In Battles Of Man Versus Machine, James Bond Always Wins

Andre Millard, author of Equipping James Bond: Guns, Gadgets, and Technological Enthusiasm, offers a piece on Bond and the threat of technology at Smithsonian.com. 

Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels have been enjoyed by a global audience since the 1950s, and the films constitute the longest running and most profitable franchise in the history of the movies. This fictional character is a global icon admired by millions.

What explains 007’s enduring appeal?

Adventure, guns, and girls, surely. But Bond’s long-standing popularity can’t be separated from our relationship with technology. The Bond character consistently embodies our ever-changing fears about the threat of new technology and assuages our anxieties about the decline of human agency in a world increasingly run by machines.

Ian Fleming made Bond a modernizing hero, and the centrality of his gadgets in the films have established Bond, armed with watches capable of creating magnetic fields or Aston Martins with hidden guns, as a master of technology, a practitioner of high-tech equipment in the service of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. But the reason why we, the audience, admire him and follow his never-ending career is to be found in his inevitable conflict with the machine.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/battles-man-machine-james-bond-always-wins-180972627/ 

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Ian Fleming and his iconic character James Bond via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/11/my-crime-beat-column-happy-anniversary.html

Equipping James Bond: Guns, Gadgets, And Technological Enthusiasm

John Greenya at the Washington Times offers a review of Andre Millard’s Equipping James Bond: Guns, Gadgets, and Technological Enthusiasm. 

While this highly readable book will not tell you how to make exploding pens, shoes with hidden knives or shoot death rays out the back of the family Buick, it does tell you how and where Ian Fleming, the author of the 12 James Bond novels, came up with these “fiendishly clever” devices. In other words, this book resembles the old bait and switch: The title overpromises, but the subtitle is more accurate.

Along the way, the author (a professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who has written books on Beatlemania and Birmingham’s rock ‘n’ roll years) provides one of the best capsulized histories of technology in warfare I’ve ever read. It also traces the development of the Bond character from the books of the 1960s to the movies of the present day, or, to put it differently, from George Lazenby to Daniel Craig.

Andre Millard puts Fleming in historical perspective: “Winston Churchill and Ian Fleming were perfect representatives of two generations of Englishmen — the Victorians and the Edwardians — who saw their world transformed. Churchill (born in 1874) and Fleming (born in 1908) lived through the Second Industrial Revolution, which brought a host of wonderful new inventions that changed life in ways large and small … The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued that ‘the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of inventions.

… While most modernists praised the positive possibilities of this new age, Ian Fleming, a British Navy commander-turned-high-level-bureaucrat-turned-journalist-turned-spy-turned-world-famous-novelist, chose to explore the dark side. Like Churchill, a gentleman born into privilege, Ian Fleming was, also like him, fascinated with inventions, fast planes, cars and boats, and was a known tinkerer. He was also nostalgic for the good old days of Her Majesty’s secret operations branch, which in the books Fleming called M16.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/nov/21/book-review-equipping-james-bond-by-andre-millard/ 

Note: A small complaint: Ian Fleming never called British intelligence “MI6.” He called Mr. Bond’s intelligence organization the Secret Service, which he even used in a book title, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.