The Early Robert Ludlum Novels: Some Notes

Robert Ludlum's name has long been synonymous with the type of thriller he increasingly produced in the late '70s and '80s, and the pattern of which clearly characterizes his largest commercial successes. These were contemporary-set thrillers, written at what was then regarded as the "super-thriller" end of the scale length-wise, in which the protagonist, usually a solidly Eastern Establishment bourgeois-professional type, usually at least thirtysomething, usually single, finds himself caught up in an international conspiracy of distinctly contemporary character (international terrorism just about always there, though often with the terrorists as pawns in some larger game, maneuvered by some bigger and more powerful interest). In trying to get out of his mess the hero has to look over his shoulder at the pursuing authorities as much as at the more obvious villains of the piece (not unlike Richard Hannay in Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps).

The resulting adventure tends to be mobile in the extreme, with much travel involved (apt to be heavy on West/Central European locations, with Italy, Switzerland, France especially prominent), and that travel generally done in high style; involve him in a romantic/sexual relationship important to the plot (hence the preference for a hero who is single); and written for the age of the action movie, be packed with foot and car chases, close-combat fights and gunplay, in the course of which if the hero was not already an action hero type (as is the case with Jason Bourne), he is compelled to become one just to get through it all (as Noel Holcroft is). The adventure also tends to be sufficiently convoluted that one has a very hard time finding good summaries of the plots and how they progress. (Even Martin Greenberg seemed at a loss at times in The Robert Ludlum Companion.)

And the conclusion is unlikely to be a matter of the good guys simply figuring out what was up, catching the villain, telling the hero he is all in the clear and he can just get on with his life (in which respect it was very unlike The Thirty-Nine Steps). As a matter of fact the villains sometimes win, and win big. (In The Holcroft Covenant the Fourth Reich actually seizes power, and the tale closes with Noel getting its architect in his sights--the defeated hero turning to resistance and revenge after the villains' triumph. And while The Bourne Identity was tidier in its resolution than most there was no going all the way back to his old life for David Webb, and Carlos the Jackal was still at large, and Bourne/Webb and Carlos did indeed have occasion to face each other down again.)

Ludlum's less read earlier output was more diverse, and often very different. The Scarlatti Inheritance and The Rhinemann Exchange were World War II thrillers, as was the first half of The Gemini Contenders. The Osterman Weekend, The Matlock Paper and The Chancellor Manuscript were set domestically, with the events of the first two of those books all but confined to an apparently genteel community in the northeastern United States (an upper class suburb in the first case, a college town in the second), and The Matlock Paper more a crime story than a spy story (centered as it is on financially motivated drug trafficking rather than high-level political machinations). The Gemini Contenders, if more conventionally espionage-oriented, was in its stakes a Dan Brown-ish historical-religious thriller, and, with this going to a lesser degree for The Scarlatti Inheritance, a sprawling family epic, while The Chancellor Manuscript had a metafictional twist, and made use of real-life figures as characters in a manner going far beyond the use of Carlos the Jackal in The Bourne Identity (most significantly, J. Edgar Hoover). And in The Road to Gandolfo Ludlum even produced a comedy. Moreover, the books were rather more compact than they would later become, the hero's sometimes being a family man (as in The Osterman Weekend) limited the prospect of romantic entanglement, and the World War II tales apart, while these thrillers often entailing violence and danger, their often not having very much action, and the protagonist being just a "regular guy" who may not even get up to much in the way of physical heroics, and when he does so is just the ordinary man who had his "back to the wall." (That a hot war was on in the World War II stories made the difference in those books, I think.)

I suppose that Ludlum's increasing adherence to a formula from the late 1970s on was a matter of response to market signals--writing what was selling. Yet as my description of the formula suggests it can be very limiting, not just with regard to premise and theme and structure and tone, but even character and setting. And writing every book out to super-thriller length was doubtless not only exhausting, but seems to me to have led to a good deal of overwriting, and certainly worsened Ludlum's notorious melodramatic tics. (The famous italics, the exclamation points, etc., seem to me to be more evident in the later and longer books than the earlier and shorter ones.)

Still, if it seems likely that cranking out one super-thriller after another according to a formula led to repetitiveness and srain (Ludlum's tendency to overwrite, his tendency to certain literary tics--the exclamation points and so on--seem to me to have got worse, while increasingly it was sequels to old hits and repetition of older concepts), it has to be remembered that the Ludlum novels of the late '80s, at least, were by any measure colossal bestsellers--and that when collapse came in the '90s, pretty much every writer in the genre was affected.* The result is that in the end other factors were clearly more consequential than the strain that came with sticking to the same rather limiting and difficult formula for so long.*

* The Bourne Supremacy (1986) and The Bourne Ultimatum (1990) were sequels to The Bourne Identity, The Icarus Agenda (1988) one to The Chancellor Manuscript, The Road to Omaha (1992) a sequel to The Road to Gandolfo. The relatively thin The Scorpio Illusion(1993) gave us international terrorists-whose-strings-are-pulled-by-corporate-power again (if, again, in relatively competent form, with a timely Post-Cold War update), after which The Apocalypse Watch (1995) provided yet another Fourth Reich plot, and The Matarese Countdown (1997) was one more sequel, in this case to the now long-ago hit The Matarese Circle.

Revisiting the Battle of Britain, the Blitz--and British Bankruptcy

In considering the air war fought between Britain and Germany in 1940-1941 (the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz which followed it) it seems to me worth remembering that when the Luftwaffe began its campaign most observers shared two assumptions about the consequences of aerial warfare.

1. Societies will crack quickly under aerial bombardment--the shock to morale quickly producing widespread disruption far out of proportion to the physical damage the bombers actually inflict, with Giulio Douhet arguing in The Command of the Air that a force of even twenty planes could "break up the whole social structure of the enemy in less than a week, no matter what his army and navy may do." (It is worth recalling that Douhet assumed a use of chemical weapons, but I am not sure that this was essential, the more in as the purpose of the gas in his 1921 book seemed to be to disrupt emergency response, rather than produce really mass-scale deaths; and that, given the very low numbers and primitive aviation technology of the day a larger number of more advanced aircraft solely using "conventional" bombs, such as were available by 1940, could not have compensated for the lack of chemical weaponry.) This confidence in the ability of a small number of aircraft to produce so much havoc was based on the second assumption, namely that

2. "The bomber will always get through." Stanley Baldwin's phrase is famous, the larger remarks of which it is a part less so. Simply put, the idea was that protecting a country against air attack meant covering far too much airspace, including at night and in bad weather, for any conceivable air force to be confident of intercepting an appreciable number of the bombers (given that this was a matter of pilots in aircraft with top speeds in the low hundreds of miles per hour, relying on their eyes to spot the planes and machine guns with which to shoot them down). The result was that "there is no power on earth that can protect . . . any large town within reach of an aerodrome" from "being bombed," and thus the only "defence is in offence"--in hitting back harder with one's own bombers so that the enemy state fell apart first--in a situation analogous to how people came to think about war waged with ballistic missiles (with the gas weapons bombers were expected to use in the interwar period analogous to the nuclear ones they expected ballistic missiles to deliver).

Of course, both assumptions were quickly shown up, by both the greater-than-expected resilience of societies in the face of air attack, and the advent and exploitation of radar which made it possible to detect incoming aircraft and efficiently and speedily direct interceptors at them. This made the technical inadequacies that might not have mattered so much otherwise critical--namely, that air force bombers could not reliably find their targets and strike them accurately with the technology of 1932, or even 1939, while even if they were able to do so it would take a good deal more planes to do the job, preferably bigger planes equipped and organized to fight their way through a far more formidable defense than anyone imagined at the start of the '30s. Ultimately it was to take a shift from a Bomber Command of hundreds of planes to one of thousands, with Blenheims replaced by Lancasters, led by Pathfinder squadrons equipped with radio navigation aids (Gee, Oboe) and even newfangled airborne radar (H2S), covered by radar jamming, chaff and long-range escort fighters, and utilizing their Mark XIV bombsights to become really effective in the face of even a long-attrited Luftwaffe--the products of what from the standpoint of the late '30s were a mobilization of resources and drive toward technical advance scarcely thinkable outside a world war.

In the interim the advantage shifted to the defensive--and joined with other advantages to make it the stronger form still. (In an aerial campaign where bombers and escorts are up against interceptors and ground-based anti-aircraft units it stands to reason that, all other things being equal, the bombers and escorts will get the worst of it. There is the reality that pilots in damaged aircraft over friendly territory are more likely to find a safe place to land and save their aircraft rather than lose their aircraft as they try reaching their more distant base. Pilots shot down over friendly territory, if surviving the loss of their aircraft, are far more likely to return to service, in contrast with downed pilots over enemy territory likely to get captured. And so forth.)

Indeed, Germany's failure to defeat Britain with its bombers is only one half of the story, with the other half Britain's failure to defeat Germany with its own Bomber Command, which says a lot about the reality of the situation--the more in when we consider the correlation of forces. In spite of the hype (so saturating the media even before the war that in the famous short story--published six months before the conflict's outbreak--the cover of the magazine Walter Mitty picks up asks "Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?"), the Luftwaffe lacked a significant quantitative or qualitative edge over Britain's air force.

The result is that the German leadership's poor strategy in the course of the Battle of Britain and the subsequent Blitz, and the German government's refusal to prioritize aircraft production, flawed as they were, were hardly decisive--even a far better performance here likely falling well short of what it would have taken to win air superiority over southern England. The fact seems to me underscored by the reality that so many of the counterfactuals about the invasion scenario rely less on a more astute use of the Luftwaffe than on the employment of German special forces to tip the scale (as with the notion of an airborne attack on the airfields of southern England).

Still, Germany did not have to win the air war (let alone successfully execute what the air war was supposed to pave the way for, an invasion of Britain) to win the war. The reality was that as the bombs fell German submarines (and planes, and surface vessels of various types) attacked British shipping (while in the Mediterranean Italy entered the war and conflict loomed with Japan in the Far East), such that German action and British efforts to fight it off succeeded in draining Britain's limited resources at a rate that was soon to spell exhaustion. As Clive Ponting reminds his readers, in the summer of 1940 Britain's leaders knew the country would be bankrupt before the end of 1941 and perhaps much sooner, after which point, in the absence of relief, the country would have had to take whatever terms it could get (likely to have been less generous when the dark day came in March 1941 than what they would have been in the summer of 1940). And ultimately it was the readiness of the U.S. to keep Britain from going under, at the price of truly unprecedented financial and material support (over the course of the entire war Lend-Lease eventually approaching the equivalent of a year's worth of Britain's pre-war GDP).

The fact is well known but relatively little talked about--I suppose because it is hardly flattering to the nationalistic myth about Britain standing alone against Hitler; because it underlines how leaders whose wisdom historians prefer to praise rather than denigrate failed to redress industrial decline and imperial overstretch that left Britain far weaker than it might have been in an exceedingly dangerous period; and because, quite frankly, that other ending to the story looks so inglorious compared to the image of a Britain that, had it gone down, would have gone down fighting, and the Churchill well aware of this so inconsistent with the Churchill of legend who promised to fight on the beaches and the landing grounds and in the fields and the streets and in the hills, for "we shall never surrender."

It is far more comforting to take for granted that the aid would have come through, while where counterfactuals and alternate history are concerned it is particularly appealing--writers of even the counterfactual, after all, more than is generally recognized, preferring what makes besides a pleasing story an interesting and dramatically satisfying one. It is simply the case that more people are interested in minute reconstructions of battles than in political economy, while the turning of history on the battlefield appeals to the dramatic sense in a way that running out of foreign exchange does not.1 For British writers, certainly, it does not help that the key decision would have been made not in London but in Washington, Britain's fate in another country's hands precisely because of how weak its leaders had allowed the country to become--while there is the problem of explaining how the alternative would have occurred. They would have to locate it in the vicissitudes of American politics in which they are that much less likely to have an interest--and which would not comport with the romantic view many take of the common values and "special relationship" of the "English-speaking peoples." Meanwhile my experience of World War II-themed counterfactual and alternate history has Americans not much more likely to speculate about such a turn, apparently more willing to imagine an Axis victory as a result of defeat than of the country's not trying at all, save perhaps as a sermon on the foolishness of isolationism (as with Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which does indeed turn on electoral politics taking a different course with Charles Lindbergh becoming President). Even then they tend to imagine America's fate in the situation instead of what other peoples might be going through (rather than, for example, envisioning a Britain under the Nazi jackboot, a much less plausible scenario of the U.S. itself being occupied), while not being much more inclined to pay attention to things like foreign exchange. I suppose there is a symmetry in that--but also a reminder of how national blinders break up the bigger picture of a world event, and how much our understanding suffers when we neglect "boring" stuff like gold reserves in favor of heroics during the Darkest Hour.

1. Reading the essay collection If the Allies Had Fallen: Sixty Alternate Scenarios of World War II, which contains contributions from such prominent historians of the subject as David Glantz, Richard Overy and Gerhard Weinberg, does not include among its sixty counterfactuals a single one considering Britain's financial exhaustion, or more broadly, the U.S. staying out of the war.

Social Class in Robert Ludlum's Novels

I remember years ago reading James William Gibson's comment on the Tom Clancy-style military techno-thriller as a white collar counterpart to the "blue collar" paramilitary novel, reassuring middle class men that they, too, have "what it takes" to be like the Mack Bolans and Dirty Harrys and John Rambos--to, when it was called for, spring into action and save the day.

Looking at the protagonists of the techno-thriller I was increasingly less persuaded of that reading of those books. Certainly Clancy's Jack Ryan can look like he is a world away from Dirty Harry--former stock broker, college professor, published historian, and let us not forget, the son in law of a Merrill Lynch VP who has also been knighted by the Queen, Jack also literally Sir Jack--making a meteoric rise up the ranks of the security state to end up President of the United States scarcely a decade after The Hunt for Red October. Yet Ryan's roots are as blue collar as those of Bolan or Harry, Sir Jack born the son of an Irish-American cop and nurse, not a WASP blue blood; it just so happened that Ryan was one of the blue collar kids who "made good," and just maybe because of the fact that they are a blue collar kid who made good have a mettle that the born-rich kids do not (that father-in-law of Ryan's not coming off looking particularly good in their confrontation in Patriot Games). The result is that the books are more persuasive as a fantasy of social mobility--and affirmation of the conservative's belief in America's possibilities for that mobility--than as reassurance to white collar types that they too have "what it takes."

However, what Gibson wrote in that article seems to me to be more applicable to the works of Robert Ludlum, whose politics were less the right-wing populism that has dominated the action genre than a centrism of '70s vintage--which in some respects can look relatively leftish today in this age of casualness about government torture and assassination, but in others look far from leftish indeed, with, in line with the tendencies of centrism, his politics in regard to class genteely conservative in type. As one quickly finds reading their way through his books Ludlum is deeply respectful of professionals, deeply respectful of elites--admiring and flattering of people who have wealth and position, to the point that one can add to the well-known list of Ludlum's literary tics (the melodramatic italics and exclamation points and lapses into passive voice, the relentless use of synonyms for "said," etc.) the tendency to characterization consisting mainly of a profligate use of superlatives, here, there and everywhere endless verbose tribute to the brilliance, integrity and other fine qualities of the all-but-superhuman individuals in question. (Indeed, a search of The Parsifal Mosaic showed that Ludlum used the word "brilliant" at least twenty times to refer to various characters in that one book alone. Twenty times.)

Moreover, while one might add that while Establishment corruption and treachery are major themes of his work, these only rarely, if ever, give the sense that they reflect on the caste in question--the more in as, rather than being outsiders to that world as in those more populist narratives, his heroes are, to a man of that same background, solidly Eastern Establishment bourgeois-professional types, as with professors James Matlock and David Webb, or TV executive John Tanner, or architect Noel Holcroft. (This is, not coincidentally, the background of the New York City-born, Rectory School-Cheshire Academy-Wesleyan University-educated Robert Ludlum himself--writing what he knows, but unlike, for example, his colleague John le Carrè, doing so with enormous respect and affection, rather than with a critical eye.1)

In fairness, if Ludlum bestows endless praises on the blue blooded he at least refrains from pouring scorn on the less fortunately situated. Still, where this matter is concerned a particular passage in his later book The Apocalypse Watch has long stuck in my mind. In it two characters are talking about the motivations of traitors and, those who are induced to betray by monetary gain or ideological principle apart (dismissed here as people "who identify with a fanatical cause that makes them feel superior"), characterized as "the malcontents who are convinced they've been shafted by the system, their talents unrewarded"--people described here as not going "further legitimately" mainly because "they're generally lazy, like students who'd rather go into an exam with crib notes . . . than study for it."

This view--which, not incidentally, is deeply centrist in its "psychologism" and consequent treatment of dissent, or even discontent, as a symptom of mental illness--is entirely consistent with the esteem for those on top. Essentially the world is a big meritocracy, where people generally what they deserve. Those who are on top are there because they deserve to be so. The same goes for those not on top, all the way right down to the bottom. And anyone who has problems with how things went for them is basically crazy.

It is not a cheering thought for most. And if it does not seem to have been much of a problem for Ludlum's pursuit of bestsellerdom, I would be unsurprised if it did not cost him a measure of affection on the part of those readers who would have been happier to see the patricians looking down on them their whole lives taken down a peg--as they so often were in more "blue collar"-oriented action-adventure.2


NOTES
1. I find that the biographical information of celebrities available online tends to be vague with regard to indicators of class origin--their parents' occupations or wealth, such connections as may have helped them later in life, etc.--but we often are told what schools they attended. Their having gone to a private school charging $60,000+ (the median household income of an American family) per student tells you something about that background. And one finds that those who have been able to make it in the arts, contrary to the stupid rags-to-riches stories about people randomly "being discovered," very often did go to such schools, with all that implies about who gets a shot and who does not.
2. Looking back the closest Ludlum comes to an exception would seem to be The Matlock Paper (1973). In that novel the genteel facade of Connecticut's prestigious "Carlyle University" (an obvious stand-in for Ludlum's alma mater of "Little Ivy" Wesleyan) is torn away and one sees behind it real rot as the Pacific war hero and "grand old bird" of the Romance Languages Department Lucas Herron, and even university president Adrian Sealfont, are revealed as literal, drugs-and-prostitution racket-operating gangsters.

Making Sense of WGN's Transformation into NewsNation

I recall being perplexed by WGN's decision to become a part-time news channel ("NewsNation"). After all, we had been hearing for years about how cable was just doing worse and worse, the glory days of hits like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead receding into the past as the action moved to streaming. And we heard incessantly about how those who got their news from TV at all were old folk--the potential market a rather limited portion of the population whom one would guess were already spoken for with CNN and FOX and newcomers like Newsmax.

However, apparently impressed by how the horror show that was 2020 gave the cable news channels' viewership a boost the superstation decided to get in on the action. The results, of course, have not been impressive--the ratings, in fact, dismal. Still, considering details of the larger scene less publicized than that collapse in viewership of which we heard so much the essential decision seemed less profoundly counterintuitive. These were, respectively:

1. The Return to Niche Programming as a Strategy
2. The Increasingly High Valuation of Older Viewers

The Return to Niche Programming as a Strategy
I can remember how in the '80s and '90s the explosion in the number of channels, and the interest of the managements of many of them in producing and airing their own content, suggested an expanding space for niche programming--for instance, the possibility of a channel devoted exclusively to science fiction, which USA realized with the launch of the Sci-Fi Channel, which produced such cult fare as Farscape and Lexx.

Of course, later the managements of those channels became attentive to the possibility of wider, breakout hits (such as HBO's The Sopranos became), and in the '00s increasingly devoted themselves to pursuing such hits--in the case of the Sci-Fi Channel to such a degree that they no longer wanted to be Sci-Fi. Instead they became "Syfy" (whatever that was supposed to mean), while the channel that gave us Farscape and Lexx gave us blander, more general audience-oriented fare like Eureka and Warehouse 13, and packed its schedule with reality TV, and even WWE Wrestling. Eventually I stopped paying attention to it, and haven't looked back.

Since then the thinking has shifted again--it seems, because those big breakout hits have become more elusive, while the profusion of viewing options and the fragmentation of the audience has made trying to win a large viewership with a single show with a broad but limited appeal look less plausible than, again, producing something that any audience merely big enough to be profitable might like (with some hope of breaking out to capture a wider following). But what niches would be worth filling? As it happened, demographics and economics went a long way to answering that question.

The Increasingly High Valuation of Older Viewers
Younger people never stopped watching TV. Indeed, my guess would be that where visual media are concerned they actually watch more than ever. But they became much more prone to get that content from a streaming service via the Internet-connected device they take everywhere than watching a broadcast received via a conventional television made at a fixed time, with the content chopped to pieces by commercials and other such interruptions.

Thus by default TV in this sense meant the old--and where not long ago the fondness of the elderly for Matlock or CBS was a joke, now this orientation makes for a ratings winner, the more consequential because of what has happened with the distribution of income. Simply put, young people have MUCH LESS MONEY than their elders did at the same stage in their lives, and they have adapted to that poverty in ways that might well affect their habits even were times to get better for them--more prone to live at home, drive less, generally consume less. This makes the relatively affluent old a more natural target for advertisers yet again.

All of this has had predictable consequences for the content of the TV schedule, as with the increasing place of second-run content on cable. This is, partly, a matter of a declining readiness to fund the production of new content with the prospect of big hits more remote evident even on the channels least oriented to the older demographics (as with Disney). However, it is also a matter of the proliferation of channels devoted to classic TV, like H & I (Heroes & Icons), bringing back to the air shows that had virtually vanished--presumably in pursuit of older viewers who on landing on those shows will stop their flipping and watch them out of genuine pleasure at what they offer, more thoroughly nostalgic appreciation, or simply a feeling that bad old TV is more appealing than bad new TV.

All of this seems plausibly a factor in the case of WGN's transformation into NewsNation. Even before the change the backbone of its lineup was reruns of shows that skewed old--JAG (which was much joked about as an old person's show even when it was in its original run), CBS' Blue Bloods, and Tim Allen's Last Man Standing. Moreover, the tenor of these shows can seem significant given what has been said of NewsNation's politics. While marketed as a channel in the center of the political spectrum, NewsNation's own employees soon enough charged it with a conservative bias--which may seem a betrayal of its promise (and its continued PR, certainly to go by the Dan Abrams commercials I've seen), but which would seem natural from a business standpoint. The aforementioned shows were distinctly conservative favorites (with the gleefully lib-trolling Last Man Standing, according to one poll, having a liberal viewership of zero percent, exactly, literally zero percent)--suggesting this as the logical course for the channel from a commercial standpoint, especially after the channel's turn disappointed, and made trying to keep the audience their other shows have look like a safe strategy.

Of course, it remains to be seen where NewsNation will go from here. But the essential logic--the pursuit of niche audiences, and where broadcast television is concerned, the stress on pursuing older audiences--is likely to remain with the industry, perhaps so long as it continues to grind on in the new media market.

Remembering Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin's Cauldron

At this stage of things there seems little more worth saying about just how far removed from reality the realism-peddling military techno-thriller tended to be, not least in its political scenarios.

Still, one old techno-thriller has been coming to mind every so often lately as having displayed a bit more insight than the rest--Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin's Cauldron (1993).

Published back in the early '90s, when the world economy was looking sluggish, and neo-mercantilist competition between North America, some sort of European bloc and Japan looked like the new order of things, Bond and Larkin pictured exactly this happening. Here the West Europeans, particularly a France and Germany whose going their own way under rightist and none-too-democratic leaders precipitates the collapse of the NATO alliance, turn the newly ex-Communist states of Eastern Europe into semi-colonies, in a situation of deepening trade war, and deepening global economic downturn, which in turn contributes to an influx of refugees from the global South. Callous and exploitative mishandling of the refugee crisis contributes to far right backlash, not least in those East European satellites, with Hungary an early critical flashpoint.

Ultimately there is a revolt against the government that prompts aggressive military intervention by French forces to suppress the threat to its client regime that soon has them more broadly fighting the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and soon invading those nations outright to keep them under Franco-German ("European Confederation," or Eurcon) control. The U.S., with what remain to it of its European allies, intervenes to stop the aggression, while EurCon strikes up a deal with Russia (weakened, unstable, but still very heavily armed), raising the risk of things getting even uglier, fast . . .

The aggressiveness of a scenario in which the mid-1990s saw the U.S. at war with its recent European allies was, of course, a stretch by even techno-thriller standards (the kind of stretch that, I think, contributed to the decline in the genre's popularity). Still, the interaction between economic downturn and decay of the post-World War II trading system, the hints of a shaky and even fragmenting Western alliance, dissent in smaller nations confronted with German/EU diktat, the refugee crisis, the far right backlash, instability and authoritarianism in Hungary, France, and elsewhere in Europe, the resurgent possibility of armed conflict between the U.S. and Russia--all of this, wrongly anticipated as events of the '90s, could well have been "ripped from the headlines" of the late 2010s and 2020s. And as all this hints, if Bond and Larkin's book could seem merely one of a host of novels at the time envisioning some kind of clash between the U.S. and a Germany intent on mastery in Europe, Bond and Larkin, as was usually the case with their work, put rather more thought into the political their premise, and devoted more time and space to the development of the conflict on the way to the outbreak of their fighting, than any of their colleagues--and as is often the case when an extrapolation of this kind did not quite come to pass, it still offers the reader something to think about long after it has dated in the narrower ways.

Indeed, Bond and Larkin displayed sufficient sophistication that one might wonder if they did not look at theories of international politics not normally associated with the genre--the sort of stuff that uses words like "imperialism." However, if one might see something of the left's insights into this story of capitalist governments resorting to the final argument of kings in their competition for markets, no reasonable observer could mistake the Bond-Larkin scenario for a leftist one. Europe's working classes, especially as represented by trade unionists, come off as racist reactionaries, and the story is, in the end, a flag-waving, free-trading argument for the dynamic duo of "McDonald's and McDonnell-Douglas" as the world's best hope for prosperity, peace and progress--very much in line with what, in hindsight, shortly proved to be the conventional wisdom of their era.

Given how that outlook has suffered since the 2007 crisis I wonder if writers treating a comparable theme would imagine the same sort of ending today.

Just How Realistic Was the "Realistic" Techno-Thriller?

The military techno-thriller has always been sold on the basis of the plausibility of its scenarios, and the realism of their treatment. The topical, "ripped from the headlines" conflict, the treatment of actual weapons systems, the meticulousness of the writer's research, the endorsement of the package by military authorities, have been key to interesting readers--as is underlined by their openness to the genre being tied to their level of concern for "the next war." (Thus did the genre take off in the overheated political atmosphere of the late nineteenth century, wane as the world wars made another conflict seem unthinkably horrible, resurge again amid the political turn to the right, "Second Cold War" mood and Star Wars hype of the 1970s and 1980s, and then after the Cold War's end and the expectation that "big wars" were a thing of the past--and good riddance to them--wane again in the 1990s.)

But just how realistic were those thrillers? Looking at, for example, the work of Tom Clancy in his heyday, or Dale Brown, it seems safe to say that they gave a wildly exaggerated impression of the aggressiveness and recklessness of other countries (the Russians, the Chinese, were always ready to start a third world war they couldn't reasonably expect to win at the drop of a hat--in Brown's books in particular, over and over and over again), and of the clear-cut nature of international crises (beginnings and endings fairly cut and dried, the villainy all on one side--theirs--though often there was some blame to go round for the "peaceniks" too, not that they were ever really on "our" side), and the prospect of their having clean endings, even when armed force came into play (so that at the end of the book we usually just moved on). They depicted a great deal of death and destruction, but only very selectively. They showed plenty of battlefield death, but rarely, if ever, showed veterans of those wars struggling with wounds to mind and body for the rest of their life--certainly nothing to compare with a glance at the ward in Walter Reed. If they showed civilian suffering at all that suffering was usually directly and wholly the fault of the enemy, whose brutality was another reason to fight wars which were typically short and victorious. In the process they also encouraged a dangerous confidence in the good will and intelligence of world leaders to manage, constrain, deescalate the dangerous crises that the bad will and stupidity of world leaders created so endlessly. And where politics at home were concerned they were not much better, proffering a naive, sub-civics-class understanding of the subject, with little sense of just how wearing militarization and war on even a far more modest scale than they so casually depicted are on civil liberties, democratic norms and the fabric of the body politic in general.

Altogether it does not seem unfair to say that these books treated modern war pornographically--a term that, I think, merits proper definition, as my purpose here is to describe rather than throw around pejoratives (as "porn" is for so many), or confuse everything with sex in the sloppy and silly way of so much psychology (if only apocryphally Freud conceded that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, but the pop psychologists sure don't), or simply throw the word out for attention-grabbing or shock purposes (as with a certain sort of hack writer who will call mere presentation of pictures of tasty-looking food "food porn").

By pornographic what I mean is the taking of some sensational, significantly taboo subject matter that people are not supposed to speak of enjoying in "decent" company, removing it from its context, shearing it of its consequences, idealizing and intensifying it to make it seem better than it could ever be in real life, and then making a concentrated mass of it the whole show, the work consisting exclusively of the better-than-it-could-ever-be-in-real-life "good parts," such that the audience vicariously experiences that and only that over and over and over again.

Pornography in the usual sense of the term does this with sex (in a manner tailored to the tastes of its particular audience, of course). It is often said that action-adventure does this with violence (to the point that some cultural historians have connected it with pornography more narrowly--i.e. looking at the books Don Pendleton wrote before creating Mack Bolan).

The particular type of action-adventure that is the techno-thriller did this with the wielding of power at an international level, with costly and secretive weapons technology, with the violence and destructiveness of high-tech combat in its stories of international crisis.

I suspect I would have found this kind of thing hard to take as entertainment at the height of the Cold War, and that it made a difference that by the time I got around to the books that the Cold War seemed safely behind and nothing quite like it likely to come again soon, or even ever--that in those years one could imagine such events as the Norwegian rocket crisis or the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis or even the 1991 Gulf War were last aftershocks of the horribly earthquake-ridden twentieth century, and this nation-state power politics stuff had been left behind for cyber-utopia (or at least a different flavor of dystopia, like William Gibson's Sprawl stories or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I could, at least as a still fairly young person who did not personally remember the worst days, look at the more unlikely superpower confrontation stuff over submarine defections and space lasers with a certain detachment, treat it as quaint the way we might, for instance, treat the Napoleonic Wars, where when reading Horatio Hornblower or Jack Aubrey we are less likely to get into the rights and wrongs of Britain's siding with Europe's reactionary monarchies against a democratic revolution in France.

I suspect this all the more because I was still a heavy reader of the field when I started getting a formal grounding in International Relations. It was not as if I had not previously appreciated that techno-thrillers were fiction written to entertain, but all the same, the claim to at least some realism was a part of their interest, and the more I learned the flimsier did the claim seem--with the way war has pervaded all of our lives in this century making their claim seem flimsier still. The falsity of the picture of war the offer was, of course, evident to more experienced and astute observers after the outcome of the decade's Gulf and Balkan wars, but has seemed particularly incredible in the wake of the "forever" wars since 2001--one reason, I think, why in spite of some flickerings, the genre never recovered its old pride of place. It was simply too much for people coping with the reality of conflict to take as "fun."

Why JAG Was an Older Person's Show: Reflections

Donald Bellisario's JAG had a ten season run and provided the platform for the launch of one of the twenty-first century's biggest ratings' successes, the NCIS franchise (the fourth show in which, NCIS: Hawaii, has just hit the air). All this may seem surprising given that it was hardly one of the past generation's more talked-about shows, with what little comment I remember about it jokes about the advanced age of its audience. (Notably I recall a fantasy sequence in one episode of Scrubs where J.D. is in the implausible situation of sharing an apartment with a large number of old men and yells for "whoever's been filling up my Tivo with JAG reruns to cut it out!") And if this seems like just a matter of cheap laughs Bellisario personally confirmed that the jokes, at least, were not baseless. When the show was canceled he acknowledged publicly that the age of the audience was a factor for advertising-minded executives, and even joked that the decent ratings with the 18-49 crowd it had in the earlier days were a matter of it being just 49 year olds who were 59 year olds a decade later.

Recently I have found myself giving some thought to the reasons for that. Certainly part of it would seem to be that JAG simply happened to run on a channel that, even before TV generally became an old-person thing, had a reputation for drawing an older crowd. (After all, in those years CBS was identified with Murder, She Wrote, and Diagnosis: Murder, and so forth in the very years when FOX and WB and UPN and others were going very hard after younger audiences, and getting them.)

Still, JAG was hardly the show to change that image. It was, after all, hardly Beverly Hills 90210 or Dawson's Creek or even Friends. Rather the show was a legal drama about the armed forces, with grown-up characters dealing with grown-up problems and any distinct youth interest lacking. Moreover, if the show's mash-up of A Few Good Men with Top Gun promised some action-adventure that was only part of the package--and those who came for the action did not necessarily stick around when it cut back to legal procedural. This seems all the more the case given what Bellisario and his team made the stuff of the episodes. The writers attempted to be contemporary with "ripped from the headlines" plots, like that other NBC hit Law & Order, and by making the gender politics of the armed forces (an ultra-fashionable topic at the time) a major theme.1 Yet the show's backward glance, a little more recognizable when one remembers that Bellisario was the creator of Airwolf (1984-1987) and Magnum P.I. (1980-1988) before he created JAG, and before that had worked on Black Sheep Squadron (1976-1978), was unmistakable.

Simply put, the pop cultural craze for things military in the '80s that helped make Airwolf a hit was well on the way from crest to trough circa 1995 when JAG came along. This went especially for a major factor in that craze, the "ghosts of Vietnam" with which Airwolf and Magnum P.I. were saturated (the protagonists of both shows were veterans of the conflict whose service in that conflict was background to many a store, while the issue of American MIAs from the conflict was central to Airwolf and prominent again in Magnum), and with which JAG was also saturated (not least through its protagonist Harmon Rabb's hunt for his MIA father, a running story through the first three seasons, which tied up with much else).2 And where in the '70s the old-fashioned feel of Black Sheep Squadron (at the time Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales called it a "war-is-swell series" for people who recalled "World War II as a rousing, blowzy, fraternity turkey-shoot") found an audience amid a period of nostalgia for World War II-themed entertainment, JAG's reverence and earnestness and what an earlier generation would have called its "squareness" were out of step with the irony-saturated '90s, a throwback to the '40s when the show did not recall the post-Vietnam '80s. All this limited the audience, with this going above all for the young, for whom G.I. Joe was just one more thing they enjoyed as children from which they had moved on to other crazes (to the Turtles, to the X-Men), for whom Vietnam was remote, for whom much in the ever-growing range of choice they had was more appealing--while it was a segment of the older population with which the theme and the baggage and the tone were likely to strike a chord, and apparently did.

Still, the game has changed a great deal since, and it says something that as reruns of old shows seem to be resurgent across the basic (and even premium) cable line-up, helped by the arrival of a growing number of channels devoted to classic TV. Indeed, after the show being off the air for a long time, this year I have spotted reruns on no fewer than three channels (H & I, WGN/NewsNation, even Sundance!) in what seems just one reflection of the way that older groups once shunned by advertisers have become a highly coveted demographic.

1. Apart from the pilot, where the theme of women in combat and the relations between men and women aboard ship were central to the murder investigation and the larger situation of which it was a part, and the consistent pairing of Harmon Rabb with a female partner (with all the opportunities to raise such issues such a pairing meant), the show devoted numerous episodes to such matters as gender discrimination, sexual harassment and the frictions and other complexities of male-female relations within the armed forces ("Chains of Command," "The Court-Martial of Sandra Gilbert," "Offensive Action," etc.). Indeed, Representative "Bobbi" Latham, presented as a standard-bearer for the cause of women's participation in the military on equal terms with men, appeared in no fewer than 18 episodes during the series' run (from "The Court-Martial of Sandra Gilbert" on).
2. The protagonist Harmon Rabb's father (played by David James Elliott, just like the son), we are told at the outset, was a Vietnam War "MIA," believed by his son to be still alive in Communist captivity, a fact that drove Harm to sneak into Southeast Asia as a teenager in search of him, and has since remained an obsession. Indeed, the fact is significantly referenced at the very start of the series, with Harm's assignment in the two hour pilot which launched the series taking him to the very carrier from which his father flew in the war ("A New Life"), and where the ship's current Carrier Air Wing commander ("CAG") is one of the war buddies with whom he did it--Rear Admiral Thomas Boone--a connection that proves significant over the show, with, after his saving Boone's life in the pilot, Harm time and again coming to Boone's legal defense during the ten later episodes in which Boone appears. Meanwhile no fewer than six of the show's first sixty-two episodes ("The Prisoner," "Ghost Ship," "King of the Fleas," "People vs. Rabb," "To Russia with Love" and "Gypsy Eyes") had Harm's search for his father at the center of their plot, with the narrative arc concluding only with Harm's discovery of his father's fate--his transfer to the Soviet Union, his escape, his taking up with a woman with whom he had a child and whom he died defending from Soviet soldiers, though that is of course not the end of the theme. It resurfaced a number of times, not least in a Christmas-themed episode set during his father's service during the Vietnam War about a USO visit to his ship ("Ghosts of Christmas Past"), while afterward the half-brother he discovers his father sired in Russia, who happens to be a helicopter pilot (like some Russian counterpart to Airwolf's Stringfellow Hawke!) appeared in another dozen episodes (over seasons 6-8). And still other episodes evoked the conflict, sometimes in quite similar fashion, with Harm's boss Admiral Chegwidden, who has plenty of "ghosts of Vietnam" of his own, in one episode going overseas on a private mission to rescue a man who saved his life during that conflict ("Soul Searching").

On the Reputation of CBS as the Older Viewers' Network

I have recently had occasion to think about CBS' reputation as, well, an older person's TV channel.

One explanation for that reputation I have come across is that CBS was the king of the ratings back in the '70s and early '80s, thanks in large part to Norman Lear (All in the Family was the #1 show on TV for five straight years, and he had Maude, and Good Times, and The Jeffersons), and Dallas, and MASH, and Hawaii Five-O and Kojak, and 60 Minutes, and The Dukes of Hazzard, and Magnum P.I. and . . . well, you get the picture. In the 1973-1974 season it had nine of the top ten shows, eight the next season, and if there were ups and downs after that, between the 1979-1980 and 1984-1985 seasons on average seven of the top ten and eleven of the top twenty rated shows were running on that one channel, a truly extraordinary proportion of the market. Of course, CBS' hit machine virtually sputtered out later in the decade (during which one was more likely to see NBC at the top, with the likes of Cheers and Family Ties and The A-Team and The Cosby Show). The result was, presumably, that anyone who was still watching CBS was someone the channel won over in earlier, better days, who were sticking with their declining hits down to the end after most others jumped ship, were simply in the habit of watching the channel when they sat down in the front of the TV, and so because they were on the channel and see a promotion and maybe get interested, or just happened to have the channel on when the show started, wound up following shows that the rest of the public never noticed or never got interested in because their attention was directed elsewhere. And because the hits that made CBS viewers of people were from years earlier, and because it seems to have been the case that compared with younger viewers those older viewers were in their TV viewing habits more prone to follow channels than shows, that audience was on the whole older than the average.

I find this explanation plausible. But it also seems to me a matter of such hits as the channel managed to have when it faltered. Consider the biggest hit CBS generated between Magnum and the end of the century--Murder, She Wrote. Indeed, for the decade or so from 1986-1987 on, by which point most of the older hits were either gone from the air (like the Norman Lear sitcoms or MASH), or in decline (like Dallas), 60 Minutes and Murder, She Wrote were the CBS shows far and away most likely to make the Nielsen ratings' top ten--a weekly TV newsmagazine then late into its second decade (which had the curmudgeonly Andy Rooney for a mascot), and a "cozy" mystery series about a sixtysomething mystery writer solving murders--which were hardly the thing to bring in that younger crowd. And even if other CBS shows also made appearances in the top ten, like Touched by an Angel and Everybody Loves Raymond (a show about watching grouchy middle-aged people fighting each other when they were not fighting with even grouchier old people), they, along with more modest but still important successes like Diagnosis: Murder and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, affirmed the impression of a channel catering to an older audience. Then, as a result of holding on to viewers won in past days while finding it tougher to get new viewers the channel's viewers were on the whole older; the channel's management responded disproportionately to material aimed at an older audience; and so CBS kept the "old people's shows" on the air, and picked up new ones; while younger viewers passed on its offerings.

Still, when considering why this went so far it may be helpful to remember that, contrary to the solipsistic view prevailing, the outcome of a competition is never a matter of just what one party does, but what the competitors do as well--and it was the case that in these years the competition was getting a lot tougher, with there being that much more to draw away the attention of those younger viewers. After all, between the mid-'80s and mid-'90s the country saw the arrival of three new broadcast networks, all of which were very aggressively chasing younger viewers, and in at least some degree catching them. FOX had 21 Jump Street and Beverly Hills 90210 and Party of Five, while the newer and even more youth-oriented WB had Dawson's Creek and Felicity and 7th Heaven (and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed and Smallville for sci-fi fans), and UPN had Veronica Mars. Cable was scoring, too, with MTV, for instance, airing shows like Beavis and Butthead and The Real World. Meanwhile, if NBC had Matlock, The Golden Girls and Empty Nest it also had its family sitcoms, and much more youth-oriented shows like the college-set A Different World, and not long after, Friends, and Seinfeld (which if not being about teens or twentysomethings was not exactly about "adults" either, and still commanded quite the youth audience at the time), while ABC had its own youth-friendly TGIF block.

Not unrelated was that matter of "edginess." Where CBS had once been more daring and provocative than its rivals (as with the Norman Lear sitcoms, the politics of which ABC refused to touch--as one sees in its completely-missed-the-point attempt at All in the Family-minus-the-politics, the short-lived The Paul Lynde Show), it was now the channel known for offering safe, cozy stuff as the others pushed the envelope, with CBS offering Touched by an Angel as ABC contributed to broadcast TV's last truly great bout of moral panic over sex-and-violence-on-TV with NYPD Blue. (Indeed, it may say a lot that CBS' line-up from those days now makes up such a large part of the weekday lineup of the Hallmark channels.)

Certainly CBS did make some effort to vary its offerings that way, scoring cult successes with quirkier and sometimes more daring material (like The Flash, or Picket Fences), and even a measure of real commercial success (as with Northern Exposure), but when it broke with its pattern it seems to have more often been a matter of trying to make something out of its rivals' declining properties and outright cast-offs, and often not succeeding (as with its picking up longtime TGIF staple Family Matters well past its peak, only to see the onetime top twenty hit fail to make the top hundred in its one season on the channel, finishing out its run at a dismal #108). The result was that even when the channel started having top ten-caliber hits with a broader appeal--indeed, began setting trends with shows like the reality TV-pioneering Survivor and forensics show boom-launching CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (I didn't say they were good trends, just that CBS launched them)--the old person's image stuck and the channel never quite shook it. But then TV was becoming an old person's scene anyway, the young inclining toward the Internet, especially after streaming took off, and indeed a glance at the Nielsen ratings these past few years, dominated by the NCIS franchise, and The Big Bang Theory franchise, and Blue Bloods, make it look like it's the '70s all over again, with 2020-2021 seeing it ratings champion for thirteen straight years.

How Has Robert Ludlum's Readership Held Up Over the Years?

When I was researching The James Bond We Forget I found myself looking for empirically useful indications of the readership of the James Bond novels in recent years--originals and continuation novels alike. In the process I hit on the idea that the number of Goodreads ratings a book got might be an indicator. Going by these it seemed that, as I had suspected, there were not many of them. Casino Royale, greatly boosted by the hit movie, still had some 70,000 ratings when I looked--and the figure fell by more than three-fifths between there and the next book, Live and Let Die. The numbers continued trending downward from there, to about 10,000 for The Man with the Golden Gun, while the continuation novels did even less well--some of them having under a thousand such ratings.

Just for the sake of comparison, Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train each have over 2 million ratings, and Me Before You over 1 million ratings. Of course, the books in question were older and the platform less favorable to them--but compare Casino Royale even with Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October--which had well over 300,000 ratings.

Recently I wondered where Robert Ludlum fits into the picture. As it happens his novel The Bourne Identity has an impressive 420,000 ratings--doubtless also helped by having been the basis for an identically titled hit movie. But, even with the boost provided by hit adaptations of the sequels, these did far, far less well. The Bourne Supremacy has about 181,000 ratings, The Bourne Ultimatum a mere 63,000. And while Bourne got his continuation novels the way Bond has the ratings for these dwindled fast--the more recent of these scoring about a couple of thousand. Meanwhile Ludlum's non-Bourne novels have not held up all that well readership-wise, if one goes by this measure. The most-rated non-Bourne novel is The Matarese Circle, with a mere 42,000 ratings, The Icarus Agenda having about 30,000 (not sure why it ended up next in line), and The Aquitaine Progression a little under 19,000, with his The Road to Omaha (one of his two comedies) at the bottom of the list with just 4,000.

I think I was more surprised by the limited evidences of a readership for Ludlum than for Fleming. After all, Fleming's storytelling style (telling the doings of James Bond as though he were writing Madame Bovary, while every so often subjecting us to a thirty-page account of a card game) is not what readers of popular fiction these days expect from a thriller, such that Bond fans--especially fans who think of a Bond movie as properly a light, fun, gimmick-packed action-adventure secret agent procedural--quickly drop the books in disinterest. Meanwhile they never acquired the level of cachet a John le Carrè has had, leaving those who might otherwise bear with them unwilling to struggle with an old, difficult book--while many regard the social attitudes of that Edwardian Etonian as unforgivable. (Race and gender get all the press, but there is much, much more there to be offended by.)

By contrast Ludlum was a more recent writer (not 2020, but still, not a writer already being lambasted as a reactionary in the '50s), offering more straightforward, brisker, more action-packed novels. (Indeed, I think that more than anyone else he can be credited with having brought the paperback shoot 'em-up-style just arriving on the scene in the '70s into the high-end, big-press hardcover spy thriller.) There is, too, the cachet that the Ludlum media franchise has had--which I expected to do more for the readership of his books than the Bond movies manage to do for Fleming's books (let alone Gardner's), as well as the buzz that a number of his works make from development hell (as with those versions of The Matarese Circle and The Chancellor Manuscript that we heard about). But it has been far from being enough to save him--and at least to go by what I see on the Goodreads pages, a reminder that where popular fiction is concerned blockbusters very quickly lose their appeal for most readers. Indeed, I suspect that had Doug Liman's film The Bourne Identity not become a hit back in 2002 the Ludlum name (which through the '90s went from topping the bestseller lists to falling right off of them) would be all but forgotten today save by a few older fans and hardcore students of the form--a latterday William Le Queux or E. Phillips Oppenheim.

New and Noteworthy (Collected)

Back in the '00s, with social media rather less developed and utilized, it was not uncommon for bloggers to post little announcements or referrals to other material such as we would now convey to the world through a service like Twitter instead. I certainly did this with various items that caught my eye under such headings as "New and Noteworthy," "Links Round-Up" and "Items of Interest" (up until 2013, by which point the practice made less sense).

Many of these items have since lost their interest simply because they became dated, while in cases th items in question have disappeared altogether, such that it makes little sense to keep them here. Still, it seemed to me that a few were worth preserving and this post fulfills that purpose, providing a round-up of the lot in one place for anyone who might be interested in them, organized by date.

May 10, 2009
* As usual, io9's providing a lot of interesting items, with two of the more noteworthy its list of "Dumbest Space Operas of All Time!" and a "rant" asking the question "Have War Movies Become Superhero Flicks?" (My answer to that question is absolutely yes-and as it happens, I actually discussed some of the reasons for that in a January article in the Internet Review of Science Fiction, "Science Fiction and the Post-Cold War.")

* Also worth a look is Ken MacLeod's recent posting on the handling of the theme of the "surveillance society" in science fiction, and Geoff Ryman's thoughts on the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica.

As you might guess, Ryman is no exception to the disappointment felt by so many other viewers, feeling himself to have been proved right in a dismaying way.

I was left feeling proved right in a dismaying way myself, though the things that really bugged me weren't the same ones. In my May 2008 IROSF article, "The Golden Age of Science Fiction Television" I referred to the writing on the show as often being

silly, sensationalist, muddled and inconsistent (especially in its running post-Nine-Eleven commentary), its gimmicks more derivative than casual viewers of science fiction generally appreciated, and the theory of "naturalistic" science fiction touted by the writers really much ado about nothing.

In that regard the finale lived down to my lowest expectations, reminding me what utterly mediocre SF the show was, espousing an astonishing number of terrible genre cliches at its core, not the least of them a lame pseudo-religiosity (all the things that didn't make sense before still didn't make sense, thereby proving it was all God's plan!) and a "Frankenstein complex" Luddism that was already tired when Isaac Asimov coined that term seventy years or so ago.

So why was there all that hype about what a great, ground-breaking show BSG was? My guess is that the response was due to its catering to the skewed standards of TV critics, who overvalue pointless head games, "crisp" filler dialogue, unlikable characters (provided, of course, that they're unlikable in the "right" ways), homage to the political pieties of the moment, and the tendency to take oneself far, far too seriously, something this show always did.

August 27, 2009
* Charles Stross offers an impassioned and incisive analysis of the dark side of mainstream American political culture (more deeply frightening and disturbing than any of his Lovecraft homages) at his always worthwhile blog, Charlie's Diary.

* io9 recently published an interview with Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden which promises to be on the future of science fiction books (focusing mainly on the impact of e-books and the Internet, rather than on the content itself).

* Strange Horizons recently made the news-the regular news read by people who don't follow the genre (in this case, the Los Angeles Times)-after Hugo-winner John Scalzi offered to match up to $500 in donations for the non-profit magazine.

* Jonathan McCalmont, over at his Ruthless Culture blog, offers a compelling commentary on the whole issue of public support of the arts, which devotes some attention to the case of Strange Horizons specifically-and the ultimately structural nature of the problem of the respective places of amateur and pro.

September 21, 2009
* Plenty from the always worthwhile Charlie's Diary, including Stross and his readers' tracking of the saga of the Arctic Sea (the last entry on which was "More News From the Tom Clancy Dimension"); his thoughts on the joys of customer service call centers in the New Economy (said disregard for service I chalk up to the combination of "short-termism"-now an accepted term, appearing routinely in academic papers on economics and business-and the view that cutting wage expenditures is the way to business success); and an extended discourse on the "political threats of the 21st century" with an eye to the totalitarian potential latent within transhumanism and extropianism, and the prospect of Singularitarians in "chrome-plated jackboots."

* The return of the English-language edition of the Polish steampunk-themed compendium Steampunkopedia (as Steampunkopedia2) on September 3.

October 8, 2009
* A fairly lively discussion over at Lou Anders's Bowing to the Future about the old issue of the mainstream's literary elite's attitude toward speculative fiction (one which recaps recent high points in the debate-not least, the comments from Kim Stanley Robinson and recent genre coverage in The Guardian-and also includes participants unafraid of raising issues of cold hard cash, and possible hypocrisy).

* From io9's Lauren Davis, a graph offering a comprehensive track of the popularity of genre themes over time, one which suggests some interesting conclusions. Interestingly Davis notes that

the graph's most striking feature is the boom all the themes apparently experienced in the 1990s . . . [which] now seems to be on the decline . . . suggest[ing] a huge investment in genre television shows (and perhaps in television in general) that we simply aren't seeing any more . . . Interestingly, space travel shows were the first to go as circumstances changed, and although shows about managed to hang on longer, they, too are on their way out. Does this indicate that science fiction and fantasy shows are on the decline? Or does it represent a shift to less expensive, near-future science fiction with different speculative priorities, shows like Dollhouse, Chuck, and Fringe?

My methodology in setting forth my assessment of the situation in the June 2008 and June 2009 editions of the Internet Review of Science Fiction was less scientific, but similar in some of its conclusions (particularly about the shift in tropes, away from space, toward the close-at-hand, the subtly different, and the low budget). Chuck, of course, is all but finished, Dollhouse hung on by the skin of its teeth, and Fringe could be in trouble, so it may well be that the turn to "less expensive, near-future science fiction with different speculative priorities" may be a transition to even bleaker times ahead for the genre.

October 16, 2009
* Jonathan McCalmont's latest "Blasphemous Geometries" column over at Futurismic, in which he discusses the value system embedded in many of the best-known games in the first-person shooter, an additional comment about which he has posted on his personal blog, Ruthless Culture.

The heart of his argument is that in video games (as other observers, including Thomas Frank-who is cited in the piece-have pointed out about a great deal of other contemporary culture), we get an outrageous, even rebellious-seeming surface, underlain by the acceptance or even promotion of conservative or conformist values (from consumerism-as-the-essence-of-individualism to a Hobbesian world-view). As McCalmont rather elegantly puts it, these games present

man as little more than a beast: a blend of Hobbesian savage and PCP-fuelled homo economicus who can unleash unspeakable and unrepentant violence in service of his own desires, but who would never seek to question either the system he is a part of or his ultimate involvement in it.

* Over at Tor.com (for which October 2009 is steampunk month), Vernian Process founder and Gilded Age Records cofounder Joshua Pfeiffer discusses differing treatments of the sociopolitical side of steampunk (which I think deserves as much attention as the sociopolitical side, and have devoted some time to myself).

* By way of M.C. de marco, Paul Graham's essay on "Post-Medium Publishing," which wrestles with a problem raised by, among others, Cory Doctorow-namely that (as he put it in "Happy Meal Toys Versus Copyright," downloadable as part of the Content collection available on his web site) an

"information economy" can't be based on selling information. Information technology makes copying information easier and easier. The more IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information from here on in. The information economy is about selling everything except information.

Which of course leaves us wondering-where do we go from here? As you might expect, Graham doesn't have any answers, but he does have some ideas about what an answer might look like.

January 7, 2010
* CNN's list of the "nine worst tech movies of all time." There's a bit of hyperbole in the title, of course, but there are plenty of "bad" movies here all right, and certainly bad in the ludicrousness of their depictions of the technologies concerned. (Incidentally, it's no surprise to me that most of the films are from the '90s, with the most recent given as coming from 2002-for reasons I discussed at length in my February 2009 article for the Internet Review of Science Fiction, "Racing Down the Information Superhighway: Computers in 1990s Film," in which I not only discussed the subject, but critiqued many of the same movies.)

* By way of the prolific video game blog Kotaku, one Karachi resident's observation that the street signs in Modern Warfare 2's recreation of the city are written in the wrong language-Arabic, instead of Urdu (Pakistan not being an Arabic-speaking country).

Naturally, this started a debate regarding the broader unrealism of the game (which is, of course, considerable at every point, even by techno-thriller standards), and even the real-life political situation it draws on for its inspiration.

My take on this particular error: a sad reminder of our collective geographic illiteracy (did no one at the company realize this very basic point?), and the tendency to simplistically view whole parts of the world as monolithic blocks-as when someone refers to "Africa," "Asia" or "Latin America" as though any one of these were all one thing. (In spite of U.S. foreign policy's preoccupation with the Middle East since the '70s, which went into overdrive in the last decade, the North Africa/Southwest Asia/South Asia/Central Asia region seems especially susceptible to such misconceptions, with especially unfortunate consequences, because of the political charge involved.)

* For those who haven't seen it before, Mark Rosenfelder's humorous piece "If all stories were written like science fiction stories," in which a perfectly ordinary trip to San Fransisco is given the genre treatment. (Of course, this particular prose style has long since ceased to be fashionable, with "lived-in" futures in which the characters take all the trappings in stride as part of daily life enjoying more favor, but the point is valid all the same.)

March 26, 2010
* Charles Stross on Blindsight author Peter Watts's conviction-with a focus on what this whole situation tells us about the directions in which both civil liberties and globalized capitalism are moving. (As usual when an issue like this comes up, there's plenty of interest in the comments thread as well.)

September 7, 2010
* By way of io9, Connal at A Dangerous Business on his visit to the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games. (Yes, they had video games there too.)

* Also from io9: this list of science fiction films Hollywood is currently remaking (twenty-one of them!), accompanied by alternative suggestions of successful but as-yet unfilmed science fiction works.

I don't know all of the alternatives they mention, and I'm not sure that all the ones I do know really would be worth filming, even when I happen to like the source material. (I don't think there's a two hour movie in John Kessel's "Pride and Prometheus," for instance. And while there's no arguing the place of E.E. Smith's Lensman in the history of space opera, it may be too sprawling and too old-fashioned to be viable as a Hollywood movie.)

All the same, I'm sympathetic to the idea behind the post. An unwillingness to let go of (or let rest) a salable brand name or profitable intellectual property--an obsession with the sequel, the series, the remake--has always been part of Hollywood's way of doing things, and if it seems more pronounced now, it is worth remembering that this is also a response to the ever-bigger gamble involved in gigantic and still-growing budgets, shortening theatrical runs, ever-more fickle attendance at theaters, and the ever-louder pop cultural cacophony which a project needs to get above to be seen or heard, something easier to do with an already-established IP.

But all that's really no excuse. The budgets are as big as they are because the studios are so preposterously wasteful, the audiences fickle in large part because so much of the product is so bad and the ticket (and concession) prices so high, while the larger cacophony of pop culture is a reflection of their own hype-creating machines. And it's well worth remembering that much of the mess is due to the contempt of Big Media for the new and the creative that has made reality television (ugh!) what it is today, another, crucial reason for this desperate clinging to the same old IPs.

Ultimately, the biggest threat of all to their profit margins is their small-minded insistence on trying to hold back change rather than adapt to it.

And so here we have the studios determined to produce mega-budget movies no one ever asked for while ignoring vast, fertile fields of possibility. Going down the list, it seems to me that not one of the listed remakes is a genuinely exciting prospect, with some of these movies redoing what hadn't even been worth doing the first time around, and others bound to be inferior to what was accomplished with their concepts on the first go.

* SfSignal's recent "MindMeld" on "the next big thing" in science fiction and fantasy literature. Predictably, none of the authors interviewed had a particularly good answer--at least, not as straight answers go. None of them convincingly points to a new scientific development or area of technology opening up explored new territory, to an orthodoxy that will be challenged, or a vein of untapped potential that can be mined, or a new work or talent changing the game. If anything, they put me in mind of the argument I've made time and again that nothing to compare with, for instance, the splash cyberpunk made in the '80s, seems to be on the horizon.

Still, Jeff Vandermeer in particular has fun brushing off the question with facetious answers.

* Jonathan McCalmont's review of Adam Roberts' New Model Army for The Zone. You may remember I reviewed the same book for Strange Horizons back in June, but his take is quite different, McCalmont declaring it "one of those rare works that seems to provide a cultural blueprint for the entire genre," and indeed, inviting comparison with the birth of the novel. (I think that's a bit much, but as might be expected from McCalmont, the case is certainly an interesting one.)

* Victoria Strauss dissects the implications of statistics on self-published books recently published by Publisher's Weekly at the blog of the Science Fiction Writers of America. That there are more books appearing through this avenue doesn't mean more people are actually buying them, a reminder that, as Andrew Orlowski put it, the hope that "things would get fairer on the Interwebs" for those whose path to authorship has been blocked by Big Media has not been realized, and perhaps will not be.

* Last but not least, the winners of this year's Hugo Awards have just been announced. China Mieville's The City & The City and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl tied for best novel. Best novella went to Charles Stross's "Palimpsest" (first published in the collection Wireless, which I reviewed for Strange Horizons last year). Best novelette went to Peter Watts for his highly praised "The Island" (which appeared in the New Space Opera 2 anthology). You can click on the link to read the full list.

September 19, 2010
* Charles Stross, drawing on Alvin and Heidi Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock, recently looked back at the place of religious tolerance inside a world that is looking worrisomely authoritarian; and offered his thoughts on authorial fact-checking of minor details, with Carrie Vaughn's Discord's Apple held up as an object lesson.

* Airlock Alpha's Michael Hinman on HBO's recent loss of subscribers, itself part of the unprecedented, broader slippage of cable, this year seeing a drop in paying customers for the very first time. This has often been taken as a reflection of the broader economic crunch, but some also wonder if cable isn't suffering from competition with Netflix and the Internet.

There's surprisingly little comment so far, though, about how cable has tried to cope with that competition. Far from trying to fight by offering a better product or better prices as market enthusiasts would have us believe is the response to such a situation, the industry has dedicated itself to simply making it as difficult as possible for consumers to get the Internet on their TV screens, while offering less product and higher prices--yanking channels out of their analog line-ups without cutting their rates, but clearly pushing them to pick up more expensive digital packages (with John Luciew earlier this year offering an interesting take on one particularly affected group, those who rely on TV to help get them through their exercise routine).

I leave you to draw the obvious conclusions about this situation.

* Publetariat: People Who Publish, "an online community and news hub built specifically for indie authors and small, independent imprints." There is a fair amount of standard how-to stuff here, admittedly, but there is also quite a bit of news and commentary about the business itself, oriented to this marginal but heavily populated side of the publishing business (mentioned here in my blog post of the 7th this month).

November 29, 2010
• Ken MacLeod's posting on his blog of his 2006 speech on science fiction as "the first human literature," an analysis well worth the read.

• Michael Hinman of Airlock Alpha offers an incisive analysis of the "boneheaded scheduling moves" that have characterized the Syfy Channel's line-ups in recent years, with the demise of Caprica offered as an object lesson for the mismanagement of heavily serialized shows. He also offers a plausible alternative model, though my guess is that Syfy (which now airs some form of reality TV every weeknight, including Smackdown in the Friday night slot) has already written off science fiction-just as science fiction fans should be writing the channel off.

• Spy novelist Jeremy Duns' interview of J.P. Trevor on his blog, The Debrief. Trevor is an artist and production designer best known for cinematic special effects work on Star Wars and the Tim Burton Batman, but he is also the son of novelist Adam Hall, the author of the "Quiller" spy series. The Quiller novels have been translated to the big screen in a 1966 movie and the small one by the BBC in a 1975 series, and in the past decade MGM bought up the film rights in order to take another crack at the series-which has yet to materialize-and it is on this that the interview focuses.

November 30, 2010
* Airlock Alpha's Dennis Rayburn, revisiting the question of reboots, remakes and re-everything else, asks "Is Hollywood Creatively Bankrupt?"

This seems like a rhetorical question, of course. After all, can anyone but a Beverly Hills Babbitt possibly say "No" to that with a straight face? However, it's not just that I'm sympathetic to the sentiment that led me to note it here; Rayburn does show how it fits in with the industry's broader situation.

All the same, I think he's overoptimistic about the reality "craze" fading away. It's already gone strong for a decade now, with no sign of letting up, and the creative bankruptcy of which he's spoken, and the attractions of reality TV for media executives, especially those trapped between the shrinking resources of beleaguered networks, and the smaller ones of the network's cable subsidiaries (low production costs, non-unionized writers, none of that messy "creative process" Suits can't stand) make it exceptionally resistant to a backlash from an audience that frankly isn't discerning enough to teach Hollywood a lesson by refusing to have anything to do with the format.

* An abbreviated version of the roundtable discussion about the history of pulp science fiction magazines between Robert Silverberg, Richard A. Lupoff and Frank M. Robinson, up at the Locus web site. (Those intrigued by the subject may also want to check out this 2006 article by Brian Curtis for Slate Magazine regarding pulp fiction generally, across genre boundaries-and in knowing that since its redesign in October, Tangent Online has devoted a section to those same pulps, as well as one to classic science fiction in all formats.)

* Charles Stross on the possibility that a virus is responsible for the obesity epidemic, as well as the tiresome tendency to view physical illness as a matter of moral failure rather than biological disease. (Also of interest on Charlie's Diary: his commentary on the recent announcement of Prince William's marriage, which those similarly inclined may find a welcome respite from the tedious, fawning hoopla surrounding the event.)

December 7, 2011
* A trio of recent pieces from Jonathan McCalmont's Ruthless Culture on our "culture of passive-aggressive friendliness," Occupy Wall Street, and personal ambition (or to be precise, the lack of it).

* An amusing bit from Cracked about "8 Scenes That Prove Hollywood Doesn't Get Technology." (Five of the eight are actually from crime dramas on CBS – with NCIS accounting for two all by itself, the original and New York spin-offs of CSI for another two, and NUMB3RS rounding out the group. However, the 1995 film Hackers, well-known for its unique attempt to convey the experience of computer hacking on the big screen, also appears here.)

February 25, 2012
* Cory Doctorow on "The Coming War on General-Purpose Computing" and a response from Joe Brockmeier – agreeing about the import of the "copyright war," but raising some other, perhaps even trickier issues. Of related interest: Joe Karaganis on public opinion and heavy-handed online piracy crackdowns.

* Two recent pieces by Jonathan McCalmont, the first on Tim Maughan's indie short fiction collection Paintwork, which includes an interesting overview of the cyberpunk genre since the 1980s; and the second on the formulaic nature of American independent cinema. (Incidentally, McCalmont's discussion focuses on films of the 2000s like About Schmidt, Sideways and Young Adult, more than the angsty slackers, frustrated Hollywood-creative types and quirky lowlifes I personally associate the category with, but nonetheless does a good job describing a substantial amount of the recent territory.)

* At Strange Horizons: Susan Marie Groppi on her departure from the fiction department; reviews of two particularly intriguing books – Adam Roberts' new novel By Light Alone (the clever central gimmick in which is genetic engineering which endows human hair with photosynthetic properties, with huge consequences) and Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (which combines a bleak post-greenhouse future with the '80s geek nostalgia hinted at in the title); and Genevieve Valentine take on the new film version of John le Carré's classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as science fiction.

September 5, 2012
* At Forbes, a lengthy article by David Vinjamuri on indie publishing. It seems to me especially notable for its critical take on the contempt to which these authors have been subjected by bestselling authors who came up the traditional way, like Sue Grafton (who has been especially nasty), and Vinjamuri's thoughts on the economics of book pricing.

* From io9, "Ten Rules of Blockbuster Movies that Hollywood Forgot." Given that the number of blockbusters made is so small, and reliant on such a small, closely connected club of people for their creation (the handful of producers, directors, stars and executives capable of getting them green-lit, and their advisers), it seems astonishing that the product does not reflect a more robust institutional memory in these respects - but as the article makes quite clear, this has often been absent.

November 19, 2012
* Charles Stross presents his predictions about the year 2512, which, again, are a far cry from what his more extravagant fiction would lead one to expect (with rather less in the way of transhumanism and outer space adventures, and rather more in the way of climate change's consequences).

* Ken MacLeod's essay "The Soul of Man After Socialism," in which he argues that socialism, or something like it, will be more rather than less necessary in a transhuman future, on the grounds that nothing has quite matched the socialist project's assertion of a common humanity - a position which will be all the more challenged by technological change. As MacLeod notes in his mention of the essay on his blog, he touched on these ideas earlier in a September post, "Mapping the Posthuman," which also provides some useful context.

January 24, 2013
* Ian Sales on taking Amazon's bestseller lists as a guide to larger trends in book publishing.

February 26, 2013
* Tom Shone of the Guardians' film blog on the end of what he called the "Oscar film," described here as "mid-range, mid-budget humanitarian epics like Dances With Wolves, Gandhi and Driving Missy Daisy, about the moral efficacy of the individual – one person making a difference, in costume" - and of course, how that led to Argo (a controversial win in quite a few quarters) beating Lincoln.

* David Walsh with quite another perspective on how the ceremony played out. As one might expect given his particularly pointed criticism of some of the year's nominees (like Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty, but also Argo), he criticizes the product on the grounds of politics as well as art, which he sees as broadly representative of problematic tendencies within the film industry, like the superficiality of its "liberalism" (limited to culture and lifestyle, while thoroughly conservative in its attitudes toward economics and international politics), and its refusal to "mention . . . a single problem of contemporary life" ("one had the distinct sense that some powerful anti-reality filtration system was at work in the hall"), with the implications of Michelle Obama's presenting the Best Picture award, and Syriana producer and star George Clooney's being among the recipients, naturally remarked upon.

March 18, 2013
* Kent Anderson on the cheapening of the word "innovation." That the post is itself a comment on an earlier post by Scott Berkun from more than five years ago only highlights how thoroughly this term has been abused by a certain kind of technology and business-hyping nit-wit, ruining it for everyone else, so that we are all far, far, far past the point at which we should, if not totally cease and desist using the term, at least use it only very, very carefully.

We can think of it this way: if you're saying it, you probably aren't doing it.

* Tor.com on the prospect of a rise in the cost of video games with the next generation of consoles (Playstation 4, XBox 720 and the rest) now on the horizon.

I should say, though, that the $70 video game does not seem all that new to me. I remember such retail prices for 8-bit games way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Admittedly, such prices were a rarity, but given the inflation we have since then, which has almost halved the purchasing power of a dollar ($1 today is like 53 cents in 1989, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), a $70 game today is about equal to $37 then, a bit below what was average at the time - which suggests a slight drop in prices.

How many things can one say that about? Certainly not food. Or energy. Or education. Or health care. Or any of the other things that really do put pressure on people's budgets. And in contrast with all these other areas, it does seem pretty clearly the case that gamers are getting more product for their money.

* Charles Stross, considering the possible implications of a British exit from the EU (which he thinks will not be pretty for the British economy).

May 2, 2013
* John Winters on being a (self-described) self-publishing failure, a much needed corrective to the kinds of success stories our rags-to-riches-quick-fantasy-obsessed culture trumpets.

* By way of the Ukiah Blog, a piece by Victoria Beale in the New Republic which offers a critical take on Paul Coelho, as both artist and thinker, with her assessment of the author's Message tidily summed up in its last sentences:

[U]nder the platitudes Coelho’s philosophy has always been a harsh worldview: unhappiness or lack of fulfilment is only for the weak and unfocused. And increasingly in his books, success can only be measured against the author and the obstacles he has overcome. The gospel of self-reliance has never been so trite or unforgiving.

Make what you will of Coelho's star status at Davos.

* In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alec Ash's interview with writer Fei Dao about science fiction in China touching on the genre's history and influences in China (interestingly he identifies Soviet science fiction as one of the "big three" influences, alongside Western and Japanese science fiction), its current concerns (reflecting the country's modernization), as well as the audience for this type of work and the prejudices it is up against (which are not all that dissimilar from what it has seen in the West).

May 21, 2013
* At Fanpop, a well-constructed response to the enmity so many apparently feel toward Game of Thrones' Sansa Stark. (I would have to number myself among those who see her character as one of the series' more sympathetic - and a reminder that much as we complain about the prevalence of Mary Sue/Gary Stu characters, a large segment of the audience all but demands them, and becomes quite unreasonable when their demand is not met.)

* A provocative piece from Airlock Alpha's Amber Hollingsworth which takes on the issue of "Why Horror Isn't Scary, But Thrillers Are."

* A number of Charles Stross's recent posts, including his response to Margaret Thatcher's passing, and its aftermath; his "Public Service Announcement" about why it is best to ignore the news; his announcement of the release of The Traders' War (an omnibus edition of the first three Trade of Queens novels, "revised and reassembled as the single book it was meant to be"); and his piece on British nuclear disarmament, which offers a succinct critical history of the country's strategic deterrent.

May 25, 2013
* Three pieces by David Walsh. The first is a follow-up to his earlier consideration of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty which responds to later revelations about the film's production. The other two discuss Baz Luhrmann's hit remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, with the first a review of the movie which considers a side of Fitzgerald and his book that you very likely did not encounter in high school; and the second an examination of some recent misadventures of the tiresome Prince Harry and company through the lens of the novel, and the film, in turn, through Luhrmann's associations with British royals.

* An amusing piece from SFX's Nick Setchfield on what Star Trek might have looked like had it first appeared in the 1890s, 1930s, 1950s or 1970s.

June 10, 2013
* Patrick Nielsen Hayden's obituary for British novelist Iain Banks, perhaps best known to science fiction fans for Consider Phlebas, the first of his "Culture" novels, and a founding work of the new space opera. He will genuinely be missed.

* Ian Sales reviews James Lovegrove's The Age of Zeus. (You may remember my review of Lovegrove's previous mix of mythology and contemporary military adventure, The Age of Ra, which I reviewed here.)

* Charles Stross's latest crib sheet on writing The Jennifer Morgue - in which he wrote the Laundry's Bob Howard into a James Bondian adventure.

June 17, 2013
* Gawker's Max Read on the accents in Game of Thrones (which has recently concluded its third season).

* As Jonathan McCalmont notes over at Ruthless Culture, Speculative Fiction 2012, a round-up of the best online nonfiction writing about the genre, is out. As might be guessed by those who followed the portion of the blogosphere devoted to science fiction, the debate kick-started by Paul Kincaid's September 2012 review essay about three year's best anthologies for the L.A. Review of Books has a place in it, with Kincaid's piece included, as well as Jonathan McCalmont's response "Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future."

* Ken MacLeod's remembrance of Iain Banks in The Guardian.

* Also in The Guardian, Cory Doctorow on the recent revelations about the NSA's Prism program.

June 22, 2013
* David Walsh looks back on the career of the late James Gandolfini. (Naturally, he has plenty to say about The Sopranos, and what the reception of that show says about its cultural moment.)

* Shoshanna Kesock considers Syfy's Defiance.
* From io9, Charlie Jane Anders on the possibility of a Zack Snyder-helmed Wonder Woman movie. (I, for one, don't think this project is any more likely than the others, and certainly had a much more favorable view of Watchmen, which is probably the superhero movie I've enjoyed most in recent years, but the piece does touch on a lot of the relevant issues.)

July 9, 2013
* Last month io9's Rob Bricken asked "Does DC Have a Chris Nolan Problem?" after watching Man of Steel. I think DC certainly has a problem--but that it's the same problem everyone else has, and that the tendency he attributes to Christopher Nolan goes far, far beyond the role of any one individual. It reflects where the whole industry has gone in this postmodern era of "dark-and-gritty" everything with a side of still more dark-and-gritty.

* Jonathan McCalmont's review of Nikita Mikhailov's Burnt by the Sun 2, the sequel to the Palme d'Or and Oscar-winning 1994 film--which, surprisingly, seems to have wound up a Stalinist-Orthodox version of a Michael Bay movie according to McCalmont. (How many sequels to Cannes Grand Prize winners can you say that about?)

* Charles Stross, with a provocative piece on the troubles besetting British democracy, and what he thinks it says about the future of politics.