James Bond vs Max Damage

I missed Die Another Day when it hit movie theaters, but when it hit video I received an email that read, “You've got to see Die Another Day, it's EXACTLY like your Sun Stealer story.”

Now the Sun Stealer was the first of the Damage Inc stories that I wrote and was released via serialized emails to about 2,100 subscribers and was also concurrently featured on the Electronic Tales website. The main characters were the genetically improved, but still very imperfect Max Damage and his cohorts, the genetically improved Minnie Illyumzhinov who knows a dozen languages and nearly as many martial arts, and the diminutive but brilliant Seth Armstrong.

Max is a little different than many heroes in that every physical perfection he has comes with a drawback. Max is incredibly strong and heals very quickly but he has to eat an incredible amount of food or he becomes weak and fatigued. Max has eyesight as keen as an eagle, but this comes with a sensitivity to light so that he is unable to see in daylight unless wearing polarized glasses. Max has a high-threshold of pain, but his sense of touch is reduced and this sometimes makes him clumsy or even unaware of injury.

When I read the email I thought to myself, “How close could Die Another Day really be?” So I bought myself a copy and found out.

I've got to tell you it was with an eerie sense of deja vu that I first watched the movie. And though Die Another Day wasn't EXACTLY like The Sun Stealer there are a number of elements that are EXACTLY alike. What are they? Here's the quick rundown--

In both The Sun Stealer and Die Another Day:

• The main weapon is a satellite array which reflects and focuses the suns rays into a lethal and destructive weapon. I originally got this idea from an actual experiment that Russia conducted, which involved a solar array which was meant to beam sunlight into parts of Russia that had shortened days during the winter. Of course, my devious mind took it one step further and changed it into a weapon capable of immense destruction and I named it the Sun Stealer.

• The Sun Stealer device is used to (a) burn a plane out of the sky (b) burn missiles out of the sky, and (c) used in a large scale military attack.

• The central female character is genetically modified to be a superior combatant. Jinx in Die Another Day, and the redoubtable Minnie Illyumzhinov in The Sun Stealer.
  

• The villain of the story has a base of operations in an icy locale, which has become tropical due to the reflected heat of the Sun Stealer.
  

• The hero hops in a vehicle at the climax of the story and is chased by a beam from the Sun Stealer that devours everything in its path. Yes, it's true—Max Damage uses a motorcycle and escapes through subterranean tunnels and James Bond uses some sort of ice-mobile.
  

• The villain of the story is a former Olympic fencer.

Now this conglomeration of coincidences may seem merely a strange happenstance to you or it may seem just short of amazing. And since this case of possible copyright infringement will never see the inside of a courtroom (what, me take on Metro Goldwyn Mayer and their hundreds of lawyers and millions of dollars?) you get to be the judge. The law provides leeway for the creation of similar works independent from each other—and to be sure, the Die Another Day version of this story has been thoroughly Bondized by the writers (or adapters) of the movie. Max Damage isn't the type of hero that runs around dropping double entendres and bedding every woman that he runs into.

So the questions remains, is Die Another Day a pile of coincidences that created something quite similar to my previous story or were a number of story elements liberally borrowed from The Sun Stealer?

I've had some time to consider the question and as Max Damage is fond of saying, “I don't believe in coincidences.”


On a side note, I do hope to re-release The Sun Stealer as part of a future collection which will also include the Damage Inc tale On Wings of Darkness. In order to release this collection I've got to finish a third Damage Inc tale called The Black Hole of Madagascar, which is currently in the plotting stage (which means it's a long way from completion). I'd also like to see A More Peaceful World included within the collection—which is a story about 15,000 words toward completion, and is written by my good friend Derrick Ferguson that includes both Damage Inc and his dual-identity crimefighter Regency.

The only other existing Damage Inc tale is a completed novel (not yet available) called The Sea Witch.