Christopher Wood E-Books

By MI6 Staff

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The two continuation novels penned by Christopher Wood in the late 1970s, based on "The Spy Who Loved Me" which he co-wrote with Richard Maibaum, and his solo effort "Moonraker", are now available as e-books. Their publication means that all of the post-Ian Fleming 007 novels are now available as e-books. The original titles for these continuation novels were "James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me" and "James Bond and Moonraker" to distinguish them from Ian Fleming's originals. The e-books are available from Amazon (Kindle), Sony and Kobo.

Major Anya Amasova had scored well in the course on ‘sex as a weapon’, although the SMERSH report had noted a risk of emotional attachments. James Bond was as wary of her presence in Cairo as he was charmed by her proud self-assured beauty. Where did the Russians find such women? But Bond was not an agent to be distracted from his mission: someone had learned to plot the course of nuclear submarines and, impossible as it sounded, M told him in London that the 370-foot nuclear-powered H.M.S. Ranger was ‘missing’.

Not since Dr. No and Auric Goldfinger has Bond locked wits with an opponent so dedicated to his private obsession or shielded by such deadly cunning as Sigmund Stromberg. His double-0 prefix meant that Bond was used to death, but what Stromberg’s killer could do with his two rows of stainless steel teeth was an obscenity.

American space shuttles don’t just disappear. M knows they had better not even seem to disappear when on loan to the British Government if Anglo-American relations are to avoid taking a pounding. So Miss Moneypenny has her instructions: find 007. Now.

Bond’s first port of call is a dumb-founding French Renaissance chateau and space complex in the Californian desert, where the unlovable Hugo Drax first manufactured the shuttle Moonraker and from which he now conducts 40 per cent of the American space programme. As Drax’s appealing helicopter pilot Trudi puts it, ‘What he doesn’t own he doesn’t want.’

From there to Venice, where Bond discovers a dastardly Drax laboratory in the bowels of a Venetian glass factory which, when he comes to reveal it, has vanished during the night. On to a pent-house in Rio de Janeiro – so palatial that it seems to stop just short of the Pacific coast and comes complete with swimming pool and shapely swimmer. Outside, however, amongst the revelling Brazilian throng, is a carnival figure sporting an obscene set of jagged stainless steel teeth which Bond is soon to recognize as belonging to killer Jaws. His next stop after a deadly chase over squalling falls in a tropical rain forest is – unbelievable – outer space.

Christopher Wood’s astonishing new Bond adventure was written under licence from Glidrose, which owns Ian Fleming’s copyrights, from the script he wrote for the latest Bond film. The title James Bond and Moonraker itself retains the firmest link between Fleming’s original story and the events that take place on and around Hugo Drax’s malignantly conceived space utopia. Bond is at it again – raucous, dashing, cheeky as ever – and as the song says, nobody does it better.