Editing Licence Renewed (section)

==Updating James Bond==
In 1979<ref>{{Cite book |last=Adrian |first=Jack |title=John Gardner: Overview ''in'' Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers ''ed. Lesley Henderson'' |year=1991 |publisher=St. James Press |location=Chicago and London |isbn=978-1-55862-031-5 |page=418 |url=https://archive.org/details/twentiethcentury00einl}}</ref> [[Ian Fleming Publications|Glidrose Publications]] (now Ian Fleming Publications) approached [[John Gardner (British writer)|John Gardner]] and asked him to revive [[Ian Fleming]]'s [[James Bond]] series of novels.<ref name="Ripley (2007)">{{Cite news |last=Ripley |first=Mike |url=https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/nov/02/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries |title=John Gardner; Prolific thriller writer behind the revival of James Bond and Professor Moriarty |date=2 November 2007 |work=[[The Guardian]] |location=London |page=41}}</ref>

When hired to begin a new series of James Bond novels, author John Gardner was tasked with updating [[James Bond (literary character)|James Bond]] and his allies and transporting them into the 1980s.
{{Blockquote|I described to the Glidrose Board how I wanted to put Bond to sleep where Fleming had left him in the sixties, waking him up now in the 80s having made sure he had not aged, but had accumulated modern thinking on the question of Intelligence and Security matters. Most of all I wanted him to have operational know-how: the reality of correct tradecraft and modern gee-whiz technology.|John Gardner<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.john-gardner.com/bond.html |title=John Gardner: The Bond Books |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050406004645/http://www.john-gardner.com/bond.html |archive-date=April 6, 2005 |access-date=August 4, 2005}}</ref>}}
Updating the time frame to the 1980s, Gardner's series picks up the career of James Bond some years after the Fleming novels ended. Due to the time frame change Gardner's series suggests that Fleming's stories took place in the 1960s and 70s, rather than the 1950s and 60s.

Likewise with James Bond, his companions and allies, specifically those working for the [[MI6|British Secret Service]] such as [[M (James Bond)|M]], [[Bill Tanner]], [[Miss Moneypenny]], and [[Q (James Bond)|Q]] are also all transported to the 1980s, although Q is rarely mentioned and is mostly substituted by Ann Reilly, a genius of gadgetry who is promptly nicknamed "Q'ute" by fellow workers as well as Bond, not long before being added to Bond's long list of romantic conquests.

The novel was initially titled ''Meltdown'' during the manuscript stage.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Hiscock |first=Eric |author-link=Eric Hiscock |date=6 September 1980 |title=Personally Speaking |journal=[[The Bookseller]] |page=1043}}</ref>