Sometimes passages in two unrelated texts resonate for entirely accidental reasons. One of the iconic images in twentieth century cinema is the James Bond villain with the cat and we first see this villain's, Blofeld's, face when he controls a reusable spaceship from inside a mountain and nearly starts a nuclear war. In Fleming's less implausible novels, Blofeld neither holds a cat nor controls a spaceship. In fact, the only Bond villain to approach the hero carrying a cat is Goldfinger and only because the cat plays a role in the plot at that point in
Goldfinger.
However, everyone knows: Blofeld; cat; mountain; spaceship; nuclear threat. Well, Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise gives us: Ronica; cat; mountain; spaceship; nuclear threat. Of course, there is no direct connection between the film, You Only Live Twice, and this Poul Anderson novel but readers' minds see connections even when there are none and out of such coincidences can come new creative ideas - although not from mere chroniclers or unimaginative bloggers.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I consider THUNDERBALL, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, DR NO, and FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE to be among Fleming's better James Bond novels.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
"YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE" can mean a novel, an imperfect haiku within the novel, a film or the theme song of the film.
Apart from the Japanese setting, the novel and the film are almost opposites. In the novel, Bond has already destroyed SPECTRE, a much smaller organization than in the films, for the second and final time and now finds Blofeld hiding in the Castle of Death - and has lost his memory at the end.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
The BOOKS are almost always better than any movies allegedly based on them!
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Commenting on the last sentence of this blog piece of yours: I think SOME chronicles might be interesting enough to inspire some readers to think of at least indirect connections with the works of Anderson. The examples I've thought of being St. Gregory of Tours' HISTORY OF THE FRANKS and St. Bede's ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. I enjoyed reading both of these chronicles and the "link" I thought was that these histories of events in different parts of the fallen Western Empire must be analogous to the chronicles surely written on different planets of the fallen Terran Empire during the Long Night.
I also thought of how the beginning of "A Tragedy of Errors" mentions contradictory legends attaching themselves to Roan Tom, living as he did during the chaos of the Long Night a few centuries after the Empire fell.
Ad astra! Sean
I hijacked the cat for Sandra Arminger... 8-).
Cats make a good symbol for wickedness to a social animal like us because they're intensely selfish; they even love selfishly.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha! I remember Lady Sandra's cats! A nice Blofeldian touch!
Ad astra! Sean
And Sandra is fully aware of the trope -- she even says at one point that coming up with an evil plot requires a white cat in your arms, and she -does- come up with evil plots that way.
But then, she knows she's living out a medieval fantasy in reality too.
A good deal of politics is attempts to actualize fantasies -- to "live the LARP".
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And Sandra Arminger, being an adult survivor of the Change, obviously read the James Bond books! Tho they might not make much sense to those born after the Change.
And I think President Trump is aware of that actualizing of fantasies in politics!
Ad astra! Sean
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