Ooh! Ooh! One of my favourite pop-culture subjects. Novels will have their titles written in quotes, while movies titles will be in italics, to avoid confusion.
Thing to remember about the novels is that although they were a series, they weren’t really sequels in the conventional sense. Only in a few cases did Ian Fleming start a novel by including events from the previous one. “Thunderball”, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, “You Only Live Twice” and “The Man With the Golden Gun” played out in series (Ernst Blofeld introduced, Bond traces Blofeld to Switzerland, Blofeld kills Bond’s wife Tracy, Bond traces Blofeld to Japan, Bond kills Blofeld but suffers a head injury in the process, an amnesiac Bond is picked up by Soviet intelligence and is “programmed” to kill M, the attempt on M fails and Bond gets therapied back to normal etc). For the most part, the novels were standalone adventures, with only the occasional recurring background character (aside from M, Moneypenny and other Secret Service staffers, of course). As a result, movies were produced with no real need to follow the book in order.
Since you’re only familiar with the movies, I’ll run them down in order:
Dr. No: Quite close to the novel of the same name, though the villian of Blofeld was introduced as a man who never faced the camera and had a Persian cat (more on this later).
From Russia With Love: Also quite close, though the ending was altered, removing the cliffhanger that finished the novel.
Goldfinger: Very close to novel, though the goofy idea of trying to rob Fort Knox is changed in the movie to detonating a nuke inside the vault.
Thunderball: Also very close to novel, with minor changes (see below).
You Only Live Twice: This represented the first really radical departure from the Fleming novel of the same name. The novel contains no rocket stuff whatsoever, no mention of an attempt to start World War III, and though a ninja school appears about halfway along, there is no massive gun battle involving hundreds of men inside of a dormant volcano. Aside from being set in Japan and using some of Fleming’s character names, the similarity to the novel is scant.
Casino Royale[sup][/sup]: No similarity at all, really. The novel is a lame attempt at surreal comedy.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: This is extremely close to the novel, especially the ending, though the character of Tracy is given a more active role in the film than in the book. Further, the evil plot in the novel was to unleash agricultural disaster on Great Britain, while the movie suggested the entire world was the target.
Diamonds are Forever: aside from a few character names, similarity to the novel is trivial.
Live and Let Die: Similarly, a few character names are kept from the novel, as well as Solitaire’s implied psychic abilities. Aside from that, no connection to the novel.
The Man with the Golden Gun: The villian’s name is kept, as well as some of his back story, but the novel was set in Jamaica, not the Far East, and Mary Goodnight was a respectable character in the book, while Britt Ekland plays Goodnight as some kind of idiot in the film. No similarity.
The Spy Who Loved Me: Zero similarity. The novel is the only one written in the first person, through the eyes of a young French-Canadian woman who only encounters Bond in the final chapters. It has absolutely nothing to do with Egypt, submarines, or WW3.
Moonraker: Aside from the villian’s name, no similarity. The original novel described a proto-ICBM, which may have seemed really cool and futuristicky in 1955, but wasn’t a dramatic enough element for a movie in the mid-seventies.
For your Eyes Only: Fleming used this title for a short story that involved a woman with a bow-and-arrow seeking to avenge to the murder of her parents. That element (as well as Greek smugglers getting Bond involved in their lethal rivalry, from Fleming’s short story “Risico”) formed a relatively small part of the movie. In fact, because the movie was sort of hodge-podged together, it’s one of the more disjointed films in the series, in my opinion.
Octopussy: This was the title of another short story by Fleming, one in which Bond appears but only plays a minor role. The story is really about a disgraced former Secret Service officer. In the movie, Maud Adams claims to be this character’s daughter, and is grateful to Bond that he gave her father a chance to commit honourable suicide rather than face court-martial. Also, the movie involves a Fabergé egg, auctioned off under the name “The Property of a Lady”. This was the title of yet another Fleming short story that revolved almost entirely around the auction.
Never Say Never Again[sup][/sup]: Essentially a souped-up remake of Thunderball and the first major Bond film not named for a Fleming story. More on this later.
A View to a Kill: No similarity to the Fleming short story of the same (well, similar; Fleming called his tale “From a View to a Kill”) name, which involved a ring of spies shooting NATO messengers.
The Living Daylights: This was the title of yet another Fleming short story and aside from a blonde cello-case-carrying female sniper that Bond is supposed to kill but instead misses on purpose, there is no similarity to the movie.
License to Kill: Not a Fleming title, though elemtns from Fleming’s work are cherry-picked. Felix Leiter’s maiming takes place in this film, when fleming had it occuring in “Live and Let Die”. Also, an oceanographer named Milton Krest is horribly killed, as Fleming described (albeit using a completely different method) in the short story “The Hildebrand Rarity”.
Goldeneye: Not a Fleming title, but rather the name Fleming gave to his estate in Jamaica, where he vacationed for at least a month out of every year. The movie contains no elements from any Fleming work that I can recall.
Tomorrow Never Dies: No elements from any Fleming work that I can recall.
The World is Not Enough: This was a Bond family motto referred to in Fleming’s “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, though the connection to James Bond is at best tenuous (in the novel, a heraldry expert tells Bond about the motto and some of the history of a famous English Bond family. Bond expresses little interest and doubts any connection, as his father was Scottish).
Die Another Day: Aside from a few props from earlier movies thrown in as gags, no similarity to any of Fleming’s work can be found.
Put simply, the movies up the end of the Connery era can (mostly) be said to be based on Fleming’s work, though everything after that simply uses the characters. The opening credits reflect that change, with them originally saying something like “Starring Sean Connery as James Bond 007 in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger” and later morphing into “Starring Roger Moore as Ian Fleming’s ‘James Bond 007’ in Moonraker”, i.e. Fleming is credited with producing the character, not the story.
[sup]*[/sup]These movies were not produced by Albert “Cubby” Broccoli or Universal Artists and most fans consider them “unofficial”.
“Thunderball” came about when Fleming realized there was interest in producing major film versions of his novels (he’d sold the movie rights to his first Bond novel, “Casino Royale”, for a pittance, and it was made into a rather low-key made-for-TV movie with little dramtic punch or revenue potential. Later on the horrible comedy version mentioned above would be produced, though not until several years after Fleming’s death in 1964). Fleming worked wth writers Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham and produced various drafts of a script that involved a criminal organization stealing a pair of A-bombs and engaging in high-stakes blackmail. The conflict came about when Fleming went ahead and used these elements as the basis of the 1961 novel “Thunderball”, setting off a variety of lawsuits. In the end, Broccoli (in partnership with McClory) was allowed to produce a film version of the novel (as well as using the “Thunderball” villian Ernst Blofeld in other movies). McClory retained the right to make his own Bond movie using the elements he’d created with Fleming with Whittingham, though he was obliged to wait at least ten years before doing so (in addition to the basic plot of “Thunderball” the trio had come up with several variations on the nuclear blackmail theme). The result was Never Say Never Again.
McClory kept making occasional noises about making his own series of Bond films, which resulted in the opening sequence in For Your Eyes Only in which a recognizable but unnamed Blofeld is unceremoniously dropped down an industrial smokestack, the message being that Broccoli et al didn’t need Blofeld or McClory.