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Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[August 22, 1967] Boldly Going Down Under (Star Trek, Spies and space in Australia)

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by Kaye Dee

Since Star Trek debuted in the US last year, I’ve been eagerly awaiting its appearance Down Under after reading all the fascinating episode reviews that my fellow writers have produced for the Journey.

As I’ve mentioned before , the arrival of overseas television programmes onto Australian screens can vary wildly, from a few months to several years after premiering in their home country, so I had no idea how long I might have to wait. Thankfully, this time it’s only taken about ten months for the adventures of the crew of the USS Enterprise to reach our shores, with the series premiering in Sydney on TCN-9, the flagship station of the Nine Network, on Thursday 6 July.

Who’s Watching Out for the Watchers?
Like the introduction of Doctor Who in Australia, Star Trek’s presence on our screens has had to pass the scrutiny of the Australian Film Censorship Board (AFCB), which reviews all foreign content for television broadcast in Australia – and like Doctor Who, it has not escaped unscathed. The good Doctor’s Australian premiere was delayed by the AFCB considering its early episodes not suitable for broadcast in a “children’s” timeslot. Other episodes have experienced censorship cuts of scenes considered scary for children, and the entire Dalek Masterplan story was even banned for being too terrifying! (I really must write a future article on the curious censorship of Doctor Who in Australia).

Similarly, The Man Trap , screened as the first episode in the US, has also been banned here, deemed unsuitable for the show’s 8.30pm timeslot due to its themes of vampirism! Apparently, the ACFB thinks Australian adults can’t handle a good, suspenseful horror-themed story at a decent viewing hour, even though it permits B-grade (or should that be Z-grade?) vampire and other horror movies to be screened after 10.30pm, as part of the Awful Movies show hosted by Deadly Earnest (the nom-de-screen of local television personality Ian Bannerman, seen above in character). However, that show plays on another network, so it is unlikely that we’ll see The Man Trap turn up there any time soon.

Meanwhile, the AFCB is still reviewing some of the first series episodes, but hopefully they won’t ban any more from screening in the normal Star Trek timeslot. However, the review process seems to have thrown any adherence to the US screening order out the window and the seven episodes shown so far have appeared in quite a different sequence. Commencing with The Corbomite Manoeuvre as the first episode, we’ve now seen Menagerie (parts 1 and 2), Arena, This Side of Paradise, A Taste of Armageddon and Tomorrow is Yesterday. Galileo Seven is scheduled for this coming Thursday. My favourite so far? Tomorrow is Yesterday : I'm always up for a time travel story.

This order may be at least partly based on what TCN-9 has available while the AFCB completes its reviews. But it could also be that the television station staff have been indulging in the apparently common practice (so I’m told by my friend at the Australian Broadcasting Commission) of picking episodes at random off the shelf, when no specific screening order has been defined. Still, as long as we get to see the rest of the episodes, in whatever order, I’ll be happy, even if we will only be watching them in black and white (as we’re not likely to get colour TV in Australia until the mid-1970s on current government planning).

A Sydney Exclusive For Now
Star Trek is only screening in Sydney at the moment, although it will be shown nationally later in the year on other Nine Network capital city stations. The reason for this broadcast strategy is not clear, but perhaps Nine is waiting to see how popular the series is in Australia’s largest market before scheduling it elsewhere? Even though the various Irwin Allen productions have had reasonable ratings on Australian television, science fiction is still seen as something of a gamble by Australian commercial broadcasters and Nine may not be as confident in its purchase of the series as it seems.

On the other hand, rumour has it that Mr. Kerry Packer, the son of the Nine Network’s chief shareholder, media baron Sir Frank Packer, is something of a science fiction fan – I do have it on good authority that he’s a fan of that wonderfully quirky British series The Avengers. Maybe Mr. Packer wants to enjoy Star Trek in his home market of Sydney first, before sharing it with the rest of the country?


Everyone Loves Mr. Spock
While the arrival of Star Trek hasn’t had a huge promotional campaign attached to it – unlike the debut of Mission:Impossible (see below) – Sir Frank has certainly made use of the resources of his Australian Consolidated Press magazines and newspapers to plug the series. The Australian Women’s Weekly, the country’s most popular women’s magazine, is rather conservative and not exactly known for embracing “out there” interests like science fiction. Yet its television critic, Nan Musgrove, gave Star Trek a very positive review in her column (and it does feel like a genuinely positive review, not just a promotion for a Packer interest).

A full page colour spread about Star Trek (above) has recently appeared in the 2 August issue and a further article about Mr. Nimoy’s Emmy nomination in the 9 August issue. Articles about Star Trek have also appeared in the Packer-owned TV Week magazine and Daily Telegraph newspaper.

The television critics of other newspapers and television guides have also generally reviewed the series favourably, although one did dismiss it rather scathingly (but then, I think he dislikes science fiction as a matter of principle!) Mr. Spock certainly stands out as the most intriguing and popular character to the reviewers, and to letter writers to the newspapers and magazines. Several have also commented very favourably on the multi-national nature of the Enterprise crew and the lack of racial prejudice in the series – these latter comments undoubtedly influenced by the racial unrest we’ve seen in the US in recent times.

Who's Watching?
I’ve not been able to obtain any ratings figures yet for these early Star Trek episodes, so it’s hard to really judge the show’s popularity with the viewing audience. But if what I’m hearing at the university is anything to go by, and what my sister and her husband tell me they are hearing at the hairdresser and at work, people who would not consider themselves science fiction fans (or even interested in science fiction) are watching Star Trek and enjoying it.

And it’s not just the adults that are watching Star Trek, either. My niece Vickie, who recently turned 10, asked to be allowed to stay up and watch Star Trek for her birthday (as her normal bedtime is 8.30pm). Her first episode was Arena – and she was so taken by it that she refused to go to bed at the usual time the following week, insisting that now she is a "big girl", she's old enough to stay up an extra hour one night a week! Well, how could we refuse a budding fan? So now she joins her parents and I in our new Thursday night routine of watching Hunter at 7.30, followed by Star Trek at 8.30pm.


Spies are All the Rage
Hunter, which precedes Star Trek (and commenced on the same evening that Star Trek premiered), is a new Australian-made spy drama from the Crawford Productions stable. Better known for its radio dramas and police show Homicide, Crawfords has decided to cash in on the current popularity of the espionage genre by producing a very slick, American-style spy drama based around the exploits of John Hunter, a Bond-like intelligence agent for an Australian security organisation, COSMIC (Commonwealth Office of Security & Military Intelligence Co-ordination).

Being on the Nine Network, Hunter has also been heavily promoted in the Packer-owned press, but nothing like the way in which the 0-10 Network has promoted the debut of its prize overseas spy-drama purchase, Mission: Impossible. Ahead of that show’s first screening at the end of June, TEN-10 in Sydney flew 50 journalists and celebrities down to Canberra on a specially chartered flight. The station’s guests were treated to an in-flight meal of champagne, fillet mignon and “super spy cocktails” (served by silver-mini-skirted hostesses), before enjoying an exclusive preview of the first episode, screened at the museum within the Royal Australian Mint! The 0-10 network must be expecting great things from Mission: Impossible, to spend so lavishly on its promotion. 

Crawfords has preferred to spend its Hunter budget, not on promotion, but on extensive location filming. This has included segments of its first six-part story, The Tolhurst File, being shot on location at the Woomera Rocket Range. Hunter is the first commercial television programme to receive permission to film at Woomera, and it’s rumoured that Hector Crawford himself made use of his high-level political connections to obtain the clearances – because right now Woomera is a very busy place indeed!

ELDO Launches at Woomera
Of course, I wouldn't let a piece on science fiction go by without a bit on actual science as well–and there is plenty to report.

It’s been over twelve months since I wrote an update on the activities of the ELDO programme. After the Europa F-4 launch was un-necessarily terminated by the Range Safety Officer in May last year, a replacement flight to test the all-up configuration of the three-stage vehicle had to be arranged. This took place on 15 November 1966, with an active Blue Streak first stage and inert dummies of the French second stage and West German third stage. The rocket’s dummy test satellite also carried instrumentation to measure the conditions that a real satellite would experience during launch.

Fortunately, this test flight was a complete success, reaching a height of over 60 miles. The dummy upper stages separated successfully from the active first stage, with all the vehicle’s components falling, as planned, into the upper region of the Simpson Desert, south-east of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

Not so successful, however, was the flight of Europa F-6, launched just a couple of weeks ago on 4 August. This mission was intended to be the first trial flight with active first and second stages (the third stage and satellite still being dummies). Initially planned for 11 July, the flight experienced 10 aborts and launch delays over more than two weeks due to systems problems and weather.

When the mission finally launched, while the first stage once again performed as planned, the French second stage failed to ignite. The cause of this failure is not yet known, but as many components of the French Coralie stage were reaching the end of their operational life due to the launch delays, investigations of the failure are focussed on this aspect. A reflight, already dubbed F6/2 is being scheduled for later this year, possibly November.

An "Australian" Astronaut
And Australia now has its "own" astronaut, in the person of Dr Phillip K Chapman, just this month selected as part of NASA's second group of 11 scientist-astronauts. Although Chapman, who is now an American citizen (as he had to be, in order to be eligible for the astronaut programme), will not fly as an astronaut wearing an Australian flag on his shoulder, we are all excited that he will probably participate in the Apollo Applications Program, which is planned to follow-on from the initial Apollo lunar landing program: maybe he will even get to walk on the Moon as the Apollo programme expands?

Originally from Melbourne, Chapman (seen here in the back row, extreme right) is one of the first two naturalised US citizens to be selected as an astronaut. A physicist and engineer, specialising in instrumentation, Chapman studied at the University of Sydney and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from which he obtained a degree in aeronautics and astronautics.

Prior to his astronaut selection, Chapman's career has included studying aurorae in Antarctica, as part of the Australian expedition there during the International Geophysical Year. He also worked on aviation electronics in Canada before joining MIT as a staff physicist in 1961. Prior to his selection as an astronaut, Chapman has most recently been employed in MIT’s Experimental Astronomy Laboratory, where he worked on several satellites. I hope I'll have the opportuntiy to meet Dr Chapman some time soon, and I look forward to reporting on his future astronaut career. 

And while I wait for a real life Australian astronaut to make his first flight, I can at last enjoy the adventures of the crew of the USS Enterprise for myself – and hope that one day they'll add an Australian to its crew as well!



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Movies

[January 24, 1966] The Sincerest Form Of Espionage (Agent for H.A.R.M., Our Man Flint, and Other Bond Imitations)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

My Word Is My Bond

The late Ian Fleming certainly didn't invent spy fiction, but he started an explosive interest in the genre with the publication of his 1953 novel Casino Royale.


And he designed the cover art, too.

Introducing British secret agent James Bond, also known as 007, the book was followed by eleven more novels, as well as the story collection For Your Eyes Only.

Spies On The Screen

Of course, the current craze for all things Bond-related didn't really get started until the release of the film adaptation of Dr. No, making an international superstar of Scottish actor Sean Connery in the role of Bond. Since then, we've seen movie versions of From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball. It seems certain that there will be more to come, at least until they run out of Fleming titles.

It's no surprise to find out that other filmmakers around the world have jumped on the bandwagon. Many of their productions, made in Europe, have yet to appear in the USA, so are beyond this discussion. (I presume that some will eventually show up, in heavily edited and badly dubbed versions, on American television.) Let me mention, at random, a few that have appeared in Yankee movie theaters.

Hot Enough For June stars Dirk Bogarde as an ordinary fellow looking for a job who gets mixed up in international intrigue because he happens to speak Czech. Known as Agent 8 3/4 on this side of the pond, just in case we ignorant Americans didn't realize it was a spy movie, it offers both action and fish-out-of-water comedy, in the form of the reluctant secret agent.


As you can tell if you've seen the trailer, it also offers Sylva Koscina's legs.

A similar combination of laughs and thrills appears in the French film That Man from Rio (L'Homme de Rio), one of the few foreign language Bond imitations to reach English-speaking audiences.


The clever screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. You can enjoy watching the trailer at your local art cinema house, if you don't mind subtitles.

We go from semi-comic adventures to out-and-out farce with Carry On Spying, one of the many films in the long-running Carry On series of lowbrow British comedies. Given that the evil organization in this movie is called STENCH, you realize that this isn't exactly subtle wit.


The oddest thing I found out when I saw the trailer is that it's in black-and-white. The genre screams for bright, bold colors.

The United Kingdom doesn't have a monopoly on silly spy spoofs. The great Vincent Price has the title role in the American comedy Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. It's so goofy that it reminds me of the beach movies to which I am addicted. And the Supremes sing the groovy title song!


Catch the trailer to see Price parody his role in The Pit and the Pendulum.

There are other followers of the Bond formula that are more dramatic. Despite a few sly references to you-know-who, Licensed to Kill is mostly a serious imitation of the original.


It was re-edited and given a nutty new title for American audiences. They also added a title song performed by Sammy Davis, Jr.

Idiot Box Intelligence Agents

Secret agents also populate our living rooms on the small screen. One of the most popular television versions of the espionage game comes in the form of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., starring Robert Vaughn as the improbably named operative Napoleon Solo and David McCallum as his Russian partner Ilya Kuryakin. Together, they fight each week against the sinister organization THRUSH.


U.N.C.L.E. stands for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. THRUSH doesn't stand for anything but evil, as far as I know.

There's also the relatively new series I Spy, with a pair of secret agents pretending to be a semi-pro tennis player and his trainer. The show manages to be both serious and comic, and benefits from the playful dialogue between the two leads.


Comedian Bill Cosby as Alexander Scott and Robert Culp as Kelly Robinson.

Also recently arriving is a series that combines the popular Western genre with the gadgets and evil megalomaniacs of spy fiction. The Wild Wild West features two secret agents working for President Ulysses S. Grant. Their adventures often involve bizarre science fiction technology, far beyond what you would expect in the Nineteenth Century.


Ross Martin as Artemus Gordon, Master of Disguise, and Robert Conrad as James West, the Bond of the Old West.

While I was working on this article, the Noble Editor informed me that the whodunit series Burke's Law, some episodes of which were written by Harlan Ellison, has changed its name to Amos Burke, Secret Agent. The millionaire playboy police captain is now a millionaire playboy spy.


The Noble Editor also informs me that it's not very good.

Naturally, we have a situation comedy based on spy stuff. Get Smart pits the good guys of CONTROL against the bad guys of KAOS (who obviously don't spell very well.)


Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, and Barbara Feldon as the otherwise nameless Agent 99.

The Young Traveler has already waxed poetic over the British import Danger Man (known as Secret Agent in the USA, because we have to have everything spelled out for us), so I won't go into any detail.


Patrick McGoohan as John Drake. In some ways, he's the antithesis of James Bond.

I've heard good things about another TV show from the UK, but it hasn't reached these shores yet. I'm talking about The Avengers, a tongue-in-cheek adventure series starring another Patrick, this one surnamed Macnee. It started broadcasting in 1961, before the first James Bond movie was released.


Patrick Macnee as John Steed and Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale. Blackman left the series to play a character with an unusual name in Goldfinger.

I understand that the American Broadcasting Company has purchased the rights to the series, and will begin showing it in the USA in a couple of months.


Wearing Steed's bowler is his new partner, Emma Peel, portrayed by Diana Rigg.

Mad About Spies

I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't mention a series of cartoons appearing in Mad magazine, of which I am a regular reader. Cuban expatriate Antonio Prohias writes and draws Spy vs Spy, which shows a Black Spy and a White Spy taking turns destroying each other. Once in a while, the female Gray Spy shows up and gets the better of both of them. This femme fatale is drawn in a more-or-less realistic fashion, unlike the pair of cone-faced male spies.


The feature changes its name to Spy vs Spy vs Spy when she arrives. For those of you who don't read Morse code, the message says By Prohias.

Double-Oh Double Feature

Speaking of Spy vs Spy, a pair of would-be Bonds arrived in American theaters this month, ready to take on each other at the box office. Who will prevail? Let's take a look at the earlier arrival first.

In H.A.R.M.'s Way


The trailer emphasizes Danger! rather than Women!

We begin with a couple of guys running through a tunnel. A soldier chases them, but gets shot down by one of them. The two reach safety, they think, but the man they meet, who was supposed to help them cross the Iron Curtain, betrays them. He shoots one of them with a funny-looking gun that makes a kind of a hiss when it fires. We'll find out that this thing is a spore gun, and it turns people into bubbling green fungus.


Who ordered an extra large spinach and pepperoni pizza?

The other guy overpowers the traitor and gets away. It turns out that this is a defecting scientist, who apparently created the deadly spore and who is working on a cure for it.


Carl Esmond as Spore Guy.

After the semi-abstract title sequence, which seems to be mandatory for this kind of thing, we get to meet our hero, Adam Chance, Agent for H.A.R.M., played by Mark Richman. In proper Bond style, he's a real ladies' man. He's got a date with his boss's secretary, but has to break it to take on a new assignment.


She's a very minor character, and I wasn't even going to mention her, but I wanted you to see her truly amazing two-tone beehive hairdo.

He also gets some smooching from a female agent he's training in judo and marksmanship. Although she's no amateur when it comes to martial arts, he overcomes her, because he's all manly and stuff.


Romance, Adam Chance style.

Adam goes to visit the scientist in his oceanside home. Also present is his niece, whom he hasn't seen in twenty years. We find out right away that she's really an imposter, working for the Commies. Attention girlwatchers: She spends almost the entire movie in a skimpy bikini. (By the way, our hero often wears a green turtleneck with a pale yellow sweater. Somehow that doesn't seem as elegant as Bond's tuxedo.)


Barbara Bouchet, as the phony niece, reacts to Adam's choice of attire.

It seems that the Bad Guys plan to spray the spores over American crops, so those rascally capitalists will turn into slimy green goop. They've got their headquarters in a little house just over the border in Mexico. They also have only about four or five guys, and one small plane, so I assume they're on a budget.


"Tell me the truth, boss; do I look more like Stevie Wonder or Johnny Mathis?"

Well, there's no need to go over the rest of the slow-moving plot. There's a lot of running back and forth between the beach house and the Bad Guys' hacienda. There are some sub-Bond gadgets. (Adam has a tape recorder disguised in an electric shaver. During a conversation with the scientist, he has to casually ask if he minds if he shaves while they talk.) Our hero gets a flat tire, so he steals a motorcycle. Don't try that the next time you get a flat.

Oh, you'd like to know what H.A.R.M. stands for?  The movie reveals this in a shot that lasts a fraction of a second, above a sort of computer map gizmo that keeps track of where the agents are located.  Are you ready?

Human Aetiological Relations Machine.

Don't ask me what that means, or why this American organization uses the British spelling.

Originally an unsold pilot for a TV series, this thing was released to an unsuspecting public as a feature film. The low budget and cramped sets of a television show are visible in every scene. The only way to enjoy it, I think, is to get together with some friends and make fun of it.

The Lighter Side of Espionage


Watch the trailer and you'll understand my lighter joke.

Next to arrive on the silver screens of America was Our Man Flint, with James Coburn playing the title role. We start with scenes (stock footage, with maybe some stuff stolen from other movies) of disasters all over the world. For a moment I thought I was watching Crack in the World again.

Cut to the headquarters of some kind of international organization. Although an establishing shot tells us we're in Washington, D.C., there are folks of different nationalities standing around. The boss is played by Lee J. Cobb. We'll find out later that the organization is known as Zonal Organization World Intelligence Espionage — Z.O.W.I.E.!


On the phone with the President of the United States. This telephone has its own special ring.

Desperate to defeat the mysterious villains behind these events, all the assembled representatives of world governments write down their desired qualifications for the perfect agent. The computer spits out only one name: Derek Flint. Cobb has to call on Flint to convince him to come out of retirement to save the world.

Flint lives in this really cool place, full of all kinds of gadgets. He can change the paintings and statues instantly, with one push of a button. He's got private practice areas for martial arts, fencing, and so forth.


Just part of a routine day for Derek Flint.

He also lives with four women, each of a different nationality, who apparently combine the characteristics of servants — barber, valet, etc. — and girlfriends.


Flint bids a temporary farewell to the ladies

Flint prepares himself for his assignment by stopping his heart for a couple of hours, a talent that will come in handy later. This requires him to maintain what seems to be a rather uncomfortable position.


Coburn is really doing this, without special effects.

After refusing to accept the usual spy gadgets, because he has his own — remember the lighter? — he immediately dispatches a couple of Bad Guys disguised as military guards.


He knows they're phonies because they're wearing ribbons for the Battle of the Bulge, which don't exist. Silly Bad Guys.

The plot gets really complicated from this point, so let me just outline it a bit. Our movie's Bad Girl, played by Israeli beauty Gina Golan, tries to kill Flint by shooting a poison dart at him with the strings of a harp.


Our femme fatale. How much do you want to bet that she falls into our hero's arms?

Traces of the ingredients for Marseilles-style bouillabaisse on the dart lead him to the French port city. Then, after exchanging information with agent 0008 while they have a fake fight, he learns that an organization known as GALAXY is behind the disasters. Golan tries to blow him up with a bomb in a jar of cold cream.

The cold cream leads him to Rome, where he encounters Golan again. Complications ensue when his four girlfriends are kidnapped. It all leads up to the final battle at GALAXY headquarters, situated on a volcanic island.


The Bad Guys have great interior decorators.

It seems that three Mad Scientists want to create a world without war and want, using the disasters they create to blackmail the world into accepting their benign dictatorship. They also use mind control to transform Flint's ladies, and a bunch of other women, into Pleasure Units, to serve the needs of their male minions.

This takes the form of entertaining them in fantasy rooms, where they play the roles of go-go dancers, maidservants of ancient times, and so forth. The most amusing of these is the room where they park in cars with the men in a simulated drive-in theater and smooch on them.

Will Flint defeat GALAXY and get his four girlfriends back? Are you kidding me?


Make that five girlfriends.

Our Man Flint is a very amusing movie. The main source of humor is the fact that Flint is incredibly competent at everything from emergency surgery to cliff diving. Coburn plays the role with just the right sense of cool assurance.

Unlike the poverty-stricken Agent for H.A.R.M., this film obviously has a real budget. The sets are lavish, and the special effects are pretty good, although you can tell that some things are just models. The action sequences are done with excellent stunt work. The movie seems to be making money, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a sequel in the works.

I'm sure there will be countless more books, movies, television series, comic books, and whatnot inspired by the spy fad. Who knows where a secret agent will show up next?


Maybe in board games. That doesn't look a whole lot like Sean Connery, by the way.




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Book

[September 3, 1963] An unspoken Bond (Ian Fleming's On Her Majesty’s Secret Service)

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By Ashley R. Pollard

Last month I talked about spies. Spies that were cool, and those who betrayed their country. With the Profumo affair still rattling around the news, I opined that spies and spying would sweep into the public consciousness. Scandals have a habit of doing that.

So, please excuse me, while I take the time to talk about another spy-centric non-SF book for this month's episode on Galactic Journey.

With the success of last year's film adaptation of Ian Fleming's Dr. No., I continue to predict that the next James Bond film, From Russia With Love, which is coming this October, will further raise the public's interest in the heady delights of techno-thrillers featuring spies. So far all I’ve seen are a couple of stills from the set, so it’s hard to make any judgment on the adaptation of the story by the filmmakers.

But until the film arrives on the big screen we have a new Bond novel to sate our appetites.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the tenth James Bond novel, a sequel to the previous novel (once removed), Thunderball. I was lucky to get hold of a copy of OHMSS when it came out at the beginning of April, because both the first and second print runs, totaling over 60,000 copies, sold out in the first month. This should give readers some insight into how popular James Bond has become in Britain.

Since OHMSS is a sequel to Thunderball, a quick reprise of the former novel's plot is in order.

Thunderball centred on the theft of two atomic bombs stolen by a shadowy organization called SPECTRE: SPecial Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion.  SPECTRE is the replacement for SMERSH, MI-6's nemesis organization that appears in the earlier novels. These villains were originally loosely based on the real life Soviet counterintelligence organization SMERSH.

The name is a Russian portmanteau, created by Stalin from the words SMERt and SHpionam. Translated it means "Death to Spies."

Why the change? My understanding is that the film producers and Fleming decided to make the villains apolitical. In an interview Fleming said that he wanted to show that the cold war had thawed and changed the name to reflect this.

This criminal organization is led by the nefarious villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who returns in OHMSS to cause our hero more pain and suffering. This time round Fleming fleshes out his hero with some fascinating revelations about Bond's character. For example, he discloses that Bond visits the grave of Vesper Lynd every year.  Lynd was a character that appeared in Fleming's first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, where she kills herself rather than betray Bond.

James Bond's relationship with women also breaks new ground, but I don't want to spoil the plot by giving anything away. All I'll say is that OHMSS deals with grief and loss. And most affecting it is too.

As is usual in an Ian Fleming novel, real places are used to add verisimilitude to the narrative, though some of the names are changed. In this case, the description of Piz Gloria makes clear that it is based on the Nazi German eugenic research facility Schloss Mittersill.

Its inclusion as a setting for the plot therefore adds a certain emotional darkness to the story. It's a chilling foreshadowing of the reveal about the purpose of the centre. We later discover that the villain is brainwashing young women he's treating for food allergies. Blofield's plan is to send them home to Britain where they will release a bioweapon to destroy our crops.

Cue loud cackling.

OK. That was probably a tad unfair of me, but the plan strained my credulity to its limits. James Bond stories are not subtle. However, OHMSS is a lot of fun to read. Once I started I had to keep turning the pages to find out what happened next. OHMSS demonstrates Fleming's increasingly assured touch and storytelling confidence.

I will freely admit that the SF trappings are not strongly in evidence in this novel. However, the machinations of the plot are driven by technological developments driven by science. Had this novel been written before the war, it would have been derided for its fanciful SF trappings. Ideas that SF fans take as a given, like rockets, robots, and ray-guns, are now taken for granted.

All right, perhaps not ray-guns, but the terms that used to mark out the genre are now increasingly appearing in everyday usage. In a few short years, SF ideas have moved from the pages of the Pulps and post-war magazines into everyday life. Therefore, in the wake of the success of Ian Fleming's "Bond", what I predict we will see is more techno-thrillers, spy stories with futuristic trappings.

After all, why should Ian Fleming have all the fun?


The Jamaica home where Fleming wrote OHMSS during the filming of Dr. No

[Want to talk to the Journey crew and fellow fans in real-time?  Come join us at Portal 55! (Ed.)]

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