I have just reported to Amazon the fact that their page for the vintage Ace Double, The World Jones Made by Philip K. Dick/ Agent of the Unknown by Margaret St. Clair inexplicably gives a plot description for an entirely different book, Higher Than the Highest Mountain by Keith Laggos.
The Ace Double features an early work by the influential SF author Dick and another by St. Clair, one of the few identifiable women writing SF (or, at least, getting it published) in that era. Higher Than the Highest Mountain is an evangelical Christian novel written in very simple sentences. In any case, I ordered the Ace Double and received the Christian novel. Only later, while arranging the reader, did I notice the glitch on the Amazon page.
I should have twigged that something was amiss when, after my original order, the algorithms recommended an assortment of inspirational right-wing tomes and evangelical Christian books.
A refund will be made, pending my return of the unwanted novel. We shall return to the greater implications of this Kafka Lite anomaly momentarily.
More recently, I read a James Bond novel and a Reader's Digest from roughly the same era.
I read a few of the original Bond books decades ago, and became curious to revisit the series when I heard that future releases would be modified to respect some (though not all) modern sensibilities. Honestly, I cannot better David Crow's piece on the matter at Den of Vice, so you should probably read that and return here. His main points: put a warning on them and acknowledge that these novels "are shamelessly, hopelessly... antiquated. And they are indeed from a period where the terms and attitudes we rightly deem to be offensive today were commonplace." But don't change them. Their "offenses," he notes, are what make the novels valuable now.
Look, Fleming's novels are sexist, racist, sexist, occasionally homophobic, sexist, classist, sexist, pro-colonial imperialist, and sexist. Change them and you don't have Fleming's Bond. The Bond of the films was never the Bond of the books, even in the first1 film. Change them, and you pretend the offensiveness of our history never happened. Like David Crow, I find that denial of the past dangerous to the present.
I hadn't read Dr. No before and, since it was the one which inaugurated the movie series, I signed out a copy from the local library.
It's a page-turner, as Fleming's works are, at least until it gets bogged down in its villain's propensity for exposition. Fleming has a knack for vivid description. It's also, from the perspective of someone who grew up surrounded by the 1960s spy craze, the archetypal Bond story. The Bond Girl, Honeychile Rider (just "Honey Rider" in the film) has a stupid name that sounds like a 12-year-old boy's idea of a dirty joke. Character-wise, she's entirely a male fantasy projection. The titular villain, meanwhile, possesses a lavish secret lair, an "exotic" heritage, thuggish and servile minions, and a pathological need to reveal his entire plot, in paragraphs, to his enemy.
He's Chinese-German, working with the Russians, and he bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu. How's that for poking mid-twentieth-century ethnic buttons for English and Anglo-American readers? The novel takes place in and around Jamaica, which Fleming knew-- he lived there much of his life-- but he knew it like he knew women, from a very specific and insular perspective. Sure, Bond receives assistance from his old friend Quarrel, but neither Fleming nor Bond seem capable of seeing a man of Quarrel's background as anything but child-like, occupying a secondary tier beneath a man of Bond's race and social class. Bond also immediately recognizes a government secretary as a double agent for Dr. No because... she's Chinese!
(The brief handling of that character turns nastily misogynistic; the movie laundered significantly scenes related to her).
And if you want to read a James Bond novel, you should see these things. Oh, I get that the publishers want to continue a lucrative franchise and the books, in their current form, prove a bit of a liability.2 But we can only understand where we are if we see whence we came. These novels were wildly popular in their day. They flew off shelves like foreign spies from an ejector seat. They brought their author wealth and fame; Fleming counted JFK among his admirers. Most critics writing for major periodicals saw nothing wrong with Bond's racial or sexual elements or, if they did, they failed to mention it.3 Exceptions existed. The Canadian writer, Mordecai Richler, angrily and hilariously denounced Fleming's racism, particularly his coded anti-Semitism (He also mocks Fleming's "tin ear for dialogue," much on display in Doctor No). That these books became a part of the culture tell us much about that culture and our own history.
I felt the same way about the other relic I recently read, a pristine copy of the November 1965 Reader's Digest, with its wicked Halloween-themed cover. The articles, from Fluoridation to southeast Asia, prove revealing. The piece on riots in inner-city Black neighbourhoods contains both thoughtful and prescient commentary beside eye-rollingly dated remarks, written by an author who, like Fleming, clearly could not imagine anyone would be reading his words, save for other people of European descent. It's not like the conservative-leaning Digest4 was stamped "For White Eyes Only." Anyone could and probably did read it. But like Fleming, the RD editors assumed those readers would share a common background, and that they should share assumptions about politics, race, religion, and sex. One of the most sexist reader-submitted jokes came from a female subscriber, who no doubt also enjoyed the psychology article explaining that women don't like loud music the way men do because it draws attention away from them.
So back to the Ace Double that begot a Christian novel: multiply that Amazon experience manyfold and apply it to things that actually matter, and we arrive at a computer-generated dystopia. Multiply the assumptions made by Fleming and the '65 Reader's Digest and, voila, we have the structural ____-isms against which so many people continue to struggle, and in which so many of us continue to swim, blithely unaware of the forces that buoy us.
Are these forces at work even in a nerd-beloved comedy of recent vintage? Well, maybe.
I finally saw Knights of Badassdom (2013), an amusing if uneven low-budget horror/comedy about a group of LARPers who encounter a number of problems, largely because an in-game magic-user manages to summon an actual demon. The strong cast, which includes Peter Dinklage and Summer Glau, clearly had fun making this thing. They elevate a script which relies heavily on a few jokes being replayed with variations. It's not Oscar material, but it's worth seeing if you're familiar with that side of nerdity or in the mood for skilled actors doing very silly comedy and occasionally getting slaughtered by a demon. I watched it with an old friend, and we laughed through most of it, being, you know, nerds.
It also has an almost exclusively Caucasian cast, despite depicting a convention-sized LARPER event. Maybe that's just this group of people, though. Some wiggle room there. It features only two significant female characters. One is the supremely talented wonder-babe badass, a better wish-fulfilment than Honeychile Rider, and one whom Glau invests with credible life. The other is a major character's ex-girlfriend, who appears briefly to dump him, but whose form the demon takes for much of the movie.
Make what you will of that.
I've put Bond and the Reader's Digest aside to read a current literary fantasist, Karen Russell. She has a deft, brilliant prose style, creates incredible worlds and characters, and earns her accolades. This is someone whose first novel received a Pulitzer nomination. She is also-- I will say, aware, since it would trigger too many people if I called her woke. A little ways in, though, I'm finding I prefer those stories in her collection that also show off her storytelling.
Perhaps that's just me.
1. Like everyone else, I ignore in the counting the 1954 American Made-for-TV adaptation of Casino Royale. I have watched it. It's not that good.
2. Even Fleming, back in the 50s, changed a chapter title of one of his novels for the American audience, because of its inclusion of a particularly nasty racial slur.
3.Dr. No, the novel, actually received its share of negative reviews, but not for the reasons I am addressing.
4. Which I read regularly as a child, though it was the slightly divergent Canadian edition.