authentic/realistic spy fiction, e.g., John le Carre, George Smiley;
action-adventure spy fiction, e.g., Ian Fleming, James Bond;
spy-fi, e.g., The Man From UNCLE;
sf spy fiction, e.g., Poul Anderson, Dominic Flandry.
I am catching up after a couple of days without Internet access so please bear with me.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Welcome back! I was starting to get a bit concerned despite you asking your daughter to give me a heads up.
Ad astra! Sean
Spy fiction is like political-intrigue fiction; it appeals to the human desire for agency. The spy does things that are significant on a more than individual level, as a ruler does.
Of course, what a spy does is usually give rulers -information-. But how the rulers deal with it is a different matter.
In 1941, the USSR's highly efficient espionage operations gave multiple, unambiguous warnings of an imminent German attack.
Stalin simply disregarded them, and the USSR very nearly lost the war in the first six months because of it.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And if Hitler had not been at least as bad as Stalin, I would not have wept if the USSR had been destroyed!
I think Stalin had many of the hapless spies who tried to warn him of Germany's plans to attack the USSR shot. Because, in his paranoia, Stalin thought they were feeding him disinformation.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yup. In fact, he had some of them killed -after the war-, to cover up his own mistake.
The problem with being paranoid is that it leads you to suspect the wrong people... or trust nobody, which is as anti-functional as trusting everyone.
Someone once said that the true measure of Stalin's damnation was that he only trusted one man... Adolf Hitler.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I can have some sympathy for the unlucky spies!
And Stalin trusting ADOLF HITLER had to be ultimate in irony! I think Solzhenitsyn touched on that kind of black comedy somewhere in his works.
Ad astra! Sean
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