I have, as is my habit, unfortunately, dropped off the face of blogging in the face of a mountain of school work, side work, and work work work work.

While I may be dropping the ball, David Foster is looking to 360-reverse-dunk it with his latest event, The Guns of August, wherein he’s brought together espionage authors JJ Cooper, Jeremy Duns, and Adrian Magson for, well, as David writes:

It is my honour to bring these three authors together for what I will call a ‘virtual symposium’ on spy novels. From my hollowed out volcano, I have grilled them on what makes a good spy novel and have had them analyse the changes, not just to spy stories, but publishing in general. Covering everything from the Cold War to post September 11 terrorism – and from audiobook to eBooks and digital downloads. Adrian, Jeremy and JJ provide unique insights into writing past and present, and share their thoughts on the state of the ‘spy novel’.

Head over to Permission to Kill for more!

Wes Britton @ Spywise has spent the past few months assembling a series of best-of lists for the past decade of espionage fiction. It was actually a decade rich with quality movies, television, books, comics and video games, and this is reflected in the lengthy lists of high-caliber media that Wes has put together.

A number of the articles went live today, and Wes sent out the following announcement. Note that I have an installment coming soon (as soon as I finish putting it together!) on the best comics of the decade. I’ll let you know when that one goes live as well:

Spywise.net is delighted to announce the publication of four new articles, the first of our “Decade In Review” features discussing the best espionage-oriented projects released since 2000.

Without question, the Crown Jewels of this series can be found in our “Spies on Film” files:

A Decade in Review: The Best Spy Films, Part I (2000-2004)

A Decade in Review: The Best Spy Films, Part II (2004-2009)

The over 50 pages of insights, opinions, and analysis were written by an international cast of experts from the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, and Japan. Craig Arthur, Wesley Britton, David Foster, Anders Frejdh, Amanda Ohlke, and Paul Rowlands each discuss movies you’d expect—the Bourne trilogy, Casino Royale — movies you likely never heard of, and likely some controversial choices.

Then, in the “Spies in History and Literature” files, you’ll find:

A Decade in Review: The Best Spy Literature, 2001-2009

A slightly different team, Craig Arthur, Wesley Britton, Mark T. Hooker, Amanda Ohlke, and Bill Raetz suggest the best spy books of this decade, both novels and non-fiction histories and biographies. Compare your choices with theirs and see if you have some catch-up to do! (Or perhaps some ideas about what we missed . . .)

Finally—for now—the last new article is in the “Spies on Television and Radio” files:

A Decade in Review: What We Brits Saw And What We Didn’t (2000-2009)

by Ian Dickerson

This very lively and personable essay is very different from the other overviews. Here, the longtime Honorary Secretary of “The Saint Club” shares his observations on what U.K. “telly” watchers got to see and why they missed some of the better shows we got in the states.

Coming soon: Wes Britton, Craig Arthur, and David Foster will present the “Top 10” TV programs we’ve seen since 2000. In addition, Armstrong Sabian is preparing his overview of the best spy comics and graphic novels of the decade. In the meantime, the film overviews alone should keep you busy—and hopefully find you matching your own perspectives with fellow fans and experts from around the globe. Let us know what you think—the articles are ready for you as PDF files at—

www.Spywise.net

P.S. The man who handled all the visuals for this series, Peter Lorenz, runs the “Illustrated 007 – The Art of James Bond” blog at–

http://illustrated007.blogspot.com/

Peter didn’t choose to plug himself in the articles, feeling his contributions didn’t match those of the writers. I disagree—he created a great banner, plugged in all the photos, and cleaned up the format. So here’s his bio as thanks for all his hard work:

Peter Lorenz is a veteran Bond collector specializing in 007 artwork from around the world. He lives in London with his wife Mia and constantly runs out of space for his collection.

Your humble host.

One year ago today, I made the first post at Mister 8, knowing that I didn’t have an audience, in which I established what I believed to be the goals of the site. Those goals have changed a bit over the past 12 months, but I thought, if you’ll allow, I might look back on those goals, revisit some of my favorite posts over the past year, and lay out some ideas for the next year at Mister 8.

My goal with Mister 8 is the following:

Publish a weekly comic detailing the adventures of agent Martin Queen, aka the titular Mister 8. Still in the planning stages, Mister 8 will combine the feel (though, sorry to say, not the artistic majesty) of traditional adventure comics by Caniff, Raymond and Sickles with a touch of contemporary humor. That’s the plan, leastwise.

Well, this one went by the wayside fairly quickly. I realized two things shortly after posting the first few strips. The first was that the story I wanted to tell with the Mister 8 comic was vastly more intricate than my art skills or the webcomic medium would allow. The second was that putting out a comic strip, even one only seen once a week, was hard work.

Still, I’m working on a series of scripts and pitch for a comic series from my original ideas, that I’ll hopefully start submitting to editors next summer.

Discuss spy-fi music — the themes of John Barry, Lalo Schiffrin, Jerry Goldstein, Henry Mancini, Ron Grainer, Laurie Johnson, etc. — and provide tablature for the songs that I’m capable of picking out.

I’ve certainly posted a good bit of tablature. And one of my favorite posts from the last year discussed Spy-Fi music with a capital S (and F)…an interview with Tom Pervanje of the spy-surf band Spy-Fi. One of the things that I didn’t get to do this year, but wanted to, was to record versions of the songs for which I was figuring out the tablature. Though I had a few posts, during surf-spy month, and in the post for the IPCRESS File theme, where I shared some music, in the next year, I hope to provide much better quality songs — maybe even an album?

Talk about the genre on film and television — from the camp of Derek Flint to the cutting edge of the Prisoner and the Avengers to the serious takes of John Le Carre. Also, yes, inevitably, James Bond.

In the past year, we’ve scarcely talked about Flint, The Avengers or John Le Carre! But we’ve talked plenty about Bond.

We’ve also discussed my all-time favorite television show, The Prisoner, sadly quite a bit after the passing of Patrick McGoohan. We also cast a spotlight on I-Spy after running into Robert Culp in New York. And of course, the Harry Palmer Files took up much of the summer!

Spotlight the genre as represented in comics — Nick Fury, Sarge Steel, Tara Chase, King Faraday, Super Spy…the list of secret agents working in a world normally reserved for superheroes is extensive.

Thanks to our readers, we’ve been able to share bunches of out-of-print comics, and we also spotlighted a number of costumed adventurers who cross the boundary between spy and superhero.

Analyze random aspects of spy-fiction — Gadgets, tropes, cars, and whatever else comes to mind. In fact, I think I’ll start things off soon with a posting about fonts used in spy fiction.

And I did! I also covered typography in The IPCRESS File, discussed machines and technology in spy films and television, and talked about setting the scene in spy novels.

One of the best things to come from my publishing a blog about spy fiction this year was meeting so many other fantastic bloggers, with whom I formed a loose sort of union with a lousy name — The Coalition Of Bloggers wRiting About Spies — or COBRAS, for short. I hope to do more collaborative work with these guys in the future, and look forward to seeing what they come up with in the next year.

So…goals for the next year — I guess we’ll check back in on these next November:

1. Complete scripts for and sell a publisher on the idea of Mister 8 the comic!
2. Expand the web presence of Mister 8.com  and the COBRAS!
3. Share more spy-related music!
4. More interviews!
5. Finish the Harry Palmer Files!
6. Talk about the Avengers, Man From UNCLE, Mission Impossible, and other classic 60s espionage shows!
7. Become more acquainted with the Eurospy genre!
8. Answer the question: Who is Eidolon?
9. Offer more contests and fun giveaways!
10. Bring in more regular readers and commenters! Please comment!

Thanks to everyone who has visited the site in the past year! I hope you’ll keep coming back!

Yours truly,

Armstrong Sabian

Danish Dr. No comic

…I feel obligated to mention that there are a handful of other Dr. No comic-related things in existence, but I know next to nothing about them.

The best I can do is point you to the archives of Peter’s Illustrated 007, where you’ll find a Danish 007 comic (seen at left), and The Dr. No Talking Storybook, amongst hundreds of other James Bond related artwork.

If you have other additions to the list, let me know through email, or through commenting!

James Bond Argentine Comic from Illustrated 007

I’m pleased to announce that Peter of the blog Illustrated 007 has accepted membership into the COBRAS (would Coalition of Bloggers Ruminating About Spies make you happier?). Peter is a sort of curator of Bond imagery, amassing a collection both varied and expansive. A look at the categories on his site will give you an idea about the amazing sorts of things that he’s gathered.

So head on over to Illustrated 007…but maybe set aside a few hours first!

HMSS logo

We’re happy to announce that Paul Baack and the crew at the HMSS Weblog have responded positively to an invitation to join what critics call “the best group of bloggers talking about spies who have formed a coalition and have a snake-themed logo on the internet.” Baack and co. have already put together an excellent magazine-style website at HMSS.com, and for that, the web would have been thankful, but they followed up with regular astute observations and commentary on the blog and quickly became a regular read of many COBRAS agents.

Make sure you check out the site, where the conversation ranges from “Bond” to “beyond”!

More good news came through official COBRAS line of communication yesterday — we’ve established new agents in France and Argentina!

From France, we welcome Phillipe Lombard — Bienvenue en COBRAS, Phillipe! — who runs the 007-themed blog Quantum of Bond, chock full of Bond observations and ephemera. This one’s sure to tax my Google translator on a daily basis. And so will….

Una Plaga de Espias, published by Johny Malone from Argentina — Bienvenido a los COBRAS, Johny! — who brings us the best in well-crafted antique thriller covers and info from the back covers. There are some real gems in there, Johny!

These guys join our other newest member Rob Mallows in one of the finest coalition of bloggers writing about espionage ever. And something tells me we’re not done adding to our ranks yet!

Welcome to the newest COBRAS member, Rob Mallows of Deighton Dossier blog and website fame. Rob has been a big supporter of the Harry Palmer series here at Mister 8, and we’re pleased to welcome him into the esteemed echelon of espionage essayists.

And I don’t want to leak intelligence out of school, but I’d expect some other forthcoming membership announcements….

Through July, or at least until I run out of things about which to talk, we’ll be looking at the Harry Palmer series of novels (in which the character doesn’t actually have a name), their author — Len Deighton, the films based on them, the star of those films — Michael Caine, and the television movies that followed. I will be re-reading the whole series of novels, re-watching the films, and giving my thoughts on all I encounter. I’ll inevitably be drawing heavily on the collection of Kees Stam, author of The Harry Palmer Movie Site, and Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier, and other odds and ends that I’ve turned up over the years.

If you’re new to reading Mister 8, you might not be aware of the super secret organization that this website is a member of — COBRAS, or the Coalition of Bloggers wRiting About Spies — and our roster is comprised of some of the best espionage fiction experts and authors in the blogosphere.

I thought it might be interesting as we approach each movie to also look at the reviews of my fellow COBRAS agents. Surprisingly, I think more have covered the later Palmer films than the originator, The IPCRESS File. Here’s a sample of what David Foster @ Permission to Kill had to say (click through for a full review):

Imagine James Bond, heading up a team of ninjas, who are standing on the lip of a hollowed out volcano which houses the lair of an evil mastermind. But instead of storming the complex, Bond and the ninjas have to wait for their L101 form to be processed, and they have to receive TX82 clearance from headquarters. Obviously the worlds that James Bond and Harry Palmer inhabit are very different. Bond’s is one of action and instinct, whereas Palmer’s is one of rules, bureaucracy and paperwork. Despite this less glamourous world, The IPCRESS File is an excellent film, and Harry Palmer is an intriguing hero.

David also has an interesting observation about promotion / packaging of the film — it looks sort of drab on the shelf next to the Bond flicks, Matt Helm, Derek Flint, etc. And yet, isn’t that the point?

Jason Whiton @ Spy Vibe also discussed IPCRESS. Here’s a sample of his review:

The combination of stylish cinematography by Otto Heller (Peeping Tom, Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb), John Barry’s score, and the quasi-sci fi nature of the film’s use of electronic sounds and lighting as Brainwashing technology all combine to give The IPCRESS File a wonderful Spy Vibe Style.

Jason’s discussion of IPCRESS here is short, but he and guest writers explored it more in-depth later in a series on set design. We’ll be coming back to those posts in a later discussion of Ken Adams.

Wesley Britton touches on The IPCRESS File in his listing of Indispensables: The 30 Best Spy Films of All Time. Bookmark that link, because it’s something we’ll be coming back to later as well.

…IPCRESS remains the best of the trilogy as it established Harry Palmer as the antithesis to Bond, an irreverent, ironic, working-class agent who is coerced into government service because of his criminal skills. He’d prefer cooking to spying, doesn’t want to spy on weekends, and would prefer not to carry a gun. Director Sidney Furie used experimental techniques to illustrate the eavesdropping nature of espionage including camera angles from under cars and through lampshades. In addition, the scene in which Palmer thinks he’s being brain-washed in Albania while actually still being in London set the stage for the formula for mission: Impossible.

Please check out these reviews, and when you’re done, explore the rest of the sites on which they’re hosted. My fellow COBRAS agents have created a cornucopia of spy-fic information.

Do any of you Mister 8 readers have reviews of The IPCRESS File you’d like me to excerpt / link to? Let me know in the comments!

In a virtual version of that game we all used to play in grade school, where we strove to be the last person clapping after a round of applause, I’m one-upping Tanner@Double O Section’s tardiness with my own finale to Man v. Machine…week.

We’ve been talking extensively about robots so far, so let’s switch gears today and take a look at computers. I was originally going to cover a bevy of espionage films today to build my ideas around, but why bother? Why bother when a shining example has been provided by one of the greatest films, espionage, sci-fi, period, of all time: Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville.

Alphaville Poster, Art by Armstrong Sabian

Brief recap: In the futuristic titular city, journalist / secret agent Lemmy Caution arrives on a secret mission from the outlands — to capture Professor Von Braun, the creator of super computer Alpha 60, and to use his knowledge to take down the dictatorial machine. In Alphaville, Caution encounters automaton after automaton, people ruled by the cold logic of a computer that has outlawed love and poetry. In Alphaville, logic is order, and those who act illogically pay the price with their lives. Caution falls in love with Natasha, Von Braun’s daughter, and his ability to have emotions, to act illogically, serves as a monkeywrench in the orderly machine that is Alphaville.

If you haven’t seen it, stop reading now, and do yourself a favor. It’s one of a number of full-length movies recently uploaded to Google Video, so go watch it.

There exists a myriad films about amoral computers driving out the experience of humanity with logical function — within the genre of espionage, I’d also thought of discussing The Billion Dollar Brain and The Prisoner episode The General (luckily for you, our pal David @ PTK recently reviewed Billion Dollar Brain, The General, and Alphaville). Perhaps the most well known of these computers-gone-bad is HAL 9000 from the Kubrick/Clarke film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his oft-quoted line, “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Dave.”

But as with our previous discussions on robots, I question whether the actual evil might lie with the creators of HAL.

Luciano Floridi and J.W. Sanders addressed the idea of computers perpetrating evil deeds in their 2001 essay, “Artificial Evil and the Foundation of Computer Ethics” by creating a new nomenclature for…well, evil. They start by defining the nebulous term with the help of Kekes — evil is an action that “causes serious and morally unjustified harm” — and identify two traditionally acknowledged forms of evil: Moral Evil (ME), that which results from human autonomy and responsibility, and Natural Evil (NE), which comes from the natural world (i.e. earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters). These terms, they offer, are not enough to describe modern occurrences of evil:

More and more often, especially in advanced societies, people are confronted by visible and salient evils that are neither simply natural nor immediately moral: an innocent dies because the ambulance was delayed by the traffic; a computer-based monitor ‘reboots’ in the middle of surgery because its software is not fully compatible with other programs also in use, with the result that the patient is at increased risk during the reboot period. The examples could easily be multiplied. What kind of evils are these? ‘Bad luck’ and ‘technical incident’ are simply admissions of ignorance.

To this end, Floridi and Sanders offer a new term: Artificial Evil (AE). They address the question above as well — are not the evil actions of the man-made system the fault of the men who made them?:

…This leads precisely to the main objection against the presence of AE, namely that any AE is really just ME under a different name. Human creators are morally accountable for whatever evil may be caused by their artificial agents, as mere means or intermediaries of human activities (indirect responsibility)….In the same way as a divine creator can be blamed for NE, so a human creator can be blamed for AE.

Some technologies, they argue, exist as artificial and autonomous agents: (remember this was written in 2001) webbots, expert systems, software viruses, robots. These agents are nomologically independent from their human creators, and therefore their ability to initiate evil actions is also independent from their human creators.

Today’s questions:

1. Do you think there is truth to Floridi and Sanders’ claims?
2. If so, what can be done?
3. Do we see these autonomous agents, capable of enacting artificial evil, in current society, even if not on the scale of a city-running, dictatorial super-computer?

Food for thought!

Want to teach a computer the difference between good and evil? Or between Batman and James Bond? Try out this cool program, that in recent years has been turned into a toy…a toy bent on world domination!