How artists created spies and spies created artists
In a letter to The Economist, Alex Younger or “C”, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service responds to a Bagehot column on the relationship between the intelligence service and the literary establishment. Bagehot argued that spy novels offered a sharp insight into the nature of Britain and an empire in decline, sharpened by the knowledge that writers like Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John Le Carre had all been spies while ex-MI6 head, Dame Stella Rimington had written spy novels after she retired. Younger explains how the relationship was mutually beneficial. The literary world got an exciting genre and British Intelligence got a brand image as it is “painted in the minds of a global audience as some form of ubiquitous intelligence presence. This can be quite a force multiplier, even if it means we are blamed for an astonishing range of phenomena in which we have no involvement at all.”
Such branding has been called cultural climating. One famous example is maybe the movie Top Gun which led to a significant uplift in applications to join the American air force.
On another level, the imagination of the writers seems to have shaped spy craft just as their training and experience informed their stories. As Younger says, “Some of the operational correspondence I have seen during my career would grace many an anthology were it not for its classification.”
In a similar way, sci-fi writing has long inspired Silicon Valley and set tech innovators off on missions to invent jet packs and the like. The idea of a Universal Basic Income found its way into sci-fi on its long journey from Thomas Paine to being the big “new” political idea of 2017.
While I can barely contain myself as we await Bladerunner 2049 and its take on what dystopian AI hell lies ahead I think I will distract myself with a reading of Ian M Banks Culture with its post-scarcity vision of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, as this excellent blog piece by James Smith explains.
