Among the people best able to predict what the future James Bond would look like is a British writer with a keen sense of spies and espionage. William Boyd has repeatedly returned to the terrain of his books. What's more, in 2013 he wrote his own official Bond novel: Solo.

Now that Amazon has picked up the rights to the character, Boyd envisions a series of 007-related products and entertainment. Maybe even new novels generated by artificial intelligence? "Certainly wait for the Bond aftershave - and the amusement park, and the evening coats. The new owners will have to turn everything to do with their billion-dollar purchase into product, so there will be nightclubs and vodkas," he says.

But the novelist and screenwriter doesn't see this as a new betrayal. Based on the authentic Bond, films have been made that bear little relation to creator Ian Fleming's original.

"It's too late now. The films have nothing to do with the novels. The films are ridiculous action movies that have to sell globally and therefore can't contain too much dialogue," says Boyd. 

Fleming's novels of the 1950s were already old-fashioned when the first Dr. No movie came out in 1962, Boyd says. "Since then, the movies have gotten further and further away from the stories, and the gap is now so wide that it doesn't matter."

Anyone wondering how Fleming's Bond behaved should turn to his own book, he suggests. "I took Fleming's character and then dealt with him, so if anyone is interested, all the information is in Solo; from Bond's book-lined office to his favourite marmalade."

Boyd's research takes him back to details dropped from the films but often borrowed from Fleming's own life. "The astonishing thing is that this not very good writer has created a figure as mythical as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. His novels remain the mother of Bond, with all their imperfections and political incorrectness." 

Is writing then like the process of creating fiction using artificial intelligence by "scraping" data from the past? After all, Boyd had searched through Fleming's 14 books, "pen in hand," before writing Solo. "It's true that everything in this novel that seems unusual actually comes from Fleming - that Bond was a nervous flier, for example. He gave Bond all his quirks."

But artificial intelligence, Boyd hopes, could only work to create strict and very formulaic fiction. "It might work for romance novels, but it was absolutely useless when I tried it about a year ago. Of course, artificial intelligence will become more and more effective. However, I think you'll only ever get something 'pretty good'. Serious literature is extremely specific and AI (artificial intelligence) will have a hard time keeping up with it. The only straw it can grasp is the very complexity and randomness of human individuality." | BGNES