A speculative chronology suggests that James Bond was born in "1920?" Sandra Miesel's Chronology of Technic Civilization published in Poul Anderson, The Technic Civilization Saga, states that Dominic Flandry will be born in 3000 although see here. A year date for Flandry serves two functions. It locates Flandry in the future history chronology and also connects his life events together. Thus, Flandry is known to have been nineteen in Ensign Flandry and to be approaching seventy in The Game Of Empire. Therefore, these works should be about fifty years apart in the Chronology. They are not.
W. Somerset Maugham's and John Buchan's fictional World War I spies inspired real life World War II spies and also the fictional Cold War spy, James Bond. Simon Hollister and Dominic Flandry come later although both were published before Bond. Anderson's adventurer, David Falkayn, refers indirectly to another earlier fictional adventurer, Simon Templar.
13 comments:
This is a threat when you begin a series without careful thought as to where it's going to go. Avoiding continuity errors becomes very difficult.
That's one reason I use dates in chapter headings; it helps keep things straight. (But there are still mistakes.)
The WW1 spies were also inspired by fiction: the Indian Secret Service was modeled on "Kim", and when that novel was written it didn't exist.
I love fiction-reality interactions.
Similarly, some accounts say that Kipling's portrayal of British Army slang was mostly from his imagination ... but new recruits who'd read his work beforehand thought that was how real British soldiers talked, and thus it BECAME how the NEW real British soldiers talked. (I can neither confirm nor deny this.)
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Now THAT was interesting, the Indian Secret Service being partly inspired by Kipling's KIM! I would have thought it logical to think the British already had Intelligence services.
Sean
That's going a bit far; Kipling had a lot of interactions with British soldiers when he was a reporter in Lahore and in other locations, and he was acutely observant and extremely curious.
(An Arab king complained that Kipling grilled him about the camel trade in the Hejaz at a diplomatic function.)
What probably happened was that officers and officer-class people started -noticing- the soldier slang after they read Kipling and realized there was such a thing.
There was always intelligence work in British India, both by serving officers and by "political officers" (army officers or ICS men on detached service aimed at native monarchs), but it was 'ad hoc' -- built up by individuals and folding when they moved on.
"Secret Service" was something people did on particular occasions, not an organization.
There wasn't a central agency that handled political intelligence and counterespionage on a systematic basis with permanent personnel and a career path and training and central records and so forth. Intelligence work was an afterthought in the British military, too -- something improvised before a particular campaign. The Boer War was an egregious example of that.
Kipling imagined such an organization for "Kim" (putting it together from bits and pieces that actually existed), and shortly afterwards such an organization was actually founded -- and the people who did that had certainly read "Kim" and used elements from the book for the real thing. They also adopted terminology and 'style' from the book and other fiction.
Life imitates art.
The percusors of M.I.5 and M.I.6 were also founded in the Edwardian period, and likewise in reaction to 'spy scares' and fiction and paranoia about German intelligence operations. They remained so tiny before 1914 that the head of foreign intelligence personally prowled around German naval bases in those years with a false mustache plastered to his upper lip.
The Germans actually did have a fairly extensive military intelligence/espionage operation -- in fact, several, including the Foreign Office and the Great General Staff, which had a section called Abteilung IIIb which did a lot of the things that intelligence services do today.
It was fairly small until WW1, though, during which it expanded immensely. The head, Colonel Walter Nicolai, was a pioneer in modern intelligence/clandestine work, and in things like subversion, sabotage and clandestine operations.
The French had the "Second Bureau" of the general staff, but it was compromised in the rather byzantine politics of the Third Republic and was closed down for a while in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair. They still use the term "Second Bureau" as shorthand for secret intelligence work there, IIRC.
The Czarist secret police, the Okhrana, the successor to previous organizations that had existed for generations, was the closest pre-1914 equivalent to modern institutions like the CIA or MI5-6.
It operated both at home and abroad, and did spying, counterintelligence, clandestine operations, takeovers of foreign newspapers, and "disinformation" (a longstanding Russian technique -- the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" were essentially an Okhrana disinformation operation.)
It was the only part of the Czarist government that worked really well.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I think part of the reason why the British (and by extension, the Americans) were slow about institutionalizing intelligence work was from having distaste for it. An attitude summarized by what a US Secretary of State allegedly said: "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail."
I'm amused and pleased that Kipling fanboys were so influenced by KIM in setting up a real British Intelligence agency.
I read a lot about the Tsarist Okhrana in Solzhenitsyn's works, both fiction and non fiction. It certainly seemed to have been an unusually effective RUSSIAN gov't agency. And your comments made me wondered if the vile and disgusting monster and fanatic Lenin was only able to eventually seize power in Russia because the Okhrana's masters were too stupid to use it to permanently destroy Lenin and his gang.
Sean
Kipling had a very powerful imagination. It could stutter a bit when his day-to-day emotions were involved, but usually it made him very perspicuous. He was certainly one of Poul's major inspirations.
I was thinking of this the other day, when I contemplated the difference between space exploration organizations which dread failure above all and those that accept it and learn from it, and Kipling said things about that general principle which are still very relevant.
For example, when he wrote a poem on explorers and pathfinders, he didn't entitle it the "Song of the Very Careful".
He called it the "Song of the Dead", and the relevant verse goes (from memory):
"We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town;
We yearned beyond the skyline, where the strange roads go down.
Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need
'til the soul that is not Man's soul was lent to us to lead
As the deer breaks -- as the steer breaks -- from the herd where they graze
In the faith of little children we went on our ways.
Then the wood failed -- then the food failed -- then the last water dried;
And in the faith of little children we laid down and died.
In the sand-drifts -- by the veld-side -- in the fern-breaks we lay,
That our sons might follow after by our bones upon the way.
Follow after, follow after, for we have watered the root
And the bud has come to blossom that ripens for fruit;
Follow after, we are waiting, by the trails that we lost,
For the sound of many footsteps, for the tread of a host.
Follow after, follow after, for the harvest is sown --
By our bones upon the wayside ye shall come unto your own."
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I absolutely agree with you and Kipling (and Poul Anderson)! Only by our adventurers and pioneers being willing to accept risk, danger, death, failure, etc., will we ever get off this rock in a MAJOR way! I get so frustrated with those who say we should forget about space and other worlds till we solve our problems on Earth or till it's "safe" to leave Earth with no risk.
Sean
Before 1914, the Bolsheviks weren't considered a major threat -- they spent most of their time anathematizing other leftists.
The biggest revolutionary party was the Socialist Revolutionary party, and the Okhrana had infiltrated them so thoroughly that they were effectively running them, and their terrorist "Fighting Groups".
They were working on doing the same to the Bolsheviks, and had taken control of their newspaper and had agents deep in their apparatus.
The Okhrana's general policy was to infiltrate and control underground revolutionary organizations rather than destroy them, on the principle that if you wiped them out another organization would spring up and you'd have to start all over again.
Infiltration and control let the Okhrana set them to feuding with each other, and to identify and catch the more able and daring ones.
It got so that a lot of the people in groups like the SR and the Bolsheviks not only suspected all their "comrades", but didn't really know who they were working for themselves -- double, triple and quadruple agents abounded.
The Okhrana also had a general policy of "trust destruction", trying to eliminate social trust so that nobody would dare do anything for fear of betrayal and anonymous denunciation.
"When three men sit down to talk politics, two are fools, and one is a secret police informer", as the old Russian saying goes.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Again, thank you for your very interesting notes. Yes, from Solzhenitsyn's works, both fiction and non fiction, I was aware of the Okhrana's policy of infiltrating and taking over terrorist and revolutionary groups, with the idea of rendering them harmless by making everybody in these sects paranoid and afraid of each other. And there were persistent rumors that Stalin himself was an Okhrana double agent.
But this policy came with problems and risks. I think some Okhrana agents got so lost in the TRILL of intrigue and counter intrigue that they lost sight of the POINT of it all, which was to preserve the Tsarist state. Also, I think some Okhrana agents themselves were compromised--when posing as SRs or Bolsheviks, some of them ordered hits against their own people on the Tsarist side, in order to preserve their credibility with the revolutionaries (the assassin of the Tsarist PM, Peter Stolypin, may have been an Okhrana agent himself, acting as an SR or Bolshevik).
No, MY preference, after thoroughly infiltrating the most dangerous revolutionary groups, would have been to destroy them all in one fell swoop. Yes, I know other revolutionary groups would have soon started up. But it would have needed TIME for them to become dangerous (and I would have the Okhrana start infiltrating THEM). Meanwhile, the destruction of the SRs, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, etc., would have given more time for the reforms of Peter Stolypin to take root and take the wind out of the revolutionary sails!
Sean
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