Tom Clancy

Mr. Clancy is dead? Damn. The Hunt for Red October (the movie version) was my first ever exposure to his long-running franchise, which at the time I was still completely unaware of (they should've put a brief notice before the movie proper about how it's an adaptation of a novel). Wish I could get my hands on the rest of the franchise.

Speaking of The Hunt for Red October, are there significant differences between the movie and the novel? The Awesome Moments subpage has the following, which does not ring any bells for me at all: "Marko Ramius taking out an enemy sub, with his own totally unarmed". The only enemy sub that Red October directly engaged at all in the whole movie was the Konovalov at the end, and it technically was armed, it's just that the traitor broke the fire control board with his gunfire.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

@Marq: Yes, the book is substantially different in the details, although the broad strokes are preserved. In the novel, for example, the Red October defeats the Konovalev by ramming it. They can't fire torpedoes due to being undermanned (only the officers are operating the ship), not because of damage to the bridge systems. Ryan is less of a "buckaroo".

edited 16th Mar '14 2:55:07 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Don't you mean the US submarine captain — what was his name? That's who Ramius described as a buckaroo in the movie, at least.

... I'll take the much more awesome "game of chicken" trick from the movie, thank you very much.

edited 16th Mar '14 4:12:46 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

They still do the trick of hitting the torpedo before it's armed, but they don't play Wronski Feint with the second one. In fact, the Red October takes a torpedo hit which fails to sink it, then rams the Konovalev because Ramius knows its performance profile better than its captain. It may be less "cool" but it's more realistic ^note A torpedo simply wouldn't behave like that., and just as dramatic in the novel.

And yes, I'm thinking of the wrong character with the "buckaroo" comment; that's Mancuso. My point still pertains; Ryan does not speak Russian in the book and there's no shootout in the bridge; they discover the saboteur because he kills a junior officer offscreen. Ryan does indeed hunt him down in the missile room, but Ramius goes with him. Ramius is shot in the leg, but lives.

I thought that Alec Baldwin owned Jack Ryan in that film. I was disappointed to see Harrison Ford cast as him in the sequels. I heard that Baldwin didn't like the character's political views, but that could be apocryphal.

edited 16th Mar '14 4:58:50 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

From the chatter around at the time of casting Patriot Games, it was partly due to Baldwin's political views, and partly because the makers of the film didn't want to sizeably upgrade his salary given the enormous amount of money that Red October made. Two hundred million dollars gross on a thirty million dollar budget.

No, I take it back. Tanking a torpedo without sinking is more awesome by way of demonstrating its status as a technological marvel.

What do you mean "performance profile", though?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

As one of their most experienced and trusted drivers, Ramius captains the prototypes for every new Soviet sub. He "test-drove" the Alfa, so he knows how it handles. Tupolev counts on his superior speed and maneuverability to evade the Red October, but doesn't realize that Ramius knows exactly what those are.

Also, the reason the torpedo doesn't sink the Red October is mainly because the Typhoon is one tough monster of a ship all by itself, and Soviet subs have a double hull, using the space between them for air baffles. It also happens that the torpedo strikes the caterpillar drive which acts as a layer of extra armor for the inner hull.

It is not at all unheard of for a sub to survive a torpedo hit, although we have (thankfully) very little practical combat data for modern ones.

edited 17th Mar '14 11:22:19 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Oh, crafty. Very crafty, Captain Ramius.

On another note... Jack Ryan eventually becomes the US President in a later book, right? How well did his presidency fare?

edited 17th Mar '14 3:44:20 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Kinda mixed. His reform of the tax code wasn't long lasting, he was faced with a reasonably successful biological weapon attack, and Washington nearly got obliterated from the map by a Chinese ICBM.

He was on the ship that took that particular missile out with their AEGIS system.

It got a little silly. Clancy's moderate conservative/libertarian "everyman" President became the greatest in all of America's history, but then sneaky, dirty New England liberal Kealty got back in and undid all his noble work; meanwhile all of his brilliant diplomatic and military victories got the Reset Button pressed on them because Clancy couldn't write a modern techno-thriller without modern issues.

edited 17th Mar '14 7:39:36 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Hmm. Kealty is basically Ted Kennedy. Only not dead. Everything folks hate about Kealty - in universe and out - is what a helluva lot of folks, including me, hated about Ted Kennedy.

It made the books Kealty appeared in even better once I grasped the subtext and exactly who Clancy was metaphorically kicking in the goolies. And given that Clancy was from the same ethnicity as Ted Kennedy, Irish Catholic American, Ted Kennedy couldn't play the racial bias card against Clancy for making him look like such a nasty person in the books.

We obviously have our philosophical differences, Tam. That said, Clancy's best writing is when he focuses on the techno-thriller stuff, not when his characters get on a soapbox and preach Good Conservative American Values.

edited 18th Mar '14 8:20:42 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

So... what are most people here's opinions of Clancy's later works? I haven't bought or read anything later than The Bear And The Dragon, and I might opt to buy some new ones after my high school finals.

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

Well, Red Rabbit is well written, but suffer from the usual problems brought by Protection from Editors that late Clancy novels show.

And I wanted to throw my copy of The Teeth of the Tiger to the thrash after reading it. It left a taste so bad in my mouth that I haven't read the later novels.

I've read Red Rabbit and found it mediocre at best. I read Teeth and got royally pissed off at Clancy for playing around with the continuity of his 'verse just to stay relevant and make more jabs at liberal elitists. It was still fairly effective as a thriller, though. I started reading Dead or Alive and couldn't make it in more than a few chapters. So there you have it.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Are the latest books still full of "Jack Ryan Jr" bullshit? Clancy was always insanely conservative but his later works were particularly horrendous. Including an illegal, divorced from oversight wetworks and assassinations section that is literally funded by being insider trading capitalists. And they're the good guys!

Seriously, that setup sounds like it belongs to the techno thriller villain, not the guys we're supposed (but given no reason to) root for.

edited 11th Jun '14 8:44:31 PM by Mars444

Have you looked at their opposition? People who serve the plot best by leaving it.

I think whoever starting ghost-writing for him just isn't as good as he was. Clancy could be relied upon to make a respectful, reasoned, and persuasive conservative case, with a left-liberal counterpoint, without hammering the story.

Debt of Honor excepted, which is contemptible.

Schild und Schwert der Partei

That's the first time I've heard accusations of a ghost writer for him, though admittedly I don't obsess over all news regarding Clancy.

I don't think that the stuff with just "Tom Clancy" on the cover (no co-writers listed, none of the "Tom Clancy's X" stuff) is anyone but him, his writing just got worse as time went on and he found that he could make lots of money regardless of what he wrote.

And out of possibly morbid curiosity, how was DoH "contemptible" compared to, say the poor setup and silly-stupid "AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!" roflstomp of The Bear and the Dragon (IIRC the last solo book)?

edited 16th Jun '14 2:21:56 PM by Nohbody

All your safe space are belong to Trump

Because the Chinese are running dogs of capital and treacherous revisionists of the Great Helmsman's true vision, of course!

I suppose I didn't have as much problem with Bear for a couple of reasons: it prominently featured Sergei Golovko and General Bondarenko, and I enjoyed the Russian characters. The treatment of abortion is actually handled reasonably enough - Ryan makes the point that pro-choice =/= pro-abortion-all-the-time, and that the One Child Policy removes choice to a nastier degree than any Republican right policies could. The thuggish Chinese regime, which manages to combine the worst of capitalism with the worst of communism, is a more palatable target than democratic Japan. Perhaps more than anything, I read it when I was younger and less engaged and didn't really mind.

My objection to DoH is the underlying idea that not only are the Japanese treated as "different" Eastern barbarians (the bit where Clark reads a haiku is a standout) but the rather nasty way in which America's eventual victory is treated as some kind of glorious re-establishment of American primacy and the Japanese are returning to their rightful place. The crowing in EOs doesn't help. It's a classic Yellow Peril story.

As for ghostwriting - I think there is a fall-off in quality across the series best explained by external input.

edited 19th Jun '14 1:14:14 PM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

I was under the impression that Clancy personally wrote everything in the Jack Ryan series. I certainly saw his increased use of the Author Filibuster as it progressed, but Executive Orders remains one of my favorite novels despite that. I didn't get that Debt of Honor was about Japan-bashing so much as it was about the domination of their politics by the zaibatsu — a rather grotesque irony given how dominant corporate influences are in our country.

Given the premise — that Japan launches a rerun of the Pacific theater of World War Two — certain liberties had to be taken with creating a scenario in which that might actually be a realistic possibility, among them a reasonable Japanese PM being replaced with a weak-willed corporate shill. This, of course, became Hilarious in Hindsight (or harsher depending on your definition) when George W. Bush got elected in America and decided to invade Iraq.

After that it's good old fashioned "America, Fuck Yeah", not that much different from his other novels. The climax of the book was also an eerie prediction of the 9/11 attacks.

In summary, I didn't read "Japan sux lol" from the story so much as "I need an excuse for America and Japan to fight". That and a helping of "Look at those dumb liberals who want to cut our military", something of a Take That! at Clinton who was reviled by the right for drawing down our military capabilities.

edited 20th Jun '14 6:54:56 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

So there is a continuation novel already. I'm surprised they didn't call it Tom Clancy's The Campus in....

Excerpts here. I suppose having a previous co-writer do things may just avert franchise zombiehood a la Van Lustbader... maybe not.

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

I doubt I'll read it. I lost interest about a quarter of the way into Dead or Alive.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Eh, I might check it out from the library when it gets published, if only to see what of the post-Dragon books were actually Clancy writing, and which were Greaney.

Yeah, it strikes me as morbid curiosity, too, with a splash of plain old masochism.

All your safe space are belong to Trump

Wait a minute. Who the fuck thinks that the nephew of the President of the United States would make a good wet works operator?

And these guys do know that the skill sets for an FBI agent and the skill sets for an assassin are vastly different?

(Also, who is Dominic Caruso?)