This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
John Z: I started a list for the different works collected under the Clancy name. Feel free to expand/remove as needed.
Silent Hunter: Oh, dear. This is what can happen with Natter. Someone want to fix this or should I?
Fighteer: Done. The original entries are preserved below, for amusement reference.
- Strawman Political - Most later books villify Muslims, the Chinese, environmentalists and left-wing activists based on simplistic stereotyping. Example:
- Vilified... Muslims? Uh, what? The Clancyverse is the place where the Middle East peace process actually worked because the Palestineans chose to abandon terrorism and work for peaceful resolution. Its the place where the government of Saudi Arabia is actually honest. Where there were sympathetic portrayals of every kind of Muslim from Iraqi generals to Syrian peasants. The only Muslims who get one-dimensional unfavorable portrayals in the works are the Osama bin Laden expy and the Ayatollah Khomeini expy, and their immediate followers. So seriously, what?
- Yellow Peril
- This is the same novel that ended with a heroic Chinese students' revolution, not instigated by the Americans, overthrowing the corrupt oligarchs and restoring peace to the land, right? The message was quite clear: nothing's wrong with the Chinese as a people, but the Communist government epically sucks.
- We obviously did not read the same book, Clancy frequently gets several facts wrong about China and is downright insulting to them, many Chinese Nationals I've spoken who've read the book confirm this. For example
- Chinese food according to Clancy "sucks", this is clearly wrong.
- "30 Foot Nation" where everything only "looks good" X many feet away.
- For some strange reason the Chinese military is still using 1970's Soviet styled "Shock Armies" when the actual PLA had in the wake of the Gulf War completely overhauled their army in an unprecedented scale (switching from Division OOB to Brigade centric OOB), since the Clancy-verse had essentially the exact same war this is an example of Did Not Do The Research including showing the Chinese senior military leadership as having somehow no concept of AWACS or UAV's and other spy drones concepts and technologies they either knew of theoretically in detail or had and were actively deploying.
- Other inaccuracies including the amount of Chinese casualties in the Korean War, and quite a bit of slander towards the sexual habbits of Mao Tse-tung (a pedophile? Never substantiated anywhere) and of the politburo in general? Essentially he demonizes the government as caricatures, and repeatedly has even the main characters use absolutely tasteless racial slurs about the Chinese.
- And then there's the whole tortured logic behind the whole China being secretly in debt from mass purchases of Israeli tank barrels etc, more Did Not Do The Research as reading even a few respectable sources would show that while China has been for the last 19 years been steadily upgrading their military they've been doing so at a slow and steady pace never emphasizing military buildup over economic buildup the complete opposite of Soviet and US Cold War strategy and actually somewhat ignores real history of the year ~2000 that the book takes place in even when accounting for it being Alternative History and then there's the whole weirdness with the US recognizing Taiwan in the previous book something that would've probably on its own collapsed the CPC had they choosen to ignore it and do nothing.
- hilarious and accurate review here Did Not Do The Research http://trac.bookofhook.com/bookofhook/trac.cgi/wiki/TheBearAndTheDragon
- This is the same novel that ended with a heroic Chinese students' revolution, not instigated by the Americans, overthrowing the corrupt oligarchs and restoring peace to the land, right? The message was quite clear: nothing's wrong with the Chinese as a people, but the Communist government epically sucks.
Removed this one from the Plot Reaper entry:
- Combined with a touch of Did Not Do The Research (which is somewhat surprising, given that the President is Commander in Chief of the military that he fairly accurately depicts), in that in Real Life, such a meeting would intentionally be missing at least one person in the presidential line of succession, so that a freak accident or attack couldn't totally demolish the national command structure.
Its factually inaccurate on two grounds. One, since Jack Ryan had just been confirmed as Vice-President, he's first in the line of succession anyway. He got the job immediately upon the death of President Durling. And two, its mentioned in Executive Orders that at least one Cabinet secretary (Transportation) had been chosen as the 'designated survivor' for that special joint session of Congress, which is why the Secretary of Transportation is the only still-living member of the Cabinet appointed by President Durling in that novel. The main purpose of immolating the Capitol building at the end of Debt of Honor was to simultaneously wipe out 95% of Congress, the entire Supreme Court, and most of the Cabinet, along with the directors of the CIA, FBI, et al, thus handing President Ryan the titanic task of rebuilding most of the civilian command structure of the US government from scratch. Indeed, it was specifically pointed out at the beginning of Executive Orders that the military chain of command was pretty much the only part of the US government to be functioning without significant impairment immediately after the attack, precisely because it was the only part specifically designed to withstand this kind of catastrophic attack on Washington DC.
From Strifey: I'd question the claim that Clancy's in name only works "all meet the author's demands for research and technical realism." Anyone tried to suffer through the novelization of End War?
Fighteer: I'm cross-referencing a ton of tropes from the Related To page. Anyone who spots errors is welcome to correct me. The same with the catalogue of Clancy's works in the description. Edit: I finished, but I deliberately skipped tropes that specifically and only apply to the video games.
