Bond…Racist, Homophobic, Misogynistic Bond

Over at Nerd World, great blog by the way, Matt Selman has a disturbing write up about Ian Fleming’s Gold Finger book. I’m a fan of the James Bond movies but I’ve never read any of the books and its a good thing I didn’t as they (maybe just this one?) are full of some of the most vile stereo types.

It’s common knowledge that Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy thrillers were hardly politically correct. They were packed with outdated, but probably deeply-felt, sexism, racism, and, yes, even homophobia. (Not to mention the relentlessly kick-ass sadism.) Those who haven’t opened the books in a while may assume that Fleming’s old-timey notions lurked in the subtext of the novels. But a recent re-read of Goldfinger revealed the hate-speech was hilariously explicit.

Check out the original post for the specifics. The Quantum of Racist

Remembering Ian Fleming

Stephen King’s “N” is Here online

Stephen King was one of my favourite authors as a teenager but somehow fell out of favour when I discovered William Gibson. Neuromancer was a game changer for me.

After a decade or more I read my first new King novel, “Cell” and I really enjoyed it. Then I discovered that King was writing a column for Entertainment Weekly which is actually quite good.

Now that he’s back on my radar I find myself tripping over new material. The latest is a serialization of his short story “N” which is set to appear in  a new collection of shorts to be released November 2008. The interesting thing about this serialization is that its an animated comic with voice acting rather than straight up text.

N is broken up into 25 parts, with one part being released each week day. As of this writing its up to chapter 14.

Link to N

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