"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.

Listened to the audiobook created by the James Bond Radio podcast. A good listen. Different to the movie. Written by the man who wrote the Confessionsbooks in the 70s. Descriptive and gives context to aspects of the movie.

Sloopy novelisation of the movie. Do yourself a favor and read either the novel or watch the movie.

I found this to be an enjoyable beach read. A lot of Bond purists turn up their noses at Moonraker but I have always enjoyed it, with one major caveat, the inclusion of Jaws, which was a terrible mistake. He should have never returned for a second outing as a Bond villain. He is popular with audiences,but the character is ridiculous.In this novelization, there is mercifully less of Jaws. Hugo Drax is a marvelous villain. He is given some wonderful lines: "See to Mr Bond. Make sure some harm comes to him." and "You defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you, Mr Bond." All in all, not bad.

Disjointed action lacking cohesion. Characters akin to crash test dummies with Bond the catalyst for carnage. True to form conceptually but this novelisation feels like it missed the mark.

Story: 2.5
Plausibility: 0.5
Sex: 3

Overall: 2

Christopher Wood novelizes his own movie script and tones down many of the absurdities in it, but still leaves us with a rather flat tale.

Suffers from being a novelisation of Moonraker.

This is Ian Fleming's Bond in a novelization of a Roger Moore movie. Christopher Wood does a great job of imitating Fleming's style, but unfortunately this follows the premise of the awful film. Serious, James Bond in space?!

This review originally appeared on The Reel Bits as part of my 007 Case Files series.

Here’s a strange little anomaly. A novelisation that’s not only better than the film that it’s based on, but an improvement over the original novel from which both derive their name.

When you break it down to its component parts, Christopher Wood’s screenplay to the film of Moonraker uses a similar plot device (of disappearing craft) to You Only Live Twice and his own screenplay for The Spy Who Loved Me. (All three were also directed by Lewis Gilbert). Throw in a weird romance between Jaws and a pigtailed girl, a Bond Girl named Holly Goodhead, and one of the cheesiest closing entendres to date (“I think he’s attempting re-entry”) and you have the least of the Bond films. Until Die Another Day, anyway.

Like Wood’s James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me, his screenplay was sufficiently different from Ian Fleming’s original novel that Eon Productions authorised an officially novelisation. Unlike The Spy Who Loved Me, this book is an almost direct adaptation of the screenplay with few additions and extra detail. Yet even while maintaining the qualities of one of the lesser films, Wood’s writing not only grounds the high-concept narrative but gives us a fresh perspective on its central characters.

Moonraker is not one of my favourite Flemings, featuring a semi-nihilistic Bond going up against a quintessential villain intent on domination and building a master race. Being one of Fleming’s earlier novels (published in 1955), the two decades that had passed meant that the space race had moved on significantly in that time. Despite The Spy Who Loved Me’s end-credits promise that “James Bond will return…in For Your Eyes Only,” the popularity of Star Wars prompted producers to bump Moonraker up in the production cycle.

So, it’s odd that Moonraker, both the film and zthe novel, spends much of its time on the ground, such as a lengthy sequence in Rio De Janeiro that includes a prominent use of Sugarloaf Mountain on both page and screen. In the latter, there’s a pervasive silliness that had followed the series at least since the latter days of Connery, replacing tangible threats with puns, Funniest Home Video sound effects, and sight gags than an entire Tim Conway comedy special.

Yet the novelisation is a slightly different beast, grounding 007 in ways that Eon Productions wasn’t willing to do at that stage. Yes, there’s still a character names Holly Goodhead and a metal chomping henchman – not to mention Felming’s penchant for casual homophobic and racial slurs – but there’s some knowing literary winks as well. Unshackled from his obsession with nipples in his previous novelisation, Wood spends a lot of time establishing an interiority to his minor characters, from a one-night stand “ashamed of her carnality” to the buffoonish character of Gray. (Never have I felt more seen and insulted at the same time).

Bond himself gets the same interior treatment, rounding out his character more than either Fleming or the film managed to do. In the original Moonraker novel, one of my primary complaints was that Bond doesn’t really do anything, failing to anticipate Drax’s plan and kind of giving up at the end. The suave Moore Bond doesn’t have this issue, commanding a fear that’s tangibly written (rather than just being nihilistic) and being launched into space amidst a laser battle.

Perhaps the perfect balance for this story is a mixture of all three of the sources, taking Fleming’s version of Bond, Wood’s penchant for writing large-scale action films, and a maybe a dash of that cheekiness. I must admit, while the puns were laid on a little too thick in the final film, I was a little disappointed to find that one of my favourite double entendres was absent from the novelisation. Caught out by his higher-ups canoodling in a capsule with Holly, Q’s unforgettable line (“I think he’s attempting re-entry, sir”) – delivered on-screen by the legendary Desmond Llewelyn – is sadly missing in action.

This would also represent the last Bond novelisation for another decade, when Bond continuation author John Gardner adapted Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum’s Licence to Kill in 1989. In that time, the screen Bond would transition from Moore to Timothy Dalton and Gardner would begin a run of Fleming continuation novels that would ultimately outnumber the creator. So, if nothing else, JAMES BOND AND MOONRAKER is a totem at the crossroads of Eon Productions and Ian Fleming Publications. Beyond it, the world of Bond radically changed.

James Bond will return…in Licence Renewed.

Hugo Drax, billionnaire philanthropist, has donated the Moonraker shuttle to NASA. When the shuttle is lost on its way to Britain, M orders James Bond to investigate.

A diverting couple of hours, which is a fairly good novelisation of the film, making this another book of the film of the book.

A novelization of the 1979 movie made to cash in on the popularity of Star Wars adapted from his own script by screenwriter Christopher Wood. A combination of the movies plot (which shares pretty much just a name with the Fleming book) but with a Bond that acted more like Fleming's book Bond than Roger Moore from the movies. An entertaining read for a fan of all things Bond. (A fun read but my copy of this book had a misprint that replaced some earlier pages with later ones)

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