In Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, the collective continuing villains are SMERSH and SPECTRE, respectively, with ex-SMERSH members in SPECTRE.
Anthony Horowitz's third James Bond novel, With A Mind To Kill, introduces a new collective villain, Stalnaya Ruka, Steel Hand, whose members include the former Head of SMERSH.
We have previously appreciated villains created by Poul Anderson, Ian Fleming and SM Stirling so is seems appropriate to welcome Stalnaya Ruka especially in view of its linguistic connection to Anderson's Didonians.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I happened to recently copy from Chapter X of THE REBEL WORLDS into the second volume of my CODEX ANDERSONIANUS Aaron Snelund's shrewd and perceptive comments about the functions of civil services. And how bureaucrats could slow to a crawl the implementation of policies from their political masters that they disliked.
I'm collecting into my CODEX some of what Anderson has written about bureaucracies from several of his stories.
Aaron Snelund was a vicious person and a villain worthy of being placed in the company of the villains created by Fleming and Stirling. But he was also, unfortunately, a SMART scoundrel.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Just a few more musings. For a man of strongly libertarian minded political views, Anderson wrote surprisingly much about bureaucracies and civil services, if you search thru his stories. I've already copied out important texts on the subject from THE REBEL WORLDS and THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN. Other works I've thought of would be THE PLAGUE OF MASTERS, A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS, and THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS.
Besides the faults of civil services, Anderson also fair mindedly pointed out their legitimate functions and necessity.
Ad astra! Sean
"bureaucrats could slow to a crawl the implementation of policies from their political masters that they disliked."
I can easily imagine situations in which that would be a very good thing & others in which it would be a very bad thing.
"a SMART scoundrel."
To be an *effective* villain one needs some virtues.
Kaor, Jim! I agree, there are times when foot dragging by bureaucrats can be either good or bad. True, and EFFECTIVE villain has to have SOME good qualities. One example being Leon Ammon, seen in A CIRCUS OF HELLS, described by Flandry (despite his distaste for Leon) as having energy, foresight, even courage. Curious, the number of gang bosses to be found in the Technic stories, at different times: Haguan Eluatz, boss of the Gethfennu on Merseia ("Day of Burning") Leon Ammon, on Irumclaw (A CIRCUS OF HELLS) Sumu the Fat, Unan Besar (THE PLAGUE OF MASTERS) Ad astra! Sean
Stalin could defeat bureaucratic obstructionism, but his methods were unsustainable -- involving killing off large numbers of bureaucrats at fairly close intervals.
By 1939, the total population of the USSR was declining. Stalin had the census bureau bureaucrats who discovered this shot, which is sort of amusing, in a bad way.
When Stalinism was removed, the Soviet bureaucracy became totally ossified fairly quickly; the system wouldn't work without wholesale terror, but wholesale terror was unsustainable if only because the -nomenklatura- hated it.
And of course it was killing off people faster than they were born.
There are alternatives to government bureaucracies, but they usually don't work all that well.
Eg., in early-medieval Europe, there was virtually no literate bureaucracy except for the Church.
There were rudimentary groups of officials at a "granular" level. For example, your typical feudal manor had officials in the sense that there was a court, which enforced regulations and heard disputes, and persons in charge of, for example, herding the livestock owned by the villagers, laying out strips in the common field, supervising 'boon-work' on the lord's demesne, and so forth.
But that was, until the High Middle Ages, all done with a preliterate setup. The law the manorial court enforced was 'customary' -- that is, if you wanted to find out what the law was, you just asked people; it wasn't written down. Same for the rest.
(Note that juries, in England, were originally aimed at people who -did- know the accused, the accuser, and so forth -- the knowledge necessary for the case to proceed was in their heads.)
Feudal society worked by aggregating granular units like that. A baron didn't have to record exactly what he was due from his vassals; because he only had to remember (or have someone do it for him) general stuff, like how many knights, men-at-arms and mesne tithes he was due.
This all worked, sort of, but at a rather low level of results. Bureaucracy was reinvented (or copied from the Church) to make it all work -better-.
If only because 'custom' is rather malleable -- everyone pushes at it a bit, and it sways back and forth.
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