For the next 364 days I am living the dream.
44.
Shouldn’t have any problem remembering my age. 😉
Slightly facetious, but for some reason 43 just never felt “right”. Meaning I often responded to questions about my age as either 42 or 44.
At this age it is the simple things. It is all about perspective.
(Yes, that is a turkey you see there…hanging around my neck, not me!)
Saturday, November 10th, 2012…a day that will live in…
Well, it will live on in my memory for some time.
This was the day I *trained for and one I was looking forward to, with admittedly some trepidation, for several months.
It was Pilgrim Pacer day. The day of my first Half-Marathon.
In order to allay any suspense: I survived!!!
Daniel Craig is my James Bond.
Before you tar and feather me, let me explain.
Arguably the most beloved actor to portray 007 is Sean Connery. I can see why as I am a big fan of his work. The Sean Connery films adapting the work of author Ian Fleming are not of my generation, and while that shouldn’t matter given the many films outside of my generation that I appreciate, the truth is I never really watched them. Oh, I’ve seen a few, and parts of others. But I’ve never made a conscious choice to actively seek out and enjoy the Connery 007 films. And while I’ve watched and enjoyed on some level those with Roger Moore, et al, I haven’t really connected with them. The slightly goofy, gadget-filled shows just didn’t click. They weren’t silly enough to appreciate as spoofs nor serious enough to appreciate as a good action thriller. Perhaps I was psychically in tune with Ian Fleming, because his novels are not goofy and gadget-filled either. But back to Craig.
By the time Casino Royale (the newest iteration) was released I was preconditioned for a different kind of spy thriller. Matt Damon had brought the character of Jason Bourne to the big screen and I was hooked. This was the kind of government agent film that flipped my switch. I have no doubt the film makers were influenced by the success of the Bourne franchise and then they made a decision that I will forever praise: they decided to actually adapt a James Bond novel to the big screen. I know what you are thinking, “other early James Bond films are adapted from Ian Fleming novels”. To which I would reply, “loosely based on an Ian Fleming novel is more like it”. I’ve read several of the 007 novels, inspired by the film version of Casino Royale, and they are at times laughably far from a faithful adaptation.
So despite the fact that Craig has the wrong hair color and that he is unforgivably not Sean Connery, he is my James Bond. Okay, you can commence with applying the pitch.
Oh, wait, we’ve got a movie to talk about.
6 Men–against 400,000,000
So the dramatic language of the back cover states, a battle against impossible odds, “the adventures of a handful of soldiers of the future, fighting to save America from a deadly invasion”.
Major Ardmore has just arrived at the secret location of a small scientific enclave as the news is broken that the United States has been summarily defeated by a combined Japanese/Chinese force referred to in this undisclosed future as the PanAsians. In an effort to stay protected from the spread of communism in Russia the United States had spent decades essentially ignoring the world outside its borders only to see Europe fall and the red menace coalesce the Asian and Indian continents into a juggernaut of world power. The PanAsians look upon the Americans as a lower species and with superior forces occupy and enslave the American people, creating a system in which the citizens of the United States are by and large an impotent and cowed populace.
Ardmore arrives to find that this group of scientists has discovered, through an accident of testing, a weapon that may provide the key to the return of freedom to the nation. That is, if Major Ardmore can marshal this 6-person team into a strategic force to infiltrate and reclaim America.
Robert A. Heinlein’s tale, originally published in serialized form in the early months of 1941 as a story entitled “Sixth Column”, could be accused of being a racially insensitive jingoist tract or is quite possibly one of the most eerily prescient stories ever written. Given the complicated nature of Heinlein and the curious origins of this story, I suspect that both are fair assessments of what is a compelling and highly readable novel, especially when considered in the light of the time period in which it was written.
Poul Anderson is one of the authors I chose earlier this year as part of the Grand Master Reading Challenge hosted by Worlds Without End. Anderson was a prolific author whose career spanned many decades and consequently many eras of science fiction so I was unsure exactly where to start. I had toyed with the idea of starting with his Flandry series though the covers of the more recent collected editions tended to make me think these might be like the oversexed wish-fulfillment of Heinlein’s later years. I did not want that. When I saw this Michael Whelan cover for the first novel in the series my hopes rose and I decided to go ahead and snag the book for its cover, hoping that when I got around to reading it I would not be disappointed.
Guess what? I was not disappointed, not by a long shot.
My first foray into one of Poul Anderson’s created universes proved to be one filled with rip-roaring adventure, political intrigue, Bond-style romance and not a little bit of commentary on the soul-blackening compromise of world, or in this case Imperial, government. Ensign Flandry not only provided me with some of the everyman-hero-overcoming-all-odds storytelling I was hoping for but was also full of surprises.
