Cold War spy thriller in which 007 faces off with Richard Branson er, Elon Musk, no… Hugo Drax! A rocket ship with a weapons payload is scheduled to launch from the cliffs of Dover even as Bond races against the countdown to thwart a German-Soviet plan of attack. Bill Nighy sounds a bit older than I like but I also might be projecting because we know what he looks like. Nonetheless, his interpretive skills of the text are very good. ( )

Again, I was underwhelmed. It was pretty good but not what I was expecting still. Still waiting for the series to get better, but I think I’m gunna take a break from it for now. ( )

I miss the army in spacesuits visual and the zero gravity sex scene in my favorite worst bond movie ever, but all in all one of the better books. ( )

Bond plays bridge with Drax. And Bond doesn't get the girl in the end. ( )

It isn't that I feel these books need trigger-warnings, but Fleming was a man of his age, which is to say there is a certain amount of racism, sexism, and weird conflation of personal beauty and virtue, here. Further there are colonialist politics built-in with un-examined assumptions and language that skews toward a sham-Darwinist view of Anglo-superiority.

But. If you aren't put off completely by that, and ignore the ridiculous Roger Moore movie with which this literally shares only the name of a villain[1], this is quite good. The prose is pristine in its clarity and the descriptions are quite evocative. The characters are well-realized, and the plot rips along like the better Doyle Sherlock stories.

It is known, amongst fans of these sorts of things, that novel-Bond is not particularly similar to his movie-counterpart. But Bond here is even more of a romantic than in the other books, falling in love with an engaged woman and then backing out gracefully when he learns of her fiancé. It's all very sweet in a portrait-of-a-self-destructive-alcoholic sort of way.

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[1] Has a family ever done an author so wrong as the Brocollis did to Ian Fleming when they produced those Roger Moore films? I had never previously read this because I thought it had some stupid space-thing going on. Instead, Moonraker is the name of an ICBM that is integral to the plot. ( )