Editing Colonel Sun (section)

{{Short description|Novel by Kingsley Amis}}
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{{Use British English|date=May 2025}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=May 2025}}
{{Infobox book
| name = Colonel Sun
| title_orig =
| translator =
| image = ColonelSunOld.jpg
| caption = First edition cover
| alt = Surreal book cover, showing a naked woman (the top half of her body being an ear) standing on a beach. In place of the sun is a large eyeball.
| author = [[Kingsley Amis]]<br>writing as [[Robert Markham]]
| illustrator =
| cover_artist = [[Tom Adams (illustrator)|Tom Adams]]
| country = United Kingdom
| language = English
| series = [[James Bond]]
| genre = [[Spy fiction]]
| publisher = [[Jonathan Cape]]
| release_date = 28 March 1968
| media_type = Print (hardback & paperback)
| pages = 255 pp (first edition, hardback)
| oclc = 562319365
}}
'''''Colonel Sun''''' is a novel by [[Kingsley Amis]] published by [[Jonathan Cape]] on 28 March 1968 under the pseudonym "[[Robert Markham]]". It is the first [[James Bond]] [[continuation novel]] published after [[Ian Fleming]] died in 1964. The novel centres on the fictional British [[Secret Intelligence Service|Secret Service]] operative [[James Bond (literary character)|James Bond]] and his mission to track down the kidnappers of [[M (James Bond)|M]], his superior at the Secret Service. During the mission he discovers a communist Chinese plot to cause an international incident  that would implicate Britain. Bond, assisted by Ariadne Alexandrou, a Greek spy working for the Russians, finds M on a small [[Aegean island]], rescues him and kills the two main plotters: Colonel Sun Liang-tan and a former Nazi commander, Von Richter.

Amis drew upon a holiday he had taken in the Greek Islands to create a realistic setting and characters. He emphasised political intrigue in the plot more than Fleming had done in the canonical Bond novels, also adding revenge to Bond's motivations by including M's kidnapping. Despite keeping a format and structure similar to Fleming's Bond novels, ''Colonel Sun'' was given mixed reviews, with many reviewers commenting that Amis lacked Fleming's style in writing.

''Colonel Sun'' was serialised in the ''[[Daily Express]]'' from 18 to 30 March 1968 and adapted as a [[comic strip]] in the same newspaper between 1969 and 1970. Elements from the story have been used in the [[Eon Productions]] [[List of James Bond films|Bond series]]: the 1999 film ''[[The World Is Not Enough]]'' used M's kidnapping; the name of the villain in the 2002 film ''[[Die Another Day]]'', Colonel Tan-Sun Moon, comes from Colonel Sun Liang-tan; and one scene inspired an element of the 2015 film ''[[Spectre (2015 film)|Spectre]]''.