Old Ideas, New Visions

By Tina Stranger

Percival Everett apparently wrote Dr. No as a satire of James Bond movies, with a villainous incel who became wealthy and uses robotics and chemistry to get laid, but his goal is to eliminate the United States from history to avenge the death of his parents, killed because they know who really shot Martin Luther King. The antagonist seems equally determined to justify himself to the protagonist, sometimes acting like a tour guide to a biographer, a common enough mistake among Bond villains.

But perhaps unintentionally, Everett has nearly and neatly done for science fiction what Sir Terry Pratchett did for fantasy, use it as a sense of thought provoking humor. The hero of the book is Wala, a mathematician studying the concept of nothingness, the very concept the villain wishes to weaponize. When nothing happens to a town, it is erased from history itself, as if it had never existed. So there are a lot of puns, jokes, and weirdness involving nothing at all that Sir Terry would have been proud to call his own. Wala, his friend interest Eigen (a cute autistic mathematician), and his spirit guide (a one-legged dog he adopted as a rescue pet who talks to him in dreams) are moved through this story until they eventually take real action to keep nothing from happening.  

Everett has written over thirty books, many of which have won awards and Erasure was turned into the movie American Fiction (which I enjoyed enough to explore more of his work). Dr. No specifically won the PEN/Jean Stien Book Award. It may be hard to believe that he could write so many books that won so many awards, but Dr. No has an effortless flow, the energy of a first draft when we write down all the fun stuff, as if his sense of humor would be ruined if he went back and agonized over literary qualities like the perfect description of a sunset. Comedy as much as poetry is harmed when weighed down with excess words, and since I don’t have anything else intelligent write about this book without giving away spoilers, I’ll end my review here.