Whereas nowadays international cyber terrorist syndicates are designated ‘Bond villains’, Communist Russia ruled the screen at the very start of the film series. These places, often exotic, are carefully selected to reflect the very real and existing contemporary geopolitical turmoil.
A pop-culture icon of masculinity, with a notorious track record when it comes to fighting crime abroad in places that are traditionally, and in many ways, hostile to the West. “The name is Bond, James Bond.” Everyone knows the good-looking, suited up British fighting machine that never misses its target – be it a long-legged blonde or a long-faced villain. It becomes apparent that the narrators are unreliable, not only in terms of controlling the information the reader is allowed access to within the narrative but also because of spatiotemporal ambiguity within the narratives. The analysis is divided into four chapters as follows: how to read the unnatural in a narrative, what constitutes an unnatural space, the respective narrator’s voice, and finally, reliability of the narrators within their unnatural space. By using a combination of the fairly recent sub-discipline within narratology, unnatural narrative theory, and Genette’s question of “who speaks?”, this study analyses the narrators and the different kinds of unnatural spaces in which they speak. This paper compares the unnatural aspects of Gulliver’s Travels and select City Watch instalments of Discworld. The narratives foreground the fantastic, written to entertain and amuse its readers but also contain societal criticism in the form of satire or parody.
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels set in Ankh-Morpork are similar enough that both can be treated as belonging to the subgenre of comic fantasy.
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