James Bond and the End of the World

The creation of James Bond marked a signifcant change in Ian Fleming’s view of technology. Once a technological enthusiast, a believer in the efcacy of new ideas, and a supporter of technological change, Fleming became disillusioned with science and scientists during his intelligence work in World War II. His famous character emerged at a time of dramatic and discomforting post-war change in both Fleming’s personal life – a marriage, a new home, a new job – and in his world. As he writes in Casino Royale, “[h]istory is moving pretty quickly these days” (1953, 164). The dystopian fears grew stronger in Fleming’s fction as the Cold War heated up, and his optimism for the future – as well as his health – declined. His villains grew more ambitious, the threat of technology in the wrong hands increased exponentially, and the end of the world grew closer with every novel – as one of his readers told him: “[y]ou are doing your bit to make the world a beastlier place” (qtd. in Fleming 2015, 128). As the fctionalised Bond evolved into the flmic Bond, these dystopian themes grew stronger, and the technological threat became more potent, embracing terror weapons of mass destruction. Bond stood for human agency in negotiating technological change, and his inevitable triumph symbolised Fleming’s belief in the resilience and ingenuity of the individual. So while the character of Bond changed very little, the malicious technology he faced grew in pace with the rapid advance of technology during the arms race that followed World War II. As a Cold War hero, Bond operated within the context of mutually as-

by gadgets" (1976,297), and as a young man he was convinced of the infuence of technology on history.
Yet at the same time Fleming was also a traditionalist, one whose position in the social hierarchy led him to publicly support the old hierarchy and values during a time when they were coming under some stress. He explained his resignation from the Royal Military College in 1927, which efectively ended his military career, thus: "I didn't become a soldier afer passing out from Sandhurst because they suddenly decided to mechanize the Army and a lot of my friends and I decided that we did not want to be glorifed garage hands -no more polo, no more pig sticking and all that jazz" (qtd. in Lycett 1995, 28). This was sheer bravado as Fleming was a poor horseman, did not play polo, and described his experience in Sandhurst's Cavalry School as "horrible" (ibid., 21). In fact, Fleming and his alter ego Bond rather enjoyed hanging out in garages, befriending garage hands and valuing their technical knowledge.
Fleming's associates noted that he had a fondness for men of mechanical ability. His friendship with the maverick inventor Sidney Cotton during the War is a case in point. Fleming's biographer Andrew Lycett writes that "Cotton became the frst in a line of practical inventors befriended by Ian" (1966, 106). They met for brain-storming sessions while Fleming worked in Naval Intelligence and as Cotton explained his latest gadget, Fleming would respond with "Amazing, Sidney, amazing" (ibid., 107). Fleming had great respect for Amherst Villiers, who he described as "an engineer of the highest quality" (qtd. in Pearson 1966, 336), the designer of the superchargers for Tim Birkin's racing Bentleys in the 1930s.
In Casino Royale, Bond drives a 4½ litre Bentley with a Villiers supercharger.
Fleming was born too late to see the full horrors of World War I in person, but old enough to appreciate the price paid: his father Valentine Fleming was killed on the Western Front in 1917. The horrors of modern warfare put an end to late-nineteenth century technological optimism and placed the post-war decades under the ever-darkening shadow of total war waged with strategic bombers, submarines, and poison gas. Despite dire predictions for the next world war, Fleming's enthusiasm for technology, especially fast cars and boats, was undiminished. He enthusiastically joined in the struggle against Bolshevism in the 1920s and 1930s, which represented a more immediate threat to British hegemony than enemy airships and submarines. But an aspiring writer could not ignore a popular culture increasingly refecting anxieties of technology out of con-

trol.
A.J. Millard · James Bond and the End of the World Dystopian predictions about the end of the world probably began with H.G. Wells and books like War of the Worlds. George Orwell noticed this new trend of weapons of mass destruction in the popular culture of the 1920s: "[t]he one theme that is really new is the scientifc one. Death rays, Martians, invisible men, helicopters and interplanetary rockets" (qtd. in Carey 2002, 201). The death ray moved from fction to fact in the 1920s when several individuals claimed to have developed high-energy particle or electromagnetic beams strong enough to cause injury. These quasi-scientifc predictions, combined with the imagination of pulp fction and serialised flms, produced an alarming and apparently well- One thread runs through all Fleming's flm ideas: a weapon of mass destruction falls into the wrong hands and threatens global destruction. In "The Living Daylights" (1962), Bond has to protect an agent coming across the Berlin Wall with the most valuable secrets: "loaded with stuf. Atomic and Rockets", as M informs him (82). In a letter to his literary agent William Plomer, Fleming distilled his novels as "Bond & Blonds & Bombs" (qtd. in Lycett 1995, 364 Bond as an experiment: "the facts will be noted []] Your deaths will have served the purposes of science" (Fleming 1958, 148 These toxins were alarmingly potent. A drop of this agent could kill hundreds of A.J. Millard · James Bond and the End of the World people by merely coming into contact with the skin, and was thus far more lethal than anything employed in both World Wars. Nerve gases had great appeal to an author fascinated by poisons, especially organic poisons such as that derived from the fugu fsh, or the curare he witnessed used to kill fsh on a trip on the Caribbean. These weapons held great appeal to his wartime colleagues in intelligence, as well as to his brother Peter, a world traveller and intelligence ofcer in the war who was "very keen on poisoned arrows" (Bailey 2009, 19  character, Major Smythe, is described as a once-valued intelligence ofcer whose wartime service, daily routine in post-war Jamaica, and poor health is remarkably like Fleming's. In his most autobiographical work, Fleming acknowledges how alcohol and nicotine have ravaged Smythe's health, leading him to several heart attacks and to "the frontier of the death wish" (Fleming 1965, 7).
Although Smythe meets a horrible fate afer being stung by a globefsh,   (2012) Silva is a cyberterrorist intent on revenge. The scientist standing behind the villain is no longer a German chemist, but a computer expert like Henry Gupta in Tomorrow Never Dies, a radical American who we are told "practically invented techno-terrorism".
Although Bond's world is ever-changing, there is one part of the formula that has to remain constant, or the 007 spell will be broken. The weapons of mass destruction necessarily evolve in their threat, but they must always give the bad guys "[t]he power to reshape the world", as Renard notes in The World is Not Enough. This in turn gives Bond the opportunity to save it. The adventure flms of World War II showed that the lives of hundreds and then thousands of people were put at risk, but in the Cold War, the stakes were raised to hundreds of thousands, and then millions of victims. It was lef to a single secret agent, one man with a gun, to guard against the end of the world. Bond still carried out the heroic commando raids that so impressed his creator during the 1940s, but the weapons of mass destruction he thwarts elevates him as the saviour of the whole world.
In the late-twentieth century Bond went on to defeat a succession of technological monsters -many of which mirrored the anxieties of an audience coming to terms with a digital revolution that was transforming their lives. As Claus-Ulrich Viol has pointed out: "Bond, as has been repeatedly argued, acts to alleviate fears of an increasing advance of technology and its colonisation of human beings, its becoming abused by sinister powers or its becoming fully autonomous" (Viol 2019, 14). Bond's fght against evil has moved onto the internet and into cyberspace, against malicious hackers and digitally-enhanced villains, but in the end, tranquility has to be restored by a hero "who takes power from the machine and hands it back to the human" (Willis 2009, 176). The captions of the Daily Express James Bond comic strip summarises this winning formula: 100 million pounds "in gold or we explode the bombs in your countries. Every agent, in-cluding Bond, searches for the bombs. Bond fnds them and the world is saved" (qtd. in Lycett 1995, 396).