First Vince Flynn, now Stephen Hunter

Cafe Society
1

So there’s an author named Stephen Hunter who has written a number of truly exceptional thrillers over the past decade or so. Point of Impact may be the single best page turner I’ve ever read.

I just read his newest book, I, Sniper, and all of a sudden, the book has turned from “here’s a exciting adventure starring a super-badass ex-marine” to “liberals are evil and stupid, and a super-badass ex-marine is better than them at everything, but they assume he’s a redneck because they’re stupid and evil. And the press is stupid and evil. And liberals all hate guns.”

Weird thing is, exactly the same thing happened to Vince Flynn a few years back, although Flynn could never hold a candle to Hunter in the first place.
Here’s the overall plot of this book (spoilers aplenty) (but you should read this, it’s pretty hilarious):

[spoiler]
So Ted Turner (yes, it’s very very obviously exactly Ted Turner, just using a different name) used to be a damned dirty hippie. And while he was a damned dirty hippie, he was the backup man in a bank robbery, and shot and killed some innocent bank guards. This was caught on film, and for many years a different aging hippie hung on to this film. Eventually, one aging hippie died, and some other aging hippies got ahold of it. Of course, being aging hippies, they were unethical scumbags, and they didn’t either give it to the cops or destroy it. Instead they tried to use it to blackmail Ted Turner. So he did the following, which has to rank high up there in the pantheon of idiotically overelaborate villainous schemes:
(1) hires a bunch of ruthless mercenary snipers
(2) has them kidnap a famous veteran former marine sniper (not our hero)
(3) keeps him sedated for a few weeks, steals his credit card and gun
(4) murders, sniper-style, several prominent aging vietnam-era peace protestors
(5) frames the kidnapped sniper for these murders, kills him, makes it look like suicide (ie, old sniper goes crazy, starts killing people who thought he was baby-killer 40 years earlier)
(6) among those sniped during this faked killing spree are the people who are blackmailing TT, during which the incriminating film is stolen back
(7) also among those sniped is Jane Fonda. That’s right, Ted Turner has his own ex-wife murdered
(8) Then TT takes this incriminating film and… keeps it rather than destroying it

So our hero is called in as a consultant on the case before the FBI find the “suicided” other sniper. At which point, they (and everyone else) initially assume they have their man, because of the wealth of fake planted evidence, but our hero, knowing that no marine sniper could possibly ever go bad, finds some inconsistencies in the faked evidence, unravels the entire conspiracy, outsnipes the mercenary snipers (despite them having super-high-tech sniping equipment), and, in a gloriously silly climax, actually has a mano-a-mano old west six-shooter quickdraw showdown with TT and… shoots the gun out of his hand so he can be captured and brought to justice.

So if TT had just not shot Jane Fonda in the first place, his name would never have gotten into the story, and that connection never would have been made. And if he’d just had the two hippies murdered in a normal non-sniping-related way, and their house robbed, there never would have BEEN a story in the first place.

Meanwhile, there’s a lengthy subplot about TT’s paid political henchmen and how much influence they wield, yada yada yada. Also, there’s insanely in-depth slavishly detailed descriptions of lots and lots and lots of guns.

Truly, an awful, awful book.[/spoiler]
I googled up some online reviews to see if I was the only one to have this reaction, and one made an interesting point, which is that Glen Beck has kind of become the Oprah of thrillers. If he recommends them, lots of people buy them. So maybe Stephen Hunter is writing specifically for that audience?

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Vince Flynn was pretty much always like that, though.

3

Thanks for saving me the pain. I picked up I, Sniper at the library sale ($1 for hardback!) and have not started it yet. I won’t bother.

Point of Impact was an amazing book, but the rest have never matched up IMHO.

4

Yet another reason I love Vince Flynn’s novels :smiley:

5

I dunno… his first few books seemed more libertarian than anything else… against “the system” and against government corruption, but not partisan. Early vs. late Vince Flynn is like how the tea party presents itself vs. how liberals think the tea party actually is.

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I found Flynn over the top from his first book. That book, Term Limits, was about the hero trying to catch a guy who was killing politicians. But the hero’s attitude was that he basically sympathized with the killer, it was “sure, politicians are all evil and killing them is a good idea but technically it’s against the law so I guess I’ll have to stop you.”

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Flynn’s first few books where written when the Clinton administration was in power. Then the Bush administration took over and suddenly he stopped treating the system as an enemy. Not an unusual pattern among some conservatives - “I’m against all government corruption but I only mention it when the Democrats are in power.”

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Typical of most liberals as well.

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There are liberal techno-thriller writers?

“Alright, Agent Steele, our satellite recon has pinpointed the terrorist cell in this building. We know they’re armed and have a nuclear weapon. Our special ops team is in place and they’re waiting for your order to launch the attack.”
“Actually, General, I’m not going to launch an attack. I’m going to try something different. Has anyone tried talking to these people? Maybe we can find some room for compromise and peacefully resolve our differences.”

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“Anybody else want to negotiate?”

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:rolleyes:

No, the attitude of “it’s okay, as long as it’s OUR party.”

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I haven’t read his early books, but the last few from Brad Thor are the same way. Then I noticed he thanked Glenn Beck for being such a good friend in one of his books. I really hate when the preaching is so heavy handed. I don’t want to be lectured when I’m reading fiction as an escape.

13

Although, now that you mention it, I have read at least parts of several liberal-leaning techno-thrillers. The bad guys are usually thinly-disguised Cheney types running a shadow government while the good guys are usually college professors or scholars of some sort who stumble onto some secret or other.

14

I adored Point of Impact. I liked Black Light. I found Time to Hunt to be pretty bad and felt like Hunter was just wringing a good character into an unnecessary franchise and figured he’d likely end it there.

It was just last week I discovered there are now something like 6 Bob Lee Swagger books and his daughter is all grown up and working as a reporter. That would put him in his late 60s or early 70s, and he’s still running and gunning.

I’m pretty sure I’m glad I gave up when I did.

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So…hijack of a thread about techno-thriller writers?

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So, it’s wrong to discuss politics in a thread devoted to discussing the politics of certain writers?
Wow, what a perfect illustration of my earlier point.

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I wish he had more Earl Swagger stories, but they’ve all been pretty well told from what I can see. I just picked up a couple of newer Hunters that are in paperback. I’ll gove them a shot, but give them away if they suck.

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An example or two would be nice.

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I don’t still have the books and the titles escape me—most of them weren’t very good and I have limited shelf space. I bought them in paperback at Wal-Mart because I was hard up for reading material at various times.
I do remember that one of them involved robotics and sophisticated surveillance technology and a lot of it took place on a university campus.

An example of a liberal-leaning thriller series that does come to mind, though, is the Reacher series by Lee Child. It’s not on-your-sleeve political like the ones I was speaking of above, but there are asides now and again that make the author’s politics clear.

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The Family Trade series by Charles Stross isn’t at all techno-thrillers (sci fi multiple-universe espionage and intrigue), but does feature a fairly monstrously evil extremely-clearly-Cheney.