Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7718233" data-attributes="member: 6873517">The author of this article is actually wrong about Bond novels as written by Fleming not involving &quot;save the world&quot; plots. There are a number of them. The novel Casino Royale is about saving France from a Communist infiltrator, though, so it's a &quot;saving France, and Western Europe from Communism&quot;. Perhaps not the world, but very much something that was considered very fearful and real to likely readers. The novel is set right after World War II, when many people were very afraid of a Communist takeover of Western Europe. The villain Le Chiffre is funneling huge amounts of COMINTERN money into the French election. However, Le Chiffre has a wee bit of a gambling problem and turns out to have dipped into those funds... so Bond's task is to take his money so that he ends up ruined, discredited, and likely killed by his Soviet masters. (I'm not spoiling the book, this is all discussed in the first several pages of the novel.) Moonraker, Thunderball, and Goldfinger all involve the threat of nuclear weapons. The novels usually show both Communism and Naziism, something which was very much in the worries of people at the time. I could go on, but you get the point. Bond novels, and a lot of the thriller/spy genre more broadly, have had &quot;save the world&quot; plots for a long time. Not all of them do, of course, but many do.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7718233, member: 6873517"] The author of this article is actually wrong about Bond novels as written by Fleming not involving "save the world" plots. There are a number of them. The novel [I]Casino Royale[/I] is about saving France from a Communist infiltrator, though, so it's a "saving France, and Western Europe from Communism". Perhaps not the world, but very much something that was considered very fearful and real to likely readers. The novel is set right after World War II, when many people were very afraid of a Communist takeover of Western Europe. The villain Le Chiffre is funneling huge amounts of COMINTERN money into the French election. However, Le Chiffre has a wee bit of a gambling problem and turns out to have dipped into those funds... so Bond's task is to take his money so that he ends up ruined, discredited, and likely killed by his Soviet masters. (I'm not spoiling the book, this is all discussed in the first several pages of the novel.) [I]Moonraker[/I], [I]Thunderball[/I], and [I]Goldfinger[/I] all involve the threat of nuclear weapons. The novels usually show both Communism and Naziism, something which was very much in the worries of people at the time. I could go on, but you get the point. Bond novels, and a lot of the thriller/spy genre more broadly, have had "save the world" plots for a long time. Not all of them do, of course, but many do. [/QUOTE]

Verification