The Fleming estate gave the new James Bond novel to a feminist lecturer who replaced Bond with a team of comically diverse agents

Sherwood wears her politics on her sleeve too, so we have the strange combination of a writer telling us a story about government agents, while actively disliking the government - the police are the bad guys, the climate protestors the victims. More than once, in fact over and over again, the spies working for MI6 question why they are devoted to a colonial power that has caused so much misery around the world. We get lectures on climate change, capitalism, colonialism, as though Sherwood is determined to use this opportunity to tell us all how the world should be. The straining to be politically correct throughout results in some unintentional hilarity (no tigers were sacrificed in the making of this action scene!)

Our new Double-O agents in the central roles are a woman and a Muslim man. M has been shuffled off to semi-retirement and for some unknown reason his former secretary Moneypenny, with no military experience, is now in charge of the Double-O section. Poor Major Boothroyd (Q) has been replaced by a computer, with the credit for that invention not belonging to him but a Mrs Keator (who?) and run by two young upstarts Aisha Asante and Ibrahim Suleiman (both questioning why they serve Her Majesty after the way their ancestors were treated by the Empire). The 3rd new 00 agent - Dryden - tips the whole thing over the edge into parody - he's black, gay, comes from poverty AND deaf!

Apparently this is planned to be the first in a trilogy

Surely the Fleming estate must have picked a writer with a long track record of working with beloved franchises and characters to let her make such wholesale changes?

https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/kim-sherwood

I am a Lecturer in Creative Writing. As a novelist, I contribute towards teaching creative writing and literature at postgraduate and undergraduate levels. I also supervise postgraduate dissertations, and am available as a PhD supervisor. I currently teach on the Creative Writing MSc and the English and Scottish Literature MA. Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, I taught literature and creative writing at undergraduate level at the University of East Anglia (2014-2015); on the Critical and Creative Writing MA at the University of Sussex (2016); and co-developed a Creative Writing BA as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of the West of England (2016-2021). My debut novel, Testament (riverrun, 2018), was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Award, shortlisted for the Best First Novel Award, and won the Bath Novel Award and the Harper's Bazaar Big Book of the Year. In 2019, I was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. I am now writing a trilogy of Double O novels expanding the James Bond universe for the Ian Fleming Estate and HarperCollins. The first in the trilogy, Double or Nothing, was published September 1st 2022. My next literary novel is A Wild & True Relation, out with Virago in February 2023. The novel follows a girl who joins a smuggler's screw in eighteenth-century Devon, and explores women's writing and history in a subversive adventure story.

>Her second book