Thrush History

The UNCLE Chronology.

According to this Chronology:

the founders of Thrush first met in 1895;

they built the prototype of the Ultimate Computer in 1898;

they were first called the Circle of Life, then the Krafthaus;

they became "Thrush" in 1919;

Madame Nemirovitch, who joined Thrush in 1922, later claimed to have founded it;

Thrush kept a low profile and possibly helped the Allies during WWII;

the UN and UNCLE were founded in 1946;

Thrush was in major disarray and UNCLE nearly raided Thrush Central in 1968;

the Final Affair was in 1970;

conjecturally, Napoleon Solo became Harry Rule 1972-1982;

Justin Sepheran revived at least part of Thrush in 1983.

These are just the events and dates that I happen to be interested in.

Nothing Ends But It Changes

Nothing ever ends. Having years ago read David McDaniel's The Dagger Affair, in which he introduces the Technological Hierarchy, and having just read McDaniel's The Final Affair, in which UNCLE at last destroys the seventy five year old Hierarchy, I should now read the intermediate volume, The Rainbow Affair, in which McDaniel introduces the idea of the three Ultimate Computers. For those of us who watched The Man From UNCLE TV series and wondered about Thrush, McDaniels provides very satisfying answers about the history and structure of the organization.

Thrush and Patrick McGoohan's Village are two successors of Ian Fleming's SPECTRE. In fact, Thrush is a synthesis:

SMERSH was a state organization for world domination;
SPECTRE was a private organization for private profit;
Thrush was a private organization for world domination;
the Village was - what?

Bond defeated, and Krushchev disbanded, SMERSH;
Bond destroyed SPECTRE twice, then killed Blofeld;
UNCLE destroyed Thrush;
the Prisoner destroyed the Village...

The Village imitated the SPECTRE practice of numbering its members and concealing the identity of "Number One." Which state or other organization ran the Village? The question becomes irrelevant as the Village becomes an allegory for society.

The Final Affair

SPOILER ALERT for anyone who has not yet read The Final Affair by David McDaniel.

No wonder Thrush was so difficult to destroy. It was necessary first to locate and simultaneously capture three mobile Ultimate Computers, then to locate and attack Thrush Island. (There is a SPECTRE Island in one James Bond film and a Thrush Island in this one UNCLE novel.) Even then, national THRUSH leaders will try to re-internationalize the organization. This makes sense of Return Of The Man From UNCLE.

 The biographical details of the main characters as given in this novel differ from the details as given in the recent prequel film. (See here.) In the novel, Solo was still in school in 1949, not leaving the US Army and joining CIA in 1945, and Kuryakin came from the Russian navy, not from KGB.

Three Sequels

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy has three sequels:

an unpublished manuscript by Stieg Larsson;
two novels by David Lagercrantz;
a film with the same title as Lagercrantz's first novel.

In that third sequel, Lisbeth, now a vigilante, even wears either an eye-mask or white face paint that resembles a mask: an interesting transformation of the character into a standard series avenging heroine.

Meanwhile, I enjoy rereading Larsson's trilogy.

Salander, Vigilante

Some one-off characters are potential series characters, e.g., Frederick Forsyth's Avenger. That is what happens to Lisbeth Salander in the film, not the novel, The Girl in the Spiders' Web. In this version, she regularly attacks men who have abused women and raids their bank accounts for the benefit of the abused women.

Whereas the Swedish TV dramatizations of Stieg Larsson's Millennium novels are recognizable adaptations of Larsson's texts, the Spider's Web film is simply different from the novel after which it is named and should have been given a different title.

As such, it is an interesting adaptation of the original characters.

The Girl In The Spider's Web Film

Stieg Larsson wrote a published trilogy and an unpublished manuscript.

David Lagercrantz has written two published novels based not on the unpublished manuscript written by Larsson but only on the characters created by Larsson. For comments on the first of these two novels, see here.

The film, The Girl In The Spider's Web, is only nominally based on the first novel by Lagercrantz. Thus, it is at two removes from Larsson's trilogy. Lisbeth has become a vigilante against men who hate women. Thus, Lisbeth's known character is fused with the familiar image of a screen vigilante. Bruce Wayne is personally motivated to fight against all crime whereas Lisbeth is motivated to fight against a particular type of crime but this differentiates her from the original Lisbeth who took action against particular men but did not set out to wage a war against all women-hating men.

The Fox by Frederick Forsyth

Etruscan is indecipherable. Hackers do not have to decipher top secret passwords, just find out what they are, but how do they do that? Is hacking on the scale described in The Fox possible? Is anyone doing it?

Two novels by Forsyth end with a big political change:

the restoration of Tsarism in Icon;
the overthrow of Kim III in Korea in The Fox.

On the other hand, The Fox, like Wells' The Time Machine and The First Men in The Moon, ends with a return to life as normal because the Fox loses his hacking ability.

Instead of SMERSH, the Russian President now contacts a London-based billionaire who hires criminals. The climax with the elimination of the sniper and then of the Russian intelligence chief is neat.