I've read in the James Bond Encyclopedia that Bill Tanner is the Chief of Staff and Charles Robinson is the Deputy Chief Of Staff

I do find it a bit of a shame we don’t see novelisations for some of the newer movies, because I think a lot of the Craig’s could lend themselves well regarding some backstories. Specifically Camille’s relationship with Medrano, Bond’s relationship with Blofeld/Oberhauser, Safin’s backstory. You don’t really need it in the films, but just adding a bit more depth may actually go a long way. I think missing the whole Craig for novelisations is a slight disappointment, as Casino Royale especially would make for a great novelisation 😂

Awww, your enthusiasm is infectious when discussing books you really enjoyed! This sounds like the best kind of novelisation.

Tomorrow never dies has such a special place to me. It completely takes me back to a period of my childhood. Thanks for the video Calvin.

Many thanks, Calvin, I appreciate it.

6:32 Who would have thought Stamper is into S&M kink. I think we got ourselves a Stamper and Onatopp shipping that needs to be a thing here 😂😅

Only 2 mins in and I want to watch the film now! Brosnan really was a super James Bond! Great review Calvin! 3:08

Ah, the lost art of movie novelizations, still a shelf of them in my home, including all the Brosnan Bonds.

Benson's novelizations of Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 are crazy, and MGS is already crazy. It's been a while but that's how I remember them. Mantis shows Snake a hallucination of a creepy carnival and Solidus 'breaks into a frenzied dance' on top of Federal Hall. Glad this is good, I wanna read it.

Wow, I didn't think you could get so much more from a straight from movie to book adaptations. Especially from a troubled writing production from this film. I think any good writer making a book adaptation of a Bond film will know this has to appeal MORE to the Bond fans than the general public. I just can't see people go "wow, now that ive seen film lets check out that book tie in" Sounds like this book accomplishes that. Gived us new scenes, has more playful interaction with the characters, draws up the characters motivations and ticks, and gived us a different climax. Excellent review Calvin as always. You perhaps, just perhaps, given me more faith in these from movie to book adaptions. Might just check it out. If you see this Calvin, or anyone else whose read this. Does the book make any references or tie ins with its Video Game. Id be curious how much the writers all talked to each other with the film production and got an idea of what they were expecting in the final product. Did you see any references that perhaps the video game producers picked up.

I imagine this review has just shot the price up of all available second-hand copies

YESSSSSS another Calvin review

Just ordered a copy. I watched Tomorrow Never Dies about ten times as a kid so this should be fun.

I’m glad you got to read the TND novelization. None of the Brosnan era novelizations were ever reprinted and are quite tricky to find these days. Benson had a real knack for these and here he invents crucial character moments you wish were in the film and enhance it greatly. The bits on Carver and Wai Lin are so critical to strengthening those characters, and you get to clearly see how Stamper was essentially an early version of Renard. Benson was also working from an earlier version of the script for the ending and a lot of the more complex staging I think is fitting for the stealth boat finale. I really feel this is an essential read for Bond fans, but since you enjoyed the extra character bits here, just wait until you get to TWINE! TWINE is the best of Benson’s novelizations and he invests so much critical character detail for both Elektra and Renard. Most of all he details the whole kidnapping story and ALL of this should’ve been in the film! Die Another Day is another excellent novelization, and there Benson’s greatest achievement was strengthening Bond’s character throughout and having a consistent tone without a lot of the tonal problems of the finished film. My favorite section is having a much more detailed and Bondian method for escaping the hospital room and getting back on his feet. Benson invented a very Ludlum Bourne feeling series of sequences, where we see Bond using his skills to get the lay of the land, obtain funds and working capital and find a way to smuggle himself out of the country.

Speaking of Tanner, there's a moment in the book where he's in his office alone reflecting on the mission, and he wonders what he would do if Bond failed: how since the new M came in, Bond is the only person left at MI6 he's close to, and whether he would stay if Bond died. It's a nice quiet moment that really humanises Tanner more than any other piece of Bond media - Tanner is meant to be the closest thing Bond has to a best friend so it's nice to see their relationship actually explored as opposed to just using Tanner as an exposition dump as he often ends up being.

Shuddering on the Tube is everyday for most commuters 😊

I recently watched Mr. Benson being interviewed on the “Really, 007” channel. He seems down to earth and likable. So I purchased his James Bond Union Trilogy of books. After bring completely turned off by Gardner’s 007 books, I’m looking forward to reading Benson’s take on the series.

hi Calvin. i thoroughly enjoyed the novelisation of TND as i listened to the audio version from Audible. it gave a lot more context to Carver's history and what made him a total megalomaniac. 😃😃😃

I'm going to have to read this one. As soon as I watched your reviews of the Christopher Wood novelizations, I jumped on eBay and was lucky enough to find both.

I believe Gardner said the last Bond film he saw was Moonraker, he actively avoided them once he got the book gig. Which means of course, he never even saw the ones he novelised. I hope he did a big catchup after COLD.

Thanks, Calvin. I’d always dismissed the film tie-ins, but you’ve persuaded me to re-evaluate them!

I’d love to see you interview Benson! I know it’s not your usual format, but I’m thinking you would make an excellent interviewer.

Benson is probably my favorite non Fleming Bond author. My little sister gave me a signed copy of Tomorrow Never Dies a couple months after it came out. Good book underrated movie.

I enjoyed the small technical details. One I wish had made it into the film is when Bond and Wei Lin have to buddy breathe while decompressing from the dive. This could have been a cool and intimate moment in the movie.

Infectious enthusiasm as always!

I take it you're feeling better, Calvin.

I bought the audio book based on this review and I have to say that it does not disappoint. It is as good as you say and I am loving it so far. Thanks for the review.

My favourite Brosnan Bond, and my 7th favourite of the series overall. Never read the novel, but I listened to the audiable a few years back. Really entertaining listen. Refresh my memory, does the novel mention that Natalya married a hockey player?😂 A nice nod to Isabella Scorupco’s then marriage to a Canadian hockey player.

Are the ‘choose your own fate’ James Bond books from the 80s on your list to review?

According to the Bond reference book 'The Bond Files', this novelisation was based on the Dan Patrie Jr. shooting script-apparently the script wasn't working on set, hence Bruce Feirstein's having to do constant re-writes on set and why he got sole credit, and the copious deleted scenes shows they needed to find the film in editing and where some of the extra details shown here came from. While they felt that original script was better than the final film, they were slightly disappointed with the novelisation saying it lacked suspense and was 'workman like' [a rare opinion given it mostly retains a neutral tone] which seems harsh given Benson wouldn't have long to write it.

Wish they kept the Stamper pain/pleasure thing in the film. His grimace when Bond stabs him in the arm makes sense now. Though 12 year old me wouldn’t have been any the wiser. I thought Innuendo was that BBC soap opera in Spain that got cancelled for being too expensive 😮

Tomorrow Never Dies was the first Bond book I ever read. I borrowed it from my school library as a 13 year old. I remember enjoying it although at the time I think I had only seen the film once and certainly didn't know it in the detail that I do now. It's high time for a reread I think. I'm nearly finished Benson's Man With The Red Tattoo which is the last of the main series of Bond novels that I hadn't read yet. Once I've completed them all it would probably be quite appropriate to go back to the book where it all started for me.

I am just about to start reading the first Benson. Zero Minus Ten. I searched for Tomorrow never dies, to listen to the song and get in the mood of this time. Your video showed up! I simply had to share this coincidence! 😊 Further I am reading the German translations. The publisher Cross Cult did an outstanding job from Ian Fleming to John Gardner. For the first time complete and uncut close to the original. Sadly they do not continue with Benson. So the only chance is to buy secondhand paperbacks from the nineties. And only the first two of Benson's originals were translated. Sorry, for being out of place, but I wanted to share.

This sounds like a great book! Thank you for another great review

5:25 yeah it does make me wonder though how much of all this back story and other scenes were made up by Benson and how much were unused material from the film makers because it does seem like it wouldn't have been too much of a hassle to film the odd scene or 2 for the film. But was it THAT much of a short schedule in that case not to do those scenes or additional info I wonder? Oh so were there no additional dialogue or scenes of Paris in their?? THAT I thought should have been a must, surely!!! All the best Calvin, cheers :)

It's been reported Aaron Taylor-Johnson has been offered the role and he will be announced within days. Several British newspapers have reported this news.

TWINE REVIEW SOON OMGGG

I read this book years back when i first became a bond fan. I remember being enamored with the action because I wasn’t allowed to see the film! 😂

Since Tomorrow Never Dies is my favourite Brosnan Bond film, I would just love to read the novelisation and get into that story more. It sounds like a right hoot

I'm not sure if its from another draft but I believe Carver's father was a Newspaper baron. He pushed Elliot out of his life inc financially as he was the result of an affair. Elliot's whole reason for getting into newspapers was to form a rival company to his father's and ultimately buy him out. He did and bankrupted him as revenge for abandoning him. Not sure if Benson drew from that and changed it, or he was working from a version where Carver's father was an English Lord.

These novelizations have a leg up on your standard, for-hire book to movie adaptation with a writer who is already working in the universe and is invested in it.

A great Book of the Benson Movie Adaptions probably co favourite with Bensons TWINE. The TND book offers a lot to enrich the story of TND

Love Benson’s take on Bond. So happy you’re getting to enjoy them. I haven’t read the novelizations. I would love a film Bond that is more like the guy in the books. When I read these I never really see the person in the films, which is good but seems an opportunity for Eon or perhaps Amazon if Eon is tired of the franchise.

Great Job, Calvin!! The only novelisation I have read is LTK (which was great). Overall, I love my 13 Folio Society Fleming novels more than anything else Bond! Waiting for OP/TLD

It is surprising that he expanded a lot of the movies' story, without once referring to the original story or concepts in the original script (as seen online). I guess you have to make up some of this stuff to get around copyright.

Underrated bond movie , my most favourite action bond movie . I fell in love with michelle yeoh after this movie .

That's cool.

7:00 ... wait ... 😳

Benson did really well with all of the novelizations. TND does the most, I think, to also support the theory that Benson’s run of novels takes place during Brosnan’s film series as opposed to the book continuity (the line about lying to Moneypenny in YOLT about knowing Japanese).

As the esteemed critic (and generally a Bond fan) Barry Norman said at the time - " If Elliot Carver succeeds in starting World War III to increase his newspapers readership, who is going to be left to read his newspapers?"

Can someone please tell me exactly where is the bit that James Bond admits to Wai-Lin that he lied about "taking a first at Oriental Languages in Cambridge" in the novelization of *"Tomorrow Never Dies",* because I can't find it anywhere.

Calvin, I gotta ask, where did you find your novelization of TND?? Im having trouble finding one myself

I read the first 4 novelisations back in the '90s. I never got to this one - it could have been the change of author.

I'll watch this tomorrow, I promise 😊 since you asked and all

I recently read Michael Caine's novel 'Deadly Game' and was amused to come across a minor character [who just shows the main characters around her bosses HQ and then disapears] called Natalya Semyonova!

When are we doing The World is not Enough?

I’ve got to read this book at some point. I love the film, and if the book is a good translation of it into paper form, I imagine I would have a good time.

Thanks Calvin. I never really bothered with Brosnan Bond's till I started watching your channel. Been catching up on them. GE being my favourite of his. Did like TND for the inclusion of Michelle Yeoh and a great Cheryl Crowe intro song. Thing that I really don't like is Carver, hardly a menacing figure. mind there are a few of them throughout the franchise. Well worth checking out are the BBC radio dramas of the Bond novels, most can be found on YT.

having Bond and Wai Lin have sex before searching for the stealth boat was one of the worst parts of the novel, as was changing Stamper's death before Carver's.

You of course have tons of books to go but going back to the comics as a side series, there are now tons, would work. There is even a 60s Shounen manga that got a scanlation.

it's been a long time since I read this, but if memory serves, is this the book that states M's real name was Barbara Mawdsley? (or something like that). Curiously, rumor was that in SPECTRE her name was Olivia Mansfield. Either way, M's last name started with "M". Like Admiral Sir Miles Messervy and Gareth Malory. Hmmmm.

I'm listening to the zero minus 10 audiobook on your recommendation and really enjoyjng it... how far are we from the horowitz books? Edit...if you can't find a copy of the TND novel that's also available on audible

Just the other day I paid thirty dollars for an ebook that claimed to be an omnibus of all Raymond Benson Bond novels. Would have been nice if it had included this.

Reymond he was on really 007 podcast interview he talked about Pierce brosnan James Bond movie turn into books 📚📚 he said amazing story in it greatness of amazing awesome review Calvin Dyson review Raymond Benson book tomorrow never dies I love the movie book so amazing

Everything or Nothing live gameplay coming soon?

9:17 I do find it interesting that Benson was allowed to reference the film [as YOLT famously was an original story largely unrelated to the novel] given the novels tend to stick to there own continuity [hence the infamous 'not again' with Felix being attacked in LTK]. Conversely, Mark Edlitz says that Benson references Felix Leiter in the novelisation when the character never is mentioned in the Brosnan films. Maybe as this film/novelisation was famously rushed he was able to slip these by!

You dress like you're still waiting for Paris Carver to show up. Can't wait for you to read the rest of the crazy Benson stories.

I could have sworn I read somewhere that Stamper’s pain and pleasure senses were flipped and so he felt pleasure instead of pain. But I can’t find anything on this anymore. I know I read it somewhere like Wikipedia. For me, this is becoming almost as big of a Mandela Effect as Dolly’s braces in Moonraker. But that all being said, TND (the movie) has shot up from a middling Bond film, to being in my top 5 as of a few years ago (have yet to read the book).

My favorite movie novelization is Revenge of the Sith. But TND’s up there too. It does an excellent job of enhancing an already brilliant movie!

Not to be a nerd but I understand that not all Chinese symbols are able to be shown on a keyboard and thus you need combinations of symbols to create other symbols (that are not on shown on the keyboard). So not being able to type may not be all together surprising

You forgot to mention about this book acknowledges what happened with Natalya in between movies

6:54-7:03 well that's a bit of awkwardly connected phrasing there

Don't like the idea that Bond doesn't have a First in Oriental languages. You could just as easily say that his focus was on Japanese and some other language rather than Mandarin, or even just say that despite his First he's smart enough to just let a native take over in the actual writing. I would think M's secretary of all people would know what university qualifications James Bond does and does not have.

Have you thought about doing a list by best only James bond , novels villains or top 10 villains lairs

Elliot Carver is based on Rupert Murdoch not Robert Maxwell gamuarenteed.

Thanks for all your great work! i'm sure you know about Licence To Queer, the excellently-produced podcast by gay fans of 007. Be great to see more queer content on your channel as well. 👍🏽 (And have you read The Bond Code? About how Elizabeth I and John Dee referred to each other as M and 007, respectively??)

But what I will say I always found the criticism hilarious about bond not being able to type in Chinese just because you might be able to speak or understand a foreign language doesn't necessarily mean you can write and read in it

While I am not a big fan of "Tomorrow Never Dies" film as you do as I think what you consider to be its biggest strength like the non-stop action and fast pacing is its biggest weakest since it never actually allows its characters, story and themes to truly stop and breath like they usually do with most Bond films to the point where it comes off as more boring and exhausting for me as well as myself not being a big fan of Wai Lin as a Bond girl as she comes off as just a bland and generic action heroine. HOWEVER, I do remember reading this a few years ag and thinking to myself "Wow, Benson should write a Bond film" and "Wow, this is so much better than the Gardner stuff".

Tomorrow Never Dies was the 1st 007 Movie I Ever Got in 1997, It was Summer 1997 and I Went to Jumbo Video with my Mom I was 10 at the Time and We Got 007 Tomorrow Never Dies Me and My Dad Wanted to see it, he was a Classic Bond Fan He Watched Dr No Russia With Love and Goldfinger in the 60s and we Both Saw Tomorrow Never Dies and I Liked it I don't Know about him though but Ever Since Then I was Addicted to 007 From That Point On.

Greatness of amazing awesome fun video Calvin Dyson review tomorrow never dies Raymond Benson book tomorrow never dies I love the movie so much fun movies of fun his book 😍 so fun 😊😊😊😊

Greatness of amazing awesome videos Calvin Dyson review favorite James Bond movie book Raymond Benson book tomorrow never dies greatness of amazing awesome review Calvin Dyson greatness of amazing fun 😊

Hi Calvin. Good review. I think the film needed more in the way of dramatic substance - especially regarding Carver. As it is I think it kind of deteriorates into a fairly generic 90s shoot-em-up by the end. Sounds like the book built on the holes in the film.

Feel like this film used to get a lot of hate now it's got its own sort of cult following if you like personally I like it some good film to unwind on a hot summer's evening I feel like

A brief detour into pedantry and nerdishness: Shame on Benson for his libel on Bond’s performance at Cambridge! (We have independent confirmation that he was at the university-see TSWLM’s “James Bond! What *have* you been up to since Cambridge?”) There’s a far simpler explanation here. Compare “Romance Languages.” I’m not sure if Cambridge offered or offers a tripos with this title, but it’s the name of many academic departments. I could study Italian, say in one of those departments without learning any French or Romanian. Bond could have studied Japanese to a high level, something that might have made particular sense for someone of his generation, without learning Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. (Also: “Oriental languages” at Cambridge traditionally focused on “the Orient” in the sense of “the Levant” [cp. the focus of Edward Said’s *Orientalism*]; I believe, then, that one would have been more likely-or, at any rate, just as likely-to study Arabic or Turkish if one were pursuing a degree in this area. Bond could perhaps (yes, this is a stretch) be read as having told Moneypenny merely that he’d studied multiple non-Western languages at a high level and was a quick study, not that he’d already studied Japanese.

More Wai Lin? Ugh.

Due to the fact that the novel is out of print and the fact that I'm a cheap bastard, I put off for many years the novelization experience of TND until I was able to find a free audiobook version. With that being said, the narration was spectacularly awful. I think it definitely affected my enjoyment of Benson's prose and dialogue, particularly whenever the narrator would effect an excruciatingly cringy accent for Wai Lin. Not only that but I did also take some issue with Benson's attempt at recreating Fleming's fascination with minutiae. One example was his description of a very steamy scene between Bond and Lin, wherein he takes the time to describe the size of her breasts as being akin to apples. It was awkward, to put it lightly. Fortunately, if memory serves me right, Benson really amped up his game when writing TWINE, a review that I'm greatly anticipating.

If you mix Joseph Goebbels, Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg in a blinder you get Elliot Carver.