Tom Clancy

Given my experiences with Teeth of the Tiger and Dead or Alive, instead of buying Locked On, the next book in the series, I checked it out from the local library.

Still digesting it, so to speak (well, that and dinner ), but while I don't know how much is Clancy and how much cowriter Mark Greaney, overall I thought it was a little above average, but still far short of peak Clancy. There is, unsurprisingly given the presidential election B plot, politics (particularly of the Strawman variety), but a lot of it is focused on action, particularly the Pakistan plot and Clark's activities after being outed by Kealty for a crime committed in Berlin in 1981 that wasn't covered by Ryan's pardon, all for the sake of trying to drag Ryan down with "guilt by association".

And the poison pen thing has been retired, so we can at least do without that particular bit of silliness in the "Ryanverse Jr" line.

I sort of gave up on Clancy when he killed Robby Jackson off-screen and high handedly. And since he was played by Samuel L. Jackson in the Patriot Games movie, there was even more reason NOT to do it as far as I was concerned.

Really, while with the exception of Teeth the later Ryanverse books aren't that bad (not great, but not horrible), I think that there's nothing really wrong with leaving the series after Executive Orders, and after that point use your own headcannon that Ryan Sr. didn't say at the end of EO that he would run again, and that he retired for good once finishing his term of office, with everyone but Kealty^note whom I thought was slime when he was just a Kennedy proxy, never mind post-Bear writing making him into an even more petty version of Obama living happily ever after.

Not Ryanverse, but I'm half tempted to actually take a crack at Against All Enemies, co-written with Peter Telep. The thing is, though, that while Telep is okay working off of other peoples' work, as a solo writer working on all-original material he's weak.

edited 19th Jan '13 1:16:13 AM by Nohbody

Red Storm Rising got me reading his stuff.

A friend gave me Every Man a Tiger as a gift, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

Without Remorse is still one of his best.

But my favourite is still Rainbow Six.

Rainbow Six is an amusing romp. It's not terribly realistic as Clancy novels go, but it's fun to read. I think that, as action novels go, Without Remorse remains one of my favorites. The Hunt for Red October is one of my favorite book to film adaptations of all time, and Red Storm Rising is one of my favorite war novels.

Executive Orders gave me probably the most suspenseful experience I've ever had while reading a thriller in the daycare shootout scene, even though other parts of it were a bit cringeworthy. Cardinal of the Kremlin is probably the best pure spy novel I've read in my life.

edited 23rd Jan '13 8:30:20 PM by Fighteer

^

"Sandstorm, sandstorm, sandstorm!"

Even knowing how it turns out thanks to reading through EO several times, reading that line and the rest of the scenario that follows still sends a chill up my spine.

Ditto. I love Clancy's earlier work, but think he Jumped the Shark after Executive Orders. The Bear And The Dragon had too much Unfortunate Implications and conservative politics in it for my liking.

I never got a jump the shark vibe, it was just that he abandoned any pretense of not writing conservative author tracts as he got later into his career.

The trouble is, in Executive Orders, the tracts were worked organically into the story (and what passed for "conservative" when Exec was written is more "I wish politicians were this bipartisan" now), whilst in later ones it becomes increasingly forced. I find the later novels technically inferior to the earlier ones - there are quite a few research goofs in Bear, and they aren't as well written.

Related: what party are the fictional presidents supposed to belong to? I get the impression that Durling was a Democrat (seeing as he was going to appoint Ed Kealty as his VP and his Chief of Staff was Arnie Van Damm, the token liberal teammate), but can't be sure.

Are we confusing the technical inferiority of The Bear and the Dragon with its politics? I'm trying to remember where the supposed author filibusters are in that novel. Executive Orders is far heavier on the filibustering, from what I recall.

Really, I love all of those books. Teeth of the Tiger is when things start to get ridiculous, as Clancy brazenly resets his plots to adapt the story to a modern counterterrorism setting. And, of course, Kealty turns into a Straw Liberal instead of the Straw Skirt Chaser he was in Debt of Honor and the Straw Naysayer he was in Executive Orders.

I agree that it's fairly obvious that Durling is supposed to be a Democrat. If I remember correctly, Durling succeeded Fowler after the latter resigned, so Fowler would also have been a Democrat. Fowler succeeded the unnamed President in Clear and Present Danger by winning an election against him, making that administration Republican.

edited 24th Jan '13 12:34:10 PM by Fighteer

And to add to the party line (so to speak), in Locked On Ryan runs as a Republican, after his claims in DoR/EO about not being part of any party. Nothing is mentioned, IIRC, to clarify whether that was because of the peculiarities of the US political system that effectively lock things down to one of two parties, or because Clancy (who IIRC has said that Ryan Sr is an Author Avatar) is a Republican (or at least pro-Republican).

I think that Clancy has made no secret of sharing conservative social and economic values, with a bit of a libertarian bent thrown in — in as much as a war hawk can be considered a libertarian, anyway.

edited 24th Jan '13 7:07:40 PM by Fighteer

No, he hasn't, but "Republican" isn't necessarily synonymous with "conservative" (though it is often treated as such, admittedly).

Mostly, it has to be said, by those who were and are running for political office and who represent the Republican Party in public office.

I don't know. On the relatively few times I've ventured over to, say, HuffPo or Daily Kos, the regular contributors seemed to treat the two as synonymous, and I've seen it often in comments sections on various articles on the web who used "Republican" as synonymous for "conservative".

Which must annoy the folks like Rockefeller Republicans to no end.

Or the Blue Dogs. Still, in the United States, to call yourself a Republican is to tar yourself with the conservative label... after all, the only meaningful alternative is the Democrats, who (rhetoric aside) are also pretty conservative in their mainstream political activities.

@Fighteer.

Try the discussions of US trade policy with China and his treatment of abortion.

Well, I agree with Clancy that Chinese enforcement of its "one child" policy together with its treatment of religious minorities could well lead to the kind of international PR mess featured in the story. Jack Ryan's expressed views in the series are critical of abortion but in recognition that it's legal. The treatment of China over all is... well... if he's going to have all of America's notional political rivals pull a Suicide by Cop on our Mighty Army, they have to have some reason for doing so. I don't doubt that the real Chinese Politburo is more nuanced than portrayed in the book.

Clear and Present Danger is by far his greatest. Though I do like Sum of all Fears, Debt of Honor, Rainbow Six and the Power Plays series.

The last isn't a Clancy work, it's written completely by another author. Anything with "Tom Clancy's" on the cover is other writers working under a premise/scenario/setting created by Clancy.

While I know some of it is him being Mis-blamed, I do occasionally wonder how much of "writing is crap" on the internet (if not here, IIRC) in general is attributing those as being Clancy works.

edited 29th Jan '13 4:55:47 PM by Nohbody

"The last isn't a Clancy work, it's written completely by another author. Anything with "Tom Clancy's" on the cover is other writers working under a premise/scenario/setting created by Clancy."

True. All The Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon novels are ghost-written.

As an aside, if there are any wiki editors in here, a little help moving the 400-odd wicks of TomClancy to Creator/TomClancy would be appreciated. (The A and B entries are locked pages, already requested the changes over in the thread for that.)

Finally finished with Main.Tom Clancy.

As a lot of the entries were for Jack Ryan novels (not surprising, given that's the majority of his writing), where there wasn't already a specific works page (HfRO, PG, CaPD, R6) I potholed Literature/JackRyan under the book titles. Partly because of the non-Ryanverse wicks (namely the "Tom Clancy's" games), but also to make it a little easier for anyone who gets up the time/ambition to make works pages for the other Ryanverse novels, so they can just check the JR "Related to..." section and follow links.

I've been a Clancy fan since I was about 12; I swiped Hunt For Red October off my parents' bookshelf and kept reading from there.

I think the quality of Clancy's output has taken a downturn since the Cold War ended, probably because he likes black-and-white morality and the Iron Curtain handily provided that. Today's political climate is too grayscale for his style. Also, he's started to believe his own press releases...no author should do that.

Without Remorse remains my favorite out of his catalog, with The Cardinal of the Kremlin coming in a close second. I could have done without the Son Tay subplot in Remorse - it felt like Clancy simply threw that in there to show his in-depth knowledge of the Vietnam War and for length - but otherwise its a good crime novel. Kremlin comes as close as I think Clancy ever has to moral grayness; there's the debates about smuggling Filitov out or not, the whole mess regarding The Archer, the heroism (and fatalism) displayed by the Soviet agents sent to capture Major Gregory, etc. Now, the subplots involving the lesbian scientist most definitely have not aged well...but otherwise it is one of the great pure spy novels.

edited 25th Apr '13 12:10:42 AM by drunkscriblerian

I watched the first Jack Ryan movie, "The Hunt for Red October" earlier on, and was struck by two things. The first one was how good it still was, the second by how many changes there were from the book, which is still one of Tom Clancy's best, if not the best.