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"His name is Jaws. He kills people."
The Roger Moore movie adaptation. A space shuttle has gone missing and James Bond is sent to find it. He meets billionaire Hugo Drax, the book version with the facial scars and red hair, not the movie version with the Chairman Mao suit and evil villain goatee. He meets Dr. Holly Goodhead and has some encounters with Drax's rotund Chinese henchman Chang. Bond has adventures in California, Venice, and Rio de Janeiro, but not Alaska. And once again he fights Jaws, and a giant snake.
Everything is going along nicely for most of the book. There are a bunch of gadgets involved, some of which could save Bond a great deal of trouble if he remembered to use them. Then he comes to the shuttle launch pad and it all falls apart. Everything after that is nonsense. The exhaust venting system is nonsense. Bond's escape from the pit is nonsense. The launch procedure is nonsense. The space station, the lasers, the quick-change space suits, all nonsense. Nothing about launching a space shuttle, how they operate, how they dock, nothing about them is even close to accurate. In a movie I can overlook this stuff, but in a book I have just too much time to pick it apart.
Now that I have eviscerated the novel let me speak in its defense. This book is based upon a movie so it has to stay close to the movie plot. It does and actually improves on it. The actual Ian Fleming book Moonraker is universally panned as Fleming's most ridiculous story, even more so than the voodoo one, so this is a better book of the same name. This movie came out right after "Star Wars" and every studio was trying to get out a space based movie to take advantage of the craze that came with it. So James Bond gets shot into space. Incidentally, this space craze led to dozens of movies like "The Black Hole" and TV shows like "Buck Rogers", continuing until they finally reached the be all and end all of all space movies, the Mount Everest of cosmic filmdom, the Greatest Space Movie of All Time. I am speaking, of course, of "Spaceballs".
It's a decent book. The plot is sufficiently evil, the villain so iconic that Dr. Evil mimics his clothes, and Bond actually gets physically injured like he used to in every Ian Fleming book. The science is crap. It is true that when the book was written the space shuttle was brand new and it was even conceivable that in the near future we would have a Stanly Kubrick space station. But that someone could build one without anyone noticing is unreasonable. It's not like building a hidden lair in a hollowed out volcano. Still, as a kid this was one of my favorite Bond movies.
The Roger Moore movie adaptation. A space shuttle has gone missing and James Bond is sent to find it. He meets billionaire Hugo Drax, the book version with the facial scars and red hair, not the movie version with the Chairman Mao suit and evil villain goatee. He meets Dr. Holly Goodhead and has some encounters with Drax's rotund Chinese henchman Chang. Bond has adventures in California, Venice, and Rio de Janeiro, but not Alaska. And once again he fights Jaws, and a giant snake.
Everything is going along nicely for most of the book. There are a bunch of gadgets involved, some of which could save Bond a great deal of trouble if he remembered to use them. Then he comes to the shuttle launch pad and it all falls apart. Everything after that is nonsense. The exhaust venting system is nonsense. Bond's escape from the pit is nonsense. The launch procedure is nonsense. The space station, the lasers, the quick-change space suits, all nonsense. Nothing about launching a space shuttle, how they operate, how they dock, nothing about them is even close to accurate. In a movie I can overlook this stuff, but in a book I have just too much time to pick it apart.
Now that I have eviscerated the novel let me speak in its defense. This book is based upon a movie so it has to stay close to the movie plot. It does and actually improves on it. The actual Ian Fleming book Moonraker is universally panned as Fleming's most ridiculous story, even more so than the voodoo one, so this is a better book of the same name. This movie came out right after "Star Wars" and every studio was trying to get out a space based movie to take advantage of the craze that came with it. So James Bond gets shot into space. Incidentally, this space craze led to dozens of movies like "The Black Hole" and TV shows like "Buck Rogers", continuing until they finally reached the be all and end all of all space movies, the Mount Everest of cosmic filmdom, the Greatest Space Movie of All Time. I am speaking, of course, of "Spaceballs".
It's a decent book. The plot is sufficiently evil, the villain so iconic that Dr. Evil mimics his clothes, and Bond actually gets physically injured like he used to in every Ian Fleming book. The science is crap. It is true that when the book was written the space shuttle was brand new and it was even conceivable that in the near future we would have a Stanly Kubrick space station. But that someone could build one without anyone noticing is unreasonable. It's not like building a hidden lair in a hollowed out volcano. Still, as a kid this was one of my favorite Bond movies.
