24-05-2009, 02:58 PM
Fleming indeed.
David Guyatt can write at length about Fleming's more esoteric interests and connections, and I assure you that his (Ian's, not David's) relationships to intelligence agencies and operations were long-standing and profound.
(Don't forget, Fleming was first to postulate the utilization by an intel group of a serial killer. And that's just for starters.)
Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham are credited as co-authors of the original Thunderball concept, but we are left to speculate as to the identity of the originator of the stolen H-bombs idea. My money is on Fleming.
At the time of its origin, the premise was envelope-pushing in the extreme. My experience with Fleming is that the vast majority of his fiction and non-fiction was offered, to varying degrees, in service to deep political agendas.
Might Thunderball fairly be appreciated as an anti-nuke statement? Such an interpretation would please many of us today, but in the late 1950s it might just as readily have been offered as a paean to the secret services charged with the responsibility to protect the ultimate arsenals of democracy.
Also, then and now, it reads as an anti-proliferation plea: limit membership in the nuclear club, or else!
Back to the timing issue. Let's try to compare the initial appearance of Thunderball and its high-profile litigation with broadly related deep political occurences (such as, of course, the "losses" of nuclear and thermonuclear devices).
David Guyatt can write at length about Fleming's more esoteric interests and connections, and I assure you that his (Ian's, not David's) relationships to intelligence agencies and operations were long-standing and profound.
(Don't forget, Fleming was first to postulate the utilization by an intel group of a serial killer. And that's just for starters.)
Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham are credited as co-authors of the original Thunderball concept, but we are left to speculate as to the identity of the originator of the stolen H-bombs idea. My money is on Fleming.
At the time of its origin, the premise was envelope-pushing in the extreme. My experience with Fleming is that the vast majority of his fiction and non-fiction was offered, to varying degrees, in service to deep political agendas.
Might Thunderball fairly be appreciated as an anti-nuke statement? Such an interpretation would please many of us today, but in the late 1950s it might just as readily have been offered as a paean to the secret services charged with the responsibility to protect the ultimate arsenals of democracy.
Also, then and now, it reads as an anti-proliferation plea: limit membership in the nuclear club, or else!
Back to the timing issue. Let's try to compare the initial appearance of Thunderball and its high-profile litigation with broadly related deep political occurences (such as, of course, the "losses" of nuclear and thermonuclear devices).