read.

The resulting pieces--many of them previously published but many also appearing here for the first time--are gathered together in The Secret History of Science Fiction, available in both paperback and e-book editions.

Why Do Writers Write About the Writing Life So Badly?

I have long felt that writers in every medium are overly prone to writing about writers, and that this is mainly a reflection of self-involvement and laziness and incuriosity and ignorance on the part of those who are in a position to make a living as writers about what other people do and how they live. I will add, too, that this attitude does not seem to me to be unrelated to how unbelievably closed the worlds of publishing, film and television production, etc. have become to people who are not personally connected with the business--the children and grandchildren of people in that field.

That being the case it does not seem too unsurprising that they seem to have not the slightest clue about what, for example, architects or lawyers or college professors do. But it is more surprising that they write so badly about their own profession--endlessly trafficking in the same stale clichés, not least the notion that writers spend most of their time sitting in some large, handsome bookstore signing copies of their latest for a line of starstruck fools winding out the shop door and down the block as they receive their gushing praises with a condescending smile on their self-satisfied faces.

Still, if surprising it is not inexplicable. Even if as writers they have some actual experience of what it is to be a writer, they don't write from that experience any more than they do when they write about those other jobs. Rather than life they write from what they have seen in movies and TV. (Pompous middlebrow critics will call this postmodernism. I call it creative bankruptcy.) Thus even if their canned biographies tell us that they went to college, and maybe even finished a whole semester (you'd be surprised how many college dropouts, nay, high school dropouts, are on the Hollywood A-list), their frame of reference seems to consist wholly of a half-remembered long-ago viewing of the bits of Professor Kingsfield being arrogant and abusive in The Paper Chase. And when they write about writers they write from bad movies and TV shows about writers, in which writers are sitting in those bookstores signing copies of their latest for starstruck fools--to the bewilderment and annoyance of the millions whose experiences of a writing career have been far more Kilgore Trout (who in spite of his vast output, "did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way") than J.K. Rowling.

Revisiting Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity

When I first started reading Robert Ludlum my first (even though it was long before the movie) happened to be The Bourne Identity, which I remember early on encountering in a three-book volume also containing Ludlum's two immediately preceding novels, The Holcroft Covenant and The Matarese Circle. By and large these three books, and the novels that followed them through the '80s and after, defined Ludlum for me, while I paid rather less attention to the earlier books. This was partly because they were less likely to be on a library shelf, less likely to be on sale in a bookshop. But it was also because those older books seemed less interesting. When I happened across The Osterman Weekend, for example, the domestic, suburban setting, and the comparatively low key character of the thriller, did not hold my attention as well as the action-adventure approach of the novels about Jason Bourne et. al., and did not pursue them further. Indeed, it was to be years, and a considerable broadening of my taste in thriller fiction, before I went back and gave those books another shot, and actually found some pleasant surprises in this works.

These days, I think, I prefer them to the later books. Part of this is that I have less interest than before in shoot 'em up action, and more in the other ways in which thrillers can engage and entertain--while I might add, prizing the economy of the earlier, more compact books. There is, too, their freshness. After all, The Bourne Identity was Ludlum's twelfth novel in a decade's time--all within what was more or less the same genre. A good many writers get very repetitive long before that--and Ludlum did not wholly escape that tendency. Just a few novels in he was already reusing a number of his ideas--with scandalous revelations about American financing of the Nazis in their early days from The Scarlatti Inheritance; the pursuit of documents containing explosive secrets and small, secret factions scheming to engage in systematic blackmail of elites to further a small, secret faction's policy agenda from The Gemini Contenders; and the appearance of Black nationalist paramilitaries who blackmail the hero into cooperating in advance of the final showdown from The Matlock Paper; all appearing again in The Chancellor Manuscript.

The reuse of earlier ideas was still more pronounced in The Bourne Identity. The enlistment of an academic by the authorities in their operations, exploiting his desire for revenge against the enemy for the harm they did to his family, after which those same authorities treat him as a dangerous rogue (The Matlock Paper)--with the character's revenge seeing him fight in a major war against Asian Communists on whom he blames the destruction of his wife with reckless aggressiveness (as was the case with General MacAndrew in The Chancellor Manuscript). The element of international terrorism (The Holcroft Covenant, The Matarese Circle). The use of a real-life figure as a villain for added interest (The Chancellor Manuscript), though with that figure reimagined as a pulp fictional super-assassin (Ludlum's Carlos seeming to me to owe more to the Tinamou from The Holcroft Covenant than to what was actually known about Carlos). The particular reliance on settings in New York, France, Switzerland (The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Gemini Contenders, The Holcroft Covenant). The hero, unlike many a Ludlum protagonist, having a background as an operative that prepares him for the rigors of action-adventure (like Brandon Scofield in The Matarese Circle). And the great twist, that the agent does not know who he is, another, larger use of an earlier Ludlum theme, namely the plumbing of obscure, fragmentary memory to solve a puzzle (The Gemini Contenders, The Chancellor Manuscript)--with this variation on it less original than many appreciate. (Ludlum had not previously used it, but it was by no means new to the spy genre. James Bond himself lost his memory in Ian Fleming's original You Only Live Twice, hardly an obscure work.)

Of course, authors often do amass a body of work in which they utilized a great many ideas, and then bring the better ones together in their master work, the familiar parts producing something greater than their sum. But I am not sure that he uses them to better effect. The plotting of The Bourne Identity strikes me as less inventive or technically impressive or dramatically compelling than, for example, the plots of The Gemini Contenders or The Chancellor Manuscript--while certainly offering nothing to compare with the twist ending of The Holcroft Covenant. Indeed, the story is fairly simple compared to those predecessors, and this seems to me to be tied in with another difference, namely that Ludlum's edge was becoming dulled in an important way all too reflective of the mood of the country. The '70s-era novels like The Matlock Paper, The Gemini Contenders, The Chancellor Manuscript, and even The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Holcroft Covenant and The Matarese Circle, are more politically charged, angrier works than the Ludlum novels which followed. Thus the Jackal was not an element or tool of some oblique conspiracy on the part of the powerful like we saw with the terrorists in The Holcroft Covenant or The Matarese Circle, but simply the villain as conventionally recognized. And the object of the mystery, the stakes of the conflict, are narrower and more personal as Jason Bourne endeavors to elude his pursuers and figure out what--who--he had been before the loss of his memory. Even the authorities come off as rather less ruthless than they were in prior works. (Bourne came to them damaged and angry, rather than being cold-bloodedly manipulated the way James Matlock or Peter Chancellor was. Then they honestly believed the agent had gone rogue--turned killer. It is not so surprising that they do what they do next--and telling that this time around that agent is brought back in from the cold.)

Considering the contrast I also find myself considering that division within the spy genre that Julian Symons talked about, with critical, subversive thrillers looking at the dark deeds done by the powerful in the name of national security on one side ("People in high places betray the rest of us who put them there," Chancellor remarked in the book by his name, summing up the spirit of that angriest of Ludlum's novels)--and on the other, orthodox, nationalistic, status quo-affirming spy thrillers. The Bourne Identity, unlike many of Ludlum's preceding books, falls pretty squarely into the second category, no doubts existing in the end about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. And considering that The Bourne Identity would seem to be Ludlum's biggest hit (the #1 novel of 1980, to which two of his next five books were direct sequels, and by far the most read Ludlum novel for a very long time), I can't help wondering if the relatively conventional, uncontroversial nature of the book on this level has not factored into its popularity, and Hollywood's willingness to make a franchise out of it while the planned adaptations of books like The Chancellor Manuscript and The Matarese Circle languish in development hell.

On Depicting Stupidity

I have often had occasion to remark how crude and foolish--and simple-mindedly prejudiced--popular culture can be when it attempts to convey the intelligence of a supposedly intelligent character to the reader or viewer. When it bothers to go beyond merely beating us over the head with superlatives ("X is brilliant!" we are told ad nauseam) it relies on such lame devices as associating the character with prestigious institutions in an exercise in shameless name-dropping (MIT! Oxford! And always, Harvard), similarly associating them with intellectually prestigious activities (physics is probably the favorite there), or presenting outrageously caricatured displays of intellection (like Ted Mosby reciting Dante's Divine Comedy from memory in the original Tuscan--never mind when an "architect" who spends all his free time hanging out with the likes of Barney and the gang would have acquired, and kept up, such knowledge).

What we get is not a depiction of intelligence, but, in line with the fact that this stuff is generally created by simpletons for other simpletons (don't let the nonsense about how "brilliant" TV, fiction and the rest supposedly are today fool you for a second), a simpleton's image of intelligence, which tends to reflect not intelligence so much as a package of socially elitist prejudices. (To cite but some of the most obvious: the Cult of the Good School long since run utterly amok; the hierarchical esteem for those who work "with their brains" over those who work "with their hands"; those who work with numbers over those who work with words; those recognized as disproportionately contributing to large profits for the rich and powerful over those who make any other sort of contribution, in any degree; and a leisure-class valuation of hobbies, favoring activities in which practical accessibility to most for reasons of time and money, and practical utility, are both very low--like the unpurposeful mastery of disused languages or dialects.)

Yet, in spite of the extreme stupidity Park Avenue, Hollywood and the rest show when depicting (supposed) intelligence, popular culture is not much more adroit or convincing at conveying (supposed) stupidity. After all, what do they serve up on those occasions when this is required (as in, for example, the movie Idiocracy)? What we see is a lack of formal education and social crudity and sometimes simple nonconformity (as if the only reason why a person might not conform to the conventional expectation in everything they do is their simply lacking the brain power to know and respect what society esteems as against what it disesteems). And in that it appears that just as depictions of intelligence are about exalting elites more than anything else, depictions of stupidity are a mockery of those who did not "get the breaks."

I might add that, especially in comedy, it is striking how often, when it serves the writers' convenience, supposedly "stupid" characters prove remarkably witty. One example of this that has long stuck in mind is in The Simpsons episode "You Only Move Twice" (a rather better than average parody of the '60s-era Bond films which on the whole does credit to the "classic" phase of a show that has long struck me as a good deal "smarter" than most of what we see on TV).1 Here at his new school Bart's teacher sees that he is not quite up to the local standard, which is higher than the one at the school he had previously attended, and takes him aside to ask if he knows multiplication or long divison. Bart replies that he knows of them.

Anyone who can offer such a verbally subtle response so quickly to his interlocutor's question makes it very clear that they are by no means stupid--and this goes all the more for a mere ten year old in a difficult situation such as that one. And there we have yet another irony--that a genuinely clever piece of dialogue which should have been presented as testament to its speaker's cleverness is instead used to demonstrate an academic failure supposed to reconfirm our impression of his stupidity, and get its speaker packed off to a remedial class.

Of Thomas Magnum and Harmon Rabb

A long time ago I ran into a post in a Google group raising the question of whether JAG's Harmon Rabb was "Thomas Magnum in Disguise," mainly because I had wondered something similar about these two protagonists of long-running CBS series' created and "showrun" by Donald Bellisario, and went looking to see if anyone else thought the same thing.

The post only began to touch on the similarities, but they can quickly come to appear overwhelming. As that post's author noted, both Harm and Magnum are sons and grandsons of naval officers who lost their fathers in a major war (Korea in Magnum's case, Vietnam in Harm's) and whose mothers afterward remarried, giving them an affluent civilian stepfather. However, both those figures followed in the footsteps of the biological fathers whose names they bear and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, then went on to join an elite, storied branch of the service (SEALs in Magnum's case, F-14 fighter pilots in Harm's), from which they have since departed for a second career which has them working as investigators, which work--naturally melodramatic and overglamorized, while affording a certain amount of variety (from seedy domestic stuff to paramilitary adventure), and giving them many a chance to play the action hero--is the basis of most of the TV series' episodes. Both are haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, and especially captivity by the enemy (something Magnum personally experienced, but which in Harm's case was his father's fate), which is to involve them in private attempts to rescue "Missing in Action" personnel they believe to still be held in that country. Both discover long lost half-brothers in the course of their story, whose histories are significantly connected with the same war. Both have a "cool guy" bachelor image of which a flashy sports car is an important part, both are seen wearing Hawaiian shirts and smoking cigars. And both are played by physically similar actors (both Tom Selleck and David James Elliott 6"4, both dark-haired and light-eyed, with Elliott, like Magnum, wearing a moustache when portraying Harm's father).

All of this, of course, is hardly shocking, especially when one remembers that a long creative career usually gets to be that because of a good deal of recycling and reusing one's older ideas. By this time Bellisario had been in Hollywood for about two decades--and his last show, Quantum Leap, had not exactly topped Magnum, which was far and away his biggest hit (and remained so until NCIS exploded in the twenty-first century). It was quite natural that, consciously or unconsciously, he would have served up something so resembling Magnum--though at least two differences seem worth citing. One is the fact that it was not just Magnum being recycled, as becomes obvious when we look at that most critical non-Magnum element, namely its hero's being a flyer. Aviators were, after all, the heroes in that show for which he had written earlier in his career, Black Sheep Squadron, while Bellisario had earlier made Magnum's buddies a pair of ex-Vietnam War Marine helicopter crew (TC and Rick Wright, played by Black Sheep Squadron alum Larry Manetti), and even produced an aviation-themed show of his own in Airwolf--where, it might be added, the hero was always preoccupied with Vietnam MIAs, with the theme linked to a brother who was an army helicopter pilot (in what fairly obviously parallels JAG, where the half-brother whose life story is inextricably linked to the MIA issue is a Russian army helicopter pilot).

The other is the difference in tone. As Wikipedia informs us, while Magnum was supposed to originally be a cool "Bond type" the character was reimagined as a more "'everyman'" character with a good many flaws. He could be "immature," "overconfident," "whiny," "manipulative" in petty ways, and time and again looked the fool before winning in the end, with all this generally handled in a spirit of fun. The article also informs us that this was Selleck's idea, not Bellisario's--and JAG does not repeat this, as if the show's management stuck to the initial "cool 'Bond type'" idea.

While one can read all sorts of personal motivations into that (like a determination to be proved right), I suspect that this at least partly had to do with the difference in premise, and period. It was one thing to present in such a manner a character who was an ex-Navy SEAL living as a "glorified beach bum," especially when glorified beach bumminess was part of the fantasy being presented. (Magnum may not be rich, but residing on the Robin Masters estate in Hawaii, driving a Ferrari, he lives like a king.) It was another to treat serving military officers so lightly, especially in the post-Gulf War '90s, when the attitude toward "reverent disengagement" from military affairs prevailed in American life.

Still, it seems to me that the decision cost the show in hindsight. Magnum's imperfections were important to making the character a relatable, likeable, entertaining "character," with Magnum's more humorous traits contributing greatly to its popularity--while if the '90s saw Americans treating their armed forces more reverentially that attitude was not what they were looking for from their pop culture in that era of snark. And so in the end, rather than becoming a pop cultural phenomenon like Magnum, JAG ended up just something "old people watched." Of course, they did watch it in sufficient numbers to keep it on the air for ten seasons, in the course of which it became the launch pad for an NCIS franchise that, now in its fourth incarnation, has stayed on the air for almost two decades--all of which makes it very far from being a failure.