The World of GoldenEye

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Half of Everything is Luck…

Following the tradition of authors like Charles Helfenstein and Cary Edwards, who wrote books only focused in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service or the Timothy Dalton era, I decided to write my first book and dedicate it to GoldenEye.

You ask why? “Hilarious question”, as Alec Trevelyan would have put it. It was the first James Bond movie I ever saw, not on the big screen but on TV (and I found it spectacular enough to hook me to Bond) and, I’m also the man behind The GoldenEye Dossier, a website I created in 2011 to homage not only the 1995 film but the many video games based on the story. The site also took the blueprint of other sites by Bond fans that were exclusively dedicated to their favorite films, like Alan Gilbert’s Thunderball Obsessional or Drummond Grieve’s Blofeld’s Cat, focused on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which are now extinct but were very popular in the early 2000s.

As I was planning the updates on The GoldenEye Dossier for 2020, where the 25^th anniversary of GoldenEye will be honored with eye-popping visuals and a new layout, I started to consider the idea of making a tribute of the 17^th James Bond film. Before me, it was Garth Pearce with The Making of GoldenEye, which as you know is a typical old-school official “making-of” book with loads of pictures, interviews and details of the shooting.

Yet, that publication focused only on the filmmaking aspect and ignored many other aspects, like the historical background and a literary analysis of the story, not forgetting the influence of the video games which came between 1997 and 2011, after that book was published.

I was unsure at first, but Jack, a very good friend of mine who is also a proud Pierce Brosnan admirer, thought I should go for it. Also, I’ve been unemployed for a while, so I thought that it would be great if my GoldenEye knowledge could give me some bucks in the meantime. This is how The World of GoldenEye started on the first days of April 2019.

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A GoldenEye of Inspiration

After a couple of rewatches of the film, and another read of John Gardner’s novelization, I decided to split the book in sections where I would expand many topics taken into account by GoldenEye: the Cold War, the 1990s generation and betrayal, as well as sections dedicated to the women of the film, the official and unofficial video games inspired by it and a retrospective look at the filmmaking process, where I note that a few things of the Daniel Craig movies have its origins in GoldenEye.

I was happy to see the expectation was high when I announced my project and I resorted to a certain Bond experts to give me a hand on their areas, like Matt Spaiser from The Suits of James Bond, Reuben Wakeman from Toys of Bond, and Yannick Zenhäusern and Ben Colclough, who are both working on the upcoming GoldenEye 25 unofficial PC game coming in 2022. Every Bond web site owes something to Kimberly Last’s legendary 007 site from 1994, so of course she has also contributed to the book in a way. And I didn’t forget Derek Lyons, a regular Bond actor, who has appeared as a casino guest in the movie and kindly shared some anecdotes with me.

I know many people were surprised that I have completed the whole book in about a month, wondering if there are just words of praise for more than 100 pages. Of course not, the analysis is in-depth and very rational, plus some of the subjects (like the Cossack betrayal at Lienz) have been investigated by me in 2014 when I started to write my first article for MI6 Confidential magazine, that was published on August 2015. This time, I expanded on that subject and went to look up some other facts, namely the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachov, where General Ourumov took part according to his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it dossier.

The World of GoldenEye will be out on June 8, 2019, to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of Pierce Brosnan’s announcement as James Bond.

Paperback and digital editions will be available, the latter can be pre-ordered now on Amazon. Please take into account that the book is printed and shipped exclusively by Amazon, it’s an “on demand” publishing service they have. Much to my chagrin, the book will have no film stills to avoid paying royalties or copyright claims, but hopefully you’ll be able to enjoy the evocative cover artwork I myself designed. As Spanish is my main language, I’m already working on a translation which will be out later this year. I know how collectors are because I’m a collector myself, so there is a different cover artwork for the Spanish language version. Hopefully, it can be translated in other languages in the future, as well as making a second edition one day.

Either way, I hope you will enjoy reading my thoughts of this fantastic and timeless James Bond adventure that changed my life for good and, perhaps see the story in a more intellectual way. This is also a tribute to all the Bond fans that grew up in the 1990s like me, so the book goes especially for them. Even though about to fall into the abyss of 30, we’ll never stop being kids whenever we exchange Klobb and Golden Gun shots on a GoldenEye 007 match.

As I write these lines, I’m on the phase where half of everything is luck. We’ll see what fate has to do with it in the following months.

~ Nicolás Suszczyk