"The Name is Skywalker, Luke Skywalker."

George Lucas' Star Wars (1977) is one of that handful of mid-'70s films celebrated, and attacked, as giving us the contemporary blockbuster. However, when asked about the matter in one long-ago interview, he remarked that "It was more James Bond than 'Star Wars' that brought in the 'adrenaline' movies."1

The Bond films have, of course, been a prominent part of the pop cultural landscape of the last half century. And Lucas is far from the only one to remark them as having been important in the development of the action movie, something of a consensus existing about their importance.

Still, it is rare that anyone explains the reason for that. To put it simply, it was the makers of the half dozen '60s-era Bond films that, looking to extend and amplify the style of prior thriller-makers like Alfred Hitchcock, sought to give the audience a shock, a thrill, a "bump" every couple of minutes, and accomplish this in part with a new cinematic structure (pre-credits scenes, a swifter pace leading from one shock to the next), while also working in large, complex set pieces of a kind previously unseen in contemporary-set thrillers. They also revolutionized the photography and editing of such set pieces with the use of close shots, "jump cuts," undercranking and exaggerated sound effects to intensify the action.2

Of course, in considering the Bond films' influence it has to be kept in mind that they were not really a Hollywood product. They were financed by United Artists, and involved the participation of some Hollywood talent, like veteran screenwriter Richard Maibaum, but were generally made by British-based (if expatriate) producers at Britain's Pinewood studios, with British directors and (mostly) British stars.

That limited their impact, even when, with Goldfinger, the movies started to get a little respect from tinseltown, which shamelessly imitated them, while usually missing what was most important about them. The multitude of '60s-era Bond imitations were mostly cheap-looking parodies (I was shocked when I learned the Derek Flint movies cost almost as much as Goldfinger--proof, I suppose, that basic math skills were scarce at the big studios then as now). The big action movies that followed--Bullitt (1968), The French Connection (1971), Dirty Harry (1971)--tended to be crime dramas which tossed a bit of action into a more conventionally structured, slower-paced narrative.

It was only Star Wars that really brought all the elements of James Bondian action (structure, pace, set pieces, editing technique) to big-budget Hollywood filmmaking.

Indeed, one can see much of the famous "formula" of the Bond films in the movie's structure.

Just like the Bond films, Star Wars hits the viewer hard with a flamboyantly stylized opening image (the title, the crawl) set to a now-classic musical score (John Williams' theme), which quickly gives way to an action scene that reveals something of the plans of a bizarre-looking and apparently psychotic villain—Darth Vader pursuing Princess Leia's smaller consular ship in his colossal Star Destroyer.

As it turns out, the enemy is operating out of a vast, high-tech, apparently impregnable fortress from which they are controlling a super-weapon that can destroy a world. In the course of their mission our hero is issued a gadget by an older, wiser figure (Obi-Wan, light saber), heads out to the destination to which he has been summoned (Alderaan), gets captured (tractor beam, Death Star), faces the villain (Darth), escapes from the fortress with knowledge of what must be done--with a new female ally, incidentally (Leia)--returns with allies in a military assault (X-Wings) that narrowly destroys the facility and the super-weapon as the clock ticks down to the destruction of a world (Yavin).

And of course, by this point the Bond films had already made repeated use of space themes that look like even closer precedents for Lucas' film. The most pointed were of course You Only Live Twice--which also opened with a larger spaceship capturing a smaller one--and Diamonds Are Forever--which put a super-laser in the heavens that the hero took out mere seconds before it delivered a catastrophic blow at the planet below at the film's climax.

Just about all that was missing was the sexuality. But then Princess Leia did wear that gold bikini in Return of the Jedi--for many a Star Wars fan, the equivalent of Ursula Andress' arrival on-screen way back when. So much so that watching that episode of Friends all those years ago, many must have totally expected just what fantasy Ross was going to confess to Rachel even before he said a word.3

1. Lucas' comment can be found in David A. Kaplan, "The Force Is Still With Us" Newsweek, 20 Jan. 1997, 56.
2. You can read a lengthier discussion of this history in The Forgotten James Bond, which discusses the movies' place in the development of the action film.
3. The title of the episode is actually "The One With the Princess Leia Fantasy," but I didn't know that at the time.

Win, Lose or Die and the British Techno-Thriller

The military techno-thriller is more British in its origins than anything else. Even overlooking the tradition of the "invasion story" from the nineteenth century that got underway with George Chesney's "The Battle of Dorking" (1871); the equally British genre of the spy novel to which the invasion story gave birth through its merger with the detective story; and the increasingly frequent high-tech intrigue in examples of that genre like Ian Fleming's Moonraker (1955) and Thunderball (1961), or Martin Woodhouse's Tree Frog (1965); the fact remains that it was Britons Frederick Forsyth, Craig Thomas and John Hackett who laid down the genre's essentials in the 1970s.

Forsyth was a pioneer in applying the "epic" mode to the story of political intrigue, making the story in The Day of the Jackal (1970) not really a duel of wits between the titular assassin and Detective Claude Lebel, but rather a larger struggle between the OAS and the French security state related through a vast cast of (mostly minor) viewpoint characters, then scaled the approach up to the superpower level in The Devil's Alternative (1978). Meanwhile, Craig Thomas's Firefox (1977) centered a thriller on a next-generation fighter jet, and the battles that ensued after the theft. And John Hackett depicted large-scale, high-tech fighting between the superpowers in The Third World War (1978).

However, the genre flourished in the hands of Americans like Tom Clancy, because, as the details of the plots of the books listed above suggest, Britain--the obvious and natural focus for a British thriller writer--could, given its no longer being a first-rank, global military power, less and less be at the center of a high-tech military scenario.1 One result was that rather than techno-thrillers, the "SAS Novel" became a prominent British genre, the guys who save the day not airmen or sailors operating massive, expensive weapons systems of the kind where Britain did not compete with the U.S. and Soviet Union (or even France, still making its own fighters and ballistic missiles), but its special warfare troops, less constrained by the limits of national resources from being more than a match for their counterparts in the services of more affluent powers. Indeed, when Forsyth wrote a novel of Desert Storm in techno-thriller fashion, The Fist of God (1994), the protagonist is British Special Air Service soldier Mike Martin.

John Gardner's James Bond novels reflected the broader trend. His books tended toward smaller-scale, and often more domestically situated plots, as seen in books like No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987) and Scorpius (1988), in which Bond spends much more of his time inside Britain itself, and the villains are plotting mayhem on a scale which pales next to SPECTRE in its heyday. However, at the height of the fashion back in the late 1980s, John Gardner wrote a British techno-thriller in his next Bond novel, Win, Lose or Die (1989). This time the bad guys (for all their similarities to Scorpius' people) target an Anglo-American-Soviet conference hosted aboard a British aircraft carrier amid a massive, international military exercise--while the man assigned to stop them is none other than Bond himself, as a Royal Navy officer ostensibly back in uniform, and stationed aboard the carrier.

Of course, there are ways in which the diffuse, relatively grounded storytelling of the typical techno-thriller, and the tightly focused but over-the-top character of the Bond novels, do not gel well. However, added to this is the strain involved in placing Britain's armed forces at the center of such a story in so conspicuous a fashion, evoking Britain circa 1942, rather than 1989.

As in the Second World War, Britain is again a member of a "Big Three" grouping with the Americans and Soviets (when, among others, China, Japan, West Germany, France, would have been equally or even more plausible as the third member of such a group).2 This status is underlined by the presence of the leaders of all three countries in person--George Bush, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev--which implicitly equates them with Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. (The equation of Bush with Roosevelt, Thatcher with Churchill, Gorbachev with Stalin can seem so unlikely as to appear another bit of trademark Gardner self-parody, but if that is the intent Gardner is more than usually subtle about it.)

That Britain hosts the meeting aboard its largest and most powerful warship underlines the emphasis on Britain's past standing by evoking its history as the world's dominant naval power. Of course, the book's centering on the Invincible and its Harriers also evokes more recent memories--of the last high-tech sea war Britain in as a principle, the Falklands conflict (1982). (Indeed, the Invincible was the most prominent fighting ship from that conflict still in British service.3) However, one can see in the evocation of the Falklands an indirect evocation of World War Two, given the ways in which the British government attempted to cast the conflict—to sell the fight against the "Argies" as somehow analogous to the earlier struggle with "the Hun."

All of this makes the high-tech novel at the same time relatively and awkwardly backward-looking--even by the standard of the later Bond books. However, the idiosyncracies lend the book an interest as novelty, even where it does not quite work.

1. In Firefox, British spymaster Kenneth Aubrey cooks up the scheme to steal the MiG-31 "Firefox" fighter, and uses British intelligence's assets in Moscow to pull it off—but needs an American pilot to fly the plane, because only an American pilot would have had the requisite experience (as a Vietnam veteran, and flyer of "aggressor" aircraft in American training exercises). In The Devil's Alternative, it is up to British agent Adam Munro (and a team of Special Boat Service soldiers) to save the day—but saving the day is all about pulling the Americans and Soviets away from open hostilities. And Munro's spy work even depends on American technology at a crucial instance, namely his reliance on an American SR-71 spy plane to spirit him to Moscow during a crucial stage of his activities.
2. If geopolitical and military weight were at issue, the third party ought to have been China. If economic and financial weight were what counted, it would have undoubtedly been Japan (itself a considerable naval power). If this was to be an essentially Atlantic-European affair, the Big Three might have included West Germany, in light of its status as Europe's leading economic and industrial power, as well as the implications of its geographical position and the size of its army for the East-West military balance; or possibly France, given its combination of economic and military weight, and its readiness to pursue a policy relatively independent of Washington in the past.
3. The other purpose-built carrier which served with the British navy in the war was the HMS Hermes. As the flagship of the operation, and as a vessel actually laid down during World War II, it would have been richer in symbolism. However, the ship was decommissioned in 1984 and sold to India, which it has since served as the INS Viraat.

Review: Role of Honor, by John Gardner

New York: Putnam, 1984, pp. 304.

In John Gardner's Role of Honor, the British Secret Service stages a spy scandal which has Bond rather publicly leaving the Service. Afterward Bond, under the pretext of being a free agent, trains in computer programming, the better to enable him to infiltrate the operations of a Pentagon computer expert who apparently faked his own death, Jay Autem Holy, who is thought to be involved with the Soviets in something nefarious . . .

As the premise of the novel suggests, Role is Gardner's biggest break with the familiar pattern of the Bond adventures up to this time. The months-long mission, the highly public spy scandal in which Bond is involved, his having to learn how to code, are all inconceivable in a Fleming novel—or a Bond film. Indeed, the early chapters do not feel much like a James Bond adventure at all, and it is quite some time before the book is on more familiar ground.

Interestingly, even as the novels break with the usual pattern of the adventures, they do repeat the pattern of Gardner's. SPECTRE, first reintroduced in For Special Services, is back yet again, this time under the management of Tamil Rahani. Just as in Licence Renewed there is a bit of nuclear age do-gooderism-gone-wrong in Holy's plans to neutralize the superpower arsenals—the concept presented as dangerously destabilizing on its surface, and then even that idea demonstrated as really just Rahani's cover for his real objective, neutralizing just the U.S.'s arsenal, and so handing nuclear supremacy to the Soviet Union on a platter (not unlike SPECTRE's plan in Services). There is, too, the way in which Bond comes upon the plot, sent to join a group of people, among which he has to decide whom he can and cannot trust.

Also in line with the pattern Gardner increasingly followed after Licence Renewed, the story as a whole is light on action, which is confined to a few brief bursts of violence dispersed throughout the book. Following the opening heist scenes (in which Bond does not appear), there is a brief and quickly foiled carjacking a fifth of the way in, until Bond's kidnapping another fifth of the way in. Thus does it continue, with the most elaborate set piece taking place in the middle of the book. Still, after a somewhat confusing opening the book is brisk, smooth and lucid, and has its share of appropriately Bondian touches, like the villain's use of an airship in his scheme, and a final run at 007 that demonstrates that Ernst Stavro Blofeld is not the only SPECTRE chief to live to fight another day—with Bond taking the battle up again in the follow-up, Nobody Lives Forever (1986).

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

Reviewing the Posthuman Prospect

It was about the turn of the century that I first took notice of the whole transhuman-posthuman-Singularity dialogue, reading the books of authors like Moravec and Kurzweil.

Their arguments did not make me a confirmed believer--but they did interest me. It seemed to me that if thought was indeed a physical process, then at least in theory that physical process could be replicated technologically--so that Searle's "Chinese Room" argument, or Penrose's suggestions about cognition did not seem to me persuasive counter-arguments on that level.

Penrose's argument, however, pointed to the possibility that even if there is no theoretical barrier to creating a strong artificial intelligence, the practical obstacles may be very high indeed, in ways that the optimists do not appreciate. (Indeed, those whose specialty was the human brain generally seemed much less bullish about the Singularity than the tech types.)

Still, I did find the arguments of Moravec and Kurzweil sufficiently intriguing to warrant serious consideration. And as it happened, each of them went beyond mere prediction to making forecasts--what the philosopher Nicholas Rescher in his book Predicting the Future called nontrivial, nonplatitudinous predictions, the kind where you get specific enough that you have to stick your neck out in the process. So I spent the years that followed watching the signs and the dates, and . . .

Well, not much seemed to be happening. Indeed, when 2009 rolled around I (like many, many others) looked at the list of predictions that Kurzweil made for that specific date. I (apparently, unlike many, many others) focused on the nontrivial, nonplatitudinous ones, and reviewed them comprehensively. And by and large, the disparity between what he predicted for technologies like neural nets, and their commercial, consumerist applications in areas like personal computing, translation software, virtual reality and personal transport (the real proof that something has been accomplished)--and what the state of the art really was in those things--convinced me that I was right to feel that he was way, way too bullish. In fact, I wrote a piece about that for the New York Review of Science Fiction back in 2011.

And for once, I didn't feel totally out of step with the times, many others seeming to be thinking along the same lines, the exuberance of the tech boom given way to much greater reserve, and I must admit, less interest in the issue on my part.

Today, however, I find myself looking at Amazon's Echo, and Google's Glass, and the Oculus Rift. Personal assistants, ubiquitous computing, virtual reality. Of course, what we are seeing 2015 is considerably less developed than what Kurzweil expected us to have six years ago. And there is no guarantee that these particular devices are not flashes in the pan; that they will really prove useful enough to proliferate, let alone that we will see significant improvement on them in the near term. Yet, for the moment it seems safe to regard them as real steps in the direction he envisaged. I also find myself looking at a news story from just this the past week--the digital reconstruction of a rat brain by the Blue Brain project, which may be an even more important step toward a world of "spiritual machines."

And so while I remember the exaggerated expectations of 1999 all too well, I think that I will be following these developments a bit more closely than I have in many years.

At least, for a while.

Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn

New York: Bantam, 1991, pp. 361.

I first read the books of the Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command) what now feels like a very long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and must admit that I have not thought about them very much since. It had been many years since I read very many tie-in novels, or for that matter, took much interest in the Expanded Star Wars universe.

Still, the approaching release of Episode VII, and the associated clearing of the decks with the branding of literally hundreds of tie-in works "Legends" rather than "Canon," drew me back and I decided to take a second look at Zahn's novels. I must admit that I had not expected very much. My memories of the books were favorable, but I was a far less demanding reader when I took them, quite able to enjoy fiction that, when I revisited it, later seemed appalling.

On the whole, though, Zahn's novels proved a pleasant surprise, starting with the first of his trilogy, Heir to the Empire. Of course, as a look at the back cover reveals that the premise is reasonably robust. (Five years after the Battle of Endor the Empire is down but not out, still in control of a quarter of the galaxy, and the New Republic in the ascendant not without its frailties as the former Rebels cope with the business of governance--giving the villainous imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn a chance to reverse the tide of history.) The relation of the events that unfold from it is brisk, helped by not just the promised abundance of action and intrigue, but rapid intercutting between one storyline and another. And the prose is sufficiently lucid and polished to keep the reader from tripping over awkward word choices and phrasing (as they do in so much commercial fiction).

However, these are more or less straightforward matters of craftsmanship, and not very much to ask from a veteran writer of this type of fiction like Zahn. What really impressed me was that the story genuinely feels like it belongs to the core of the Star Wars universe. Heir is not only rooted in the material of the original, canonical trilogy (replete with its characters, Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Lando all central characters), but succeeds in making the newer content grow organically out of that, rather than a repetition of old content, or a painful grafting of new to old.

In this there is much use of the settings and situations of the original trilogy. A central mystery has Luke flying to Dagobah with R2 in his X-wing, and reentering the "Cave of Evil," where he has a vision of his rescue of Han on Tatooine at the start of the Return of the Jedi. Afterward he flies off to an exotically situated business enterprise of Lando's, where Leia and Han were also headed just before the Empire came calling.

Fortunately, such scenes prove not to be repetitions of earlier situations, but rather evocative bridges from the old to the new, that at their best also put the old in a new light. Luke's return to Dagobah provides addiitonal insight into just what the Cave is (and the broader history of the Jedi), while the vision he has inside, while reinforcing the connection of this tale with what came before, foreshadows an important connection with a new character who is smoothly retconned into the narrative. Other episodes, which only to a lesser extent build on the familiar, likewise have the virtue of deepening our knowledge of what we already saw, as with Chewie and Leia's journey to the Wookie home world of Kashyyyk.

This all occurs not only on the level of the overall plot, accomplished as it is in this respect. Zahn has clearly gone some way to imagining Lucas's galaxy "to saturation," reinforcing the connection in the smaller details--a spoken reference here, a recollection there, like the revelation of a compartment on R2 that makes Mara Jade think that this must have been how Luke smuggled his light saber into Jabba's hideout.

It helps, too, that most of what is more thoroughly invented is fairly compelling. Particularly striking are the two principal villains, namely the megalomaniacal Dark Jedi Master C'baoth, and Grand Admiral Thrawn, the latter an especially tricky character to write as a result of his being a "military genius."1 Most writers of such characters, unable to think of what a genius would say or do, either keep repeating that the characters are, in fact, geniuses (groan), or resort to intellectual displays that are caricatured, irrelevant or both (groan again). Zahn takes a subtler path by, among other things, providing successive opportunities for Thrawn to base his decisions on Sherlock Holmes-style deductions, with his subordinate Admiral Pellaeon playing Watson to the Great Detective (as when Thrawn fails to be fooled by Han's attempt to sneak Leia off the Millennium Falcon). He also proves artful enough to bring the act off, and displaying a flair for charismatic, polished schemers in general, imbues the smuggler Talon Karrde with his own considerable interest.

None of this is to deny that the book has its weaker points. In contrast with the original films, the story, without anything like Luke's earlier journey to Jedi knighthood to center it, seems relatively diffuse, with such unity as it enjoys derived from the villain's plan. Mara Jade is a one-note character through the book (careerism and revenge seem to be all there is to her), and her scenes with Luke are more tedious than tense, while C'baoth seems underutilized. And the conclusion is a bit abrupt and ambiguous, just when the reader might have expected fireworks. However, after finishing Heir to the Empire I was much more enthusiastic about turning to Dark Force Rising than I thought I would be when I first thought of revisiting the series.

1. The back stories of C'baoth (or rather, the original C'baoth) and Thrawn, as well as the initial meeting of the two men, is detailed in Outbound Flight, a review of which you can read here.