Copies of the out-of-print guide regularly go for up to $250, and it's easy to see why. It's written exactly the way you'd expect Martin Amis to write a video game guide, and it's delightful. Here's his philosophical rumination on the age-old debate of risk versus reward in Pac-Man: Do I take risks in order to gobble up the fruit symbol in the middle of the screen? I do not, and neither should you. Like the fat and harmless saucer in Missile Command (q.v.), the fruit symbol is there simply to tempt you into hubristic sorties. Bag it.
It's a work of art. Why he's scrubbed this title from his bibliography, we will never understand.
1
Ian Fleming's Tacit Endorsement Of Rape
If you haven't seen The Spy Who Loved Me, you're not qualified to be reading this website, and you need to go watch it before the authorities find you. Sure, it had a cheesy villain named Jaws whose teeth were made of metal, but that's an Oscar-nominated film you're talking about. But you might be surprised to learn the book version was slightly different from the film. And by "slightly different," we mean that the main character wasn't even Bond, but a Canadian woman named Vivienne Michel. Bond himself only makes a brief appearance at the very end. But there is a reason the movie version only took the title.
Female protagonists are great and all, but in the wrong hands, it can go very badly. If you want to see how little a man understands what's like to be a woman, ask him to write a female character. Vivienne describes herself as "an attractive rat making headway in the rat-race," and insists that every woman is hankering for "semi-rape," that "they love to be taken," musing that "it was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful." Considering that James Bond himself commits a whole lot of rape, "semi" and not, it feels like there might be an ulterior motive here.
Signet Books The original title was Dr. "No" Means "Yes".
At least Fleming had the decency to regret it. He was so embarrassed by the novel's reception that he asked his publisher to never reprint it. In a letter to said publisher, Fleming explained that his attempt "to write a cautionary tale about Bond" -- whom he insists should not be regarded as a hero -- had "obviously gone very much awry." That probably should have been clear to him the moment he wrote the term "semi-rape," but hindsight is 20/20.
Abraham is lawyer living in Mexico. You can say hi to him on Twitter here, or visit his DeviantArt here.
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