James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me is the official novelization of the 1977 Eon James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, which was itself inspired by the 1962 novel of the same title by Ian Fleming. Plot Background When Ian Fleming sold the film rights to the James Bond novels to Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, he only gave permission for the title The Spy Who Loved Me to be used. Since the screenplay for the film had nothing to do with Fleming's original novel, Eon Productions, for the first time, authorised that a novelization be written based upon the script. According to Ian Fleming's literary agent Peter Janson-Smith, "We had no hand in [the Christopher Wood novelizations] other than we told the film people that we were going to exert our legal right to handle the rights in the books. They chose Christopher Wood because he was one of the screenwriters at the time, and they decided what he would be paid. We got our instructions on that, but from then on, these books-of-the-films became like any other Bond novel—we controlled the publication rights." This would also be the first regular Bond novel published since Colonel Sun nearly a decade earlier. Christopher Wood, himself a novelist, and who co-authored the screenplay with Richard Maibaum, was commissioned to write the book, which was given the title James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me. Wood would also novelize the screenplay for the next Bond film, Moonraker in 1979. Differences between novelization and screenplay The novelization and the screenplay, although both written by Wood, are somewhat different. In the novelization SMERSH has been reactivated some time before the start of the novel, and is still after James Bond. Their part in the novelization begins during the "pre-title credits" sequence, in which Bond is escaping from a cabin on the top of Aiguille du Mort, a mountain near the town of Chamonix. After the mysterious death of Fekkish, SMERSH appears yet again, this time capturing and torturing Bond for the whereabouts of the microfilm that retains plans for a submarine tracking system (Bond escapes after killing two of the interrogators). His torture by SMERSH agents is reminiscent to that by Le Chiffre from Casino Royale, only here electricity is used to attack Bond's genitals rather than a carpet beater. The revival of SMERSH goes against the latter half of Fleming's