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Summary: Bond at his best
Review: ten times better than the movie, Moonraker got me from the moment i first open it up. High stakes card games, ruthless and sinister villains, politics and twist at the end that makes the ride even better. Dear reader, if you like the spy genre or are a fan of the Bond movies, this is a must read for you.
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Summary: The Best Bond Novel
Review: Moonraker is the best of the orginal James Bond series. I cannot say enough about it, except that the film which took the title from this book and the name of some of the characters is as bad as this is great! If you want to read a good Bond page turner that shows him as a human as opposed to super human spy, then this is the book for you!
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Summary: Dated, but solid story
Review: 50 years after Ian Fleming wrote Moonraker, it is still a great action-adventure story. The ending really took me by surprise! I don't remember seeing anything like it happening in ANY of the movies.
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Summary: good fun
Review: Moonraker the book and Moonraker the movie have almost nothing in common. Bond is up against a villain whose smart, evil and completely crazed. There's no Holly Goodhead in the book and that's no loss because Gala Brand is a remarkable character. She's tough to survive to violent attacks with her wits in tact and she's vital to the success of the mission.
Moonraker shows the reader more of Bond's day to day life than the previous book, I didn't even know Bond had his own secretary. The movies combined Miss Ponsonby and Miss Moneypenny into one character. M and the lives of the folks who work for the Service are more clearly examined and once again 007 takes a heck of a beating and comes out on top. I still like the movie but the book is like finding a whole new world.
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Summary: Cracking good read!
Review: Dispel any thoughts about the tad-embarrassing Star-Wars-coat-tail film, and dive right into this whip-smart Cold War nuclear thriller. Bond, as he is in the novels, is flinty, flawed, desperate and yes, always heroic when need be. I just keep getting blown away at how three-dimensional Bond comes across in these books.
I truly didn't know what I was missing. I've polished off the first three novels like potato chips, hungrily and ready for more.
I guarantee you that if you pick up this novel, it will only be your first of the Flemings. It's irresistible.
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Summary: Best Of The Old James Bond's
Review: Of all the old James Bonds, Moonraker is the best. I've seen the movie over 20 times and everytime I watch it, it's better. So you should all buy this book.
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Summary: James Bond battles the evil Sir Hugo Drax!
Review: Moonraker is the complete opposite of the action filled, space-traveling movie. It is one of the best 007 novels of all. Never before has there been so much indepth characterization as in this novel. A true winner!James Bond's boss, M, asks Bond to accompany him to the Blades Gentlemen's club to look over a man called Hugo Drax. Drax is a hero of Britain, because of his building of a nuclear rocket for Britain. M suspects that Drax cheats at cards, and wants Bond to play with them to find out why he cheats. Bond discovers how he cheats, and uses it to take a very great amount of money from Drax. Days later, the security head working for Drax is found murdered and Bond is sent to find out what happened to him and meets up with Gala Brand, an undercover policewoman working as his secretary. They investigate his unusual rocket designs and discover that drax is planning to fire the rocket into London and destroy the city. They are both captured by Drax, who tells them he was a Nazi who now works for SMERSH. They both escape and reprogam the rocket to shoot away from London, and it hits and destroys the submarine Drax was escaping in. Moonraker is one of the most thrilling and exciting novels in the entire series of James Bond novels. A must for any James Bond fan!
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Summary: Moonraker
Review: This is not the best written or the most exciting Bond story, but it is probably my favourite, if only because it has everything the films haven't. It is subtle, intimate and almost naive, and Fleming's desciptions of the English countryside and coast are exquisite.
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Summary: An Amazing novel to be read by Post-War British
Review: This is about as controversial as James Bond gets. The original Moonraker novel is a deep and meaningfull novel, bringing in a strongly racial background, a story of intrigue in the wake of the second world war. Hugo Drax, a multi-millionaire gentleman, 'the Coloumbite King', is slowly building the formidible Moonraker missle that will bring the world to its knees. England has hailed this escaped soldier a national treasure, a man who will soon be the saviour of Britain.
But there is only one problem.
Hugo Drax cheats at cards.
M., the head of the elite double-o section of the secret service, has watched him cheat at Blades, the exclusive gentlemans club to which they are both members, many time, and has mentioned it to Basildon, the owner of Blades many a time. With nothing else to do on his own to help a national hero avoid much embarassment, he enlists the help of James Bond, agent double-o-seven, whom he has worked with twice before.
In the comfort of Blades, Bond doctors his cards before M, himself, Drax and drax's friend Meyer, begin their game of bridge. After Bond wins 15,000 pounds of Drax's money, he storms out, furiously muttering, 'Spend it quickly'.
Bond walks into the secret service building in Regents Park to find two of Drax's men, a scientist on the Moonraker, and a Policeman sent to the launchsite by Scotland Yard, have been killed in a murder-suicide, whereby the scientists last words before he lodged the gun in his throat were 'Heil Hitler'. Bond travels to the Moonraker Launch-site beside the cliffs of Dover, and finds Drax, Gala Brand, a stiff policewoman, and Krebs, Drax's suspect 'aide-de-campe'.
But something is wrong in Dover.
The test of the Moonraker missle is in three days, and Bond must find out what it is before the main population of Britain is obliterated. And he must watch out for Drax, a man who will stop at nothing to fulfill his hate-filled fantasies of mass-murder and bloodshed.
An intriguing novel that will have your pulse up twenty, Moonraker is a tale you must read up to the last page:
for healths sake
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Summary: The First "Grand" Bond Story
Review: MOONRAKER is Ian Flemming's third James Bond novel, though it is really the first to shape up like what would become a "typical" Bond story. It is the first Bond drama on a grand scale - the first during which an atomic weapon threatens a Western city (in this case, London). The stakes in the previous two books were much smaller, the consequences of Bond's struggle much less significant. The story holds together better than many Flemming novels, and thankfully, the book shares virtually nothing with the awful Roger Moore movie of the same name. MOONRAKER would actually make a great movie if adapted faithfully from the book. Although it was written as a modern spy story in the 1950s, it is really a period piece that captures the fantasies of a moment in time. Hugo Drax, the villain, is a Nazi now sabotaging the British for the Soviets. When the book was written, Nazis were very much on the minds of the young WWII vets reading Bond novels. The Soviets were presumed to be essentially just like Nazis, and their new atomic threat was ominous - if only there was some way for them to get their bomb to London. The Moonraker does the job both as a state-of-the-art long (for the time) range missile, and also because it was being fired from England into England. At the time, the premise, that Soviet spies are everywhere, must have been a British version of McCarthyism. But the story is about Britain turning to Drax, posing as an eccentrically heroic millionaire, to build the country's first atomic rocket. In retrospect, this is a cautionary tale against privatization. While whatever McCarthyites served in Parliament at the time must have liked this story, later Thatcherites probably hoped to keep it hidden. Though the scale of MOONRAKER was the most ambitious yet for Flemming, the book contains some already familiar elements. As in CASINO ROYAL, a card game plays a key role in the story. This time Bond suspects that Drax may not be all that he appears to be because he cheats at an exclusive British gambling club. As with LIVE AND LET DIE, and most of the following Bond books, the villain is physically grotesque so that he both looks and acts like a monster. And again like the previous book, the villain's henchmen are all of one ethnic group (this time Germans), playing upon all the stereotypes of that ethic group (they are ridged, sadistic, mechanical Nazis scientists). Finally, the villain's activities are ultimately in the service of the Russians. The role of the Soviets as the secret backers of all things evil in the world is distinctly absent in the Bond movies. In the early movies, SPECTER (which appears in the later Bond books) serves as a non-political substitute for the Russians, but the entire premise of the literary Bond's life and work is that commies are around every corner, lurking in every back ally. Bond of the books is distinguished from his movie-self in other ways as well - he smokes more, eats conspicuously unhealthy foods and drinks like an alcoholic. Although this Bond is smart, he is not the walking encyclopedia of the films (and often takes longer than the reader to figure out fairly obvious mysteries). In this book, the Bond girl is at least as responsible for saving the day as Bond, and a conventional bureaucrat named Vallance shares in the credit as well. The books are more brutal on Bond and his friends. He "dies" in the later, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, Felix Leiter is permanently maimed in LIVE AND LET DIE, and the Bond girl, a guilt-ridden double agent, kills herself in CASINO ROYAL. Bond merely gets pummeled over and over again in MOONRAKER, but perhaps more painful for the character - he doesn't get the girl in the end. While the "mysteries" of the main plot are not terribly mysterious, the real surprise is that the Bond girl turns out to be engaged, and she maintains her virtue. The final words are, "they turned away from each other and walked off into heir different lives." If the Bond movies rely on formulaic predictability, Flemming is worth reading because he keeps coming up with genuine surprises. Despite its age, despite its anachronistic technology, despite its tough-to-relate-to-these-days premises about Nazis and communists, MOONRAKER holds up as an exciting story that is actually fascinating (if for unintended reasons). It is well worth reading.
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