'King Zero' by Charlie Higson
emtiem
SurreyPosts: 6,886MI6 Agent
Le Chiffre. Dr No. Goldfinger. James Bond has faced them all. But now the world is changing, and even 007 has no idea what’s coming for him…
It starts with a murdered agent in the Saudi desert.
Only a traitor could have known enough to bring him down.
But even James Bond can’t guess at the secret that was worth killing him to keep.
As Bond follows the trail across the globe, he doesn’t realise the countdown has already begun.
And hiding in the shadows is a man with more power than he could ever have imagined.
Prepare for a villain unlike any before.
Prepare for KING ZERO.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/473940/king-zero-by-higson-charlie/9780241799710
Penguin have announced that Bond is back in a new full-length novel from Charlie Higson, on sale in September.
Comments
So exciting!
https://x.com/monstroso/status/2039064307288162378?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2039064307288162378%7Ctwgr%5Ef572a9e022aa51fc61412a4d156bf8c748eb4a03%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mi6community.com%2Fdiscussion%2F21819%2Fking-zero-by-charlie-higson-2026
Very good news, thanks for sharing @emtiem
I’m really glad Charlie has written a full length Bond novel - I know he’s always wanted to - apart from the Young Bond novels obviously ☺️
Looking forward to this tremendously.
Well this is certainly very welcome news. An actual adult James Bond novel actually featuring James Bond?! I had noticed that Charlie Higson was trailing an announcement about an announcement on Twitter recently and I'd hoped it was going to be Bond related though of course you never know if it's going to be about something else entirely. It's great to finally see Higson get the chance to write a fully fledged adult Bond continuation novel after all of his years as the Young Bond author and more recently with his OHiMSS adult Bond novella in 2023. Certainly no one nowadays deserves to be an official Bond continuation author more than him so I am happy he has been given the chance to do it after his long apprenticeship for the role. The story sounds intriguing and suitably Bondian - the old "killed or missing agent" is always a good hook to hang a Bond story on. This is the best literary Bond news we could've gotten this year and I'm really looking forward to this new Bond novel coming out in September.
I’m really excited by this one, Higson might be my favourite continuation author as he always seemed to have a feel for Fleming’s slightly twisted fascinations which none of the others quite got, and it felt like we were always waiting for him to do a full 007 book. I’m very intrigued to see what ‘a villain unlike any other’ is (AI? POTUS? 😜) and I even really like the title: it has that starkly dangerous quality to it and is a nice addition to the tradition of Dr No, Colonel Sun etc. - and it’s his third royal Bond title, quite apt for someone with a podcast about Kings and Queens!
Yes, funny I was thinking that myself. King Zero is in the grand tradition of such earlier Bond "villain name and profession" titles as Dr. No and Colonel Sun. It's good to have another such title in this style as it's been a while since the last one.
KING ZERO
Hmm, well, I guess it has a certain punchiness to it. As always, I will reserve judgement until I read it. However, I am certainly pleased that Charlie Higson has got the gig. I hope he doesn't let the preposterousness of the Young Bond series creep into the adult arena.
As I don't do hardbacks, I have ordered this on Kindle. Some good reading for September.
Bit more to the synopsis there, plus a statement from Higson.
i like this bit:
"It embraces the worlds of both the literary Bond and the cinematic Bond, and my bad guy has all the elements we expect from a classic Bond villain, with a twist that’s not been done before.”
I'm sure that won't be to everyone's taste, but I quite like it when they acknowledge that Bond is bigger than Fleming now, and if anyone can pull it off Higson can.
April 1st announcement?
That's what I was thinking too but technically it was announced the night before on 31st March 2026.
Could the big villain possibly be Blofeld? He wasn't mentioned as a villain that Bond has faced in the press release.
I don't see how he could be as he's dead and so is his daughter.
Excellent news...
Looking forward to reading King Zero.
Ian Fleming Publications should seriously look into the writing talents of @Barbel and @chrisno1.
A James Bond short story compendium written by these two, would greatly be appreciated by the Bond community. I was very impressed by 'Edelweiss'.
If only @chrisno1 and @Barbel could create a Dr. No inspired story...
Maybe a short story detailing Lieutenant Commander John Strangways exploration of Crab Key Island with Quarrel, leading up to the events of Dr. No.
That would be wonderful.
Mr. Higson's 'King Zero' and Ms. Kim Sherwood's 'Hurricane Room' means 2026 is going to be a great year for us Bond fans.
Funny how it's all two word titles this year: First Light, King Zero, Hurricane Room... KZ's my favourite.
I'm sure I'll give it a read, though that thing he did to cash-in on King Charlie's coronation left a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm not sure it's fair to describe something where all royalties went to charity as a 'cash-in'.
Fair enough. Change "cash in " to "exploit."
As I've said before, there's still a number of projects that IFP hasn't told us about. As I have to remind myself, the creative process takes time.
Has anyone read that the book is 400 pages long? If true, this is one of the longest books in the series.
I hadn't read that so thanks for bringing it up. It does sound substantial but of course modern books tend to have larger text than books years ago did so it will all come down to the word count as opposed to the number of pages.
Very happy with this news. I liked Higson’s adult Bond novella, although I hope this installment is a bit less politically on the nose. Not to say I didn’t agree with the sentiment, but we all need a little escape—now more than ever.
I still think ‘Now More Than Ever’ is a good title for the next movie 😁
And it's an easy title to write a song to as well.
No it isn't.
He think he's a hero
Instead he's King Zero
He's gonna leave you flat on your back
I'll make it clearo
Don't let him nearo
You know he's going in for attack
I mean, you might be able to do better, and it's a bit 'King Midas in Reverse' by whatever that band was, but ...
Roger Moore 1927-2017
😅😅😅
My apologies for being unclear. I meant that "Now More Than Ever" was an easy title to write a song to.
However, here's a songwriter's trick: if you are landed with an unwieldy phrase such as "King Zero" to write a song to, then you put it in the middle of a line and not at the end. For example, the way Hal David dealt with "Moonraker" in his lyric to that song.
That's interesting. The setting of Higson's 'On His Majesty's Secret Service' seemed to exist at a tangent to Bond's prior prose-fiction continuities; it was contemporary while at the same time evoking the old-fashioned mores of Fleming's world, particularly in the M/Bond material. I very much enjoyed that as an inflection point. On another tack, the writer who arguably, to this point, has best fused a Bondian cinematic sensibility with prose-fiction continuity is Raymond Benson in his original Bond novels; these 'felt' Brosnan-era while aligning selectively with the Fleming canon. Prior to that, Christopher Wood did well on blending the Flemingesque with movie content, in his novelisation of his credited screenplay: 'James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me'. A film novelisation is, of course, a different proposition to an original story, but Wood pulled off the unlikely achievement of situating Fleming's Bond specifically amidst the most fantasy-charged trappings of the cinematic OO7. This set a bar for the six novelisations which followed (the next two of which, starting with Wood's own 'James Bond In Moonraker', had to 'rewrite' existing Fleming villains - Drax and Krest - so veered off into parallel worlds to the literary canon). If 'King Zero' takes forward the contemporary, Fleming-inflected Bond of 'On His Majesty's Secret Service' and implies some sense of Eon's wider, pre-reboot world in the formation of the character's past, I'll be happy with that, blurred though the hybrid might seem: it could prove the best of all worlds.
Now I know what I want for Christmas 😁
Which classic characters do we think will appear? M, of course. Moneypenny, Q, Felix Leiter? A reappearance by a supporting ally?