Fantasist’s Scroll

Happy birthday, Bond!
Well, it’s more accurate to wish his creator, Ian Flemming, happy birthday.
Yes, today is Ian Flemming‘s birthday, according to the Wikipedia. Born in London, England in 1908, Flemming wanted to be a diplomat, but he failed the Foreign Office examination and decided to go into journalism. He worked for the Reuters News Service in London, Moscow, and Berlin, and then during World War II, he served as the assistant to the British director of naval intelligence. After the war, he bought a house in Jamaica, where he spent his time fishing and gambling and bird watching. He started to get bored, so he decided to try writing a novel about a secret agent. He named the agent James Bond after the author of a bird-watching book.
After a several books that sold less and less well, Flemming started to write with the movies in mind. He wrote more sensational books filled with a larger than “normal” helping of psychopathic killers, beautiful women and bizarre plots to conquer the world. Though his books began to sell better, it was only years later that the movie industry took an interest, thus sealing the hopes of budding novelists everywhere of selling the movie rights to their novel.

Well, happy birthday anyway.

Can it be done?

They used to say that an army travells on its stomache, meaning that supplies and supply lines, especially food, determine how and why an army moves. But, what can you do about that? Well, according to this article on Wired News, DARPA is trying to make a soldier that doesn’t need to eat for five days. The project is called “Metabolic Dominance” and it’s an attempt to use biochemical “cocktails” of various kinds to overcome or get around the body’s need to ingest food for long periods of time. It’s a fairly radical step in both biochemistry and military science. Imagine what might have happened to Moscow if Napolean’s troops hadn’t needed as many supplies. Awsome. This technology, if they can perfect it, combined with the other things DARPA has in the works, really could change the face of war so radically that it may just become science-fiction. Joe Haledman may have been far more prophetic than he imagined with The Forever War, not to mention the classic Starship Troopers by Heinlein.

I honestly believe that this happens all the time. If you live long enough, you’ll see yesterday’s science-fiction become today’s reality.