Unless some mean, mean SOB is playing tricks on me. Apparently, TC’s next novel will be entitled “Dead or Alive” and will follow up on plot threads established in “The Teeth of the Tiger”. See article here:
Mr. Clancy, it’s about time! I know I’ve publicly slagged some of his previous writings (for example Red Rabbit, which I described as “Tom Clancy wipes his ass and sells the result”) but it’s been long enough between books that I forgive him for his past sins. I’ll be first in line to get this when it comes out.
I notice he’s co-authoring this one with Grant Blackwood. Is anyone familiar with Blackwood’s previous works? All I know offhand is that Clancy works well with a co-author as HfRO and RSR both had help from Larry Bond and are both among Clancy’s best works.
Clancy slid off my radar with “Executive Orders” and disappeared entirely with those miserable Op-Center books. Buying “Rainbow Six” or anything after it never crossed my mind.
Yeah, I gave up on Tom Clancy a long time ago. I liked Without Remorse, Debt of Honor was preposterous and everything after that unreadable. I now hate the Jack Ryan character it’s the male equivalent of Mary Sue.
A little off topic, but isn’t anyone else surprised that they never made a film out of Rainbow Six? It was a perfectly good action story, and it has an additional built in fan base thanks to the wildly successful video game franchise.
Pretty much everything after Executive Orders was of much lower quality. I think it’s no coincidence that EO was the last book published before his divorce.
The one in which the US defeat the Japanese, was terrible.
The other one which the US defeated the new Caliphate was awful.
I didn’t read the next one, I think the US wiped out the Chinese.
Who will be the next enemy? The Cold Bitch from Narnia?
The Bear and the Dragon does not exist. I still want my money back for that turd. I gave up reading anything from him since and judging by the reviews from the ones after that I made the right decision.
I’m iffy on this… I sampled some of the co-author’s work on his website. I don’t want to say it kind of sucked but… it kind of sucked. I was only skimming it though.
You wonder why Hollywood, the ground zero of the American left/animal rights/environmental movement, didn’t produce a movie where the villains are radical leftists/animal rights activist/environmental terrorists plotting to violently reduce the earth’s population to a tenth its current level? Really?
Is Teeth of the Tiger the one where he has covert ops people doing illegal stuff, and relying on blank pardons signed by former POTUS Jack Ryan? Cuz I quit after that one.
I think so. It’s certainly the one where two top-secret covert operatives are… two children of a recent president of the US. Uh-huh. It also had a baffling moment where these two young men (of course they’re male) happen upon a terrorist attack on a suburban US mall and stop it with their badassery. Fair enough. But then they call the FBI and the FBI then has enough time to stop similar attacks all across the country. Apparently the highly organized nationwide terrorist plot was “attack the mall at noon LOCAL TIME” so that stopping one on the east coast gave time to stop all the rest.
I read a goofy Buffy/Clancy crossover fanfic recently in which one of the plot points is that a bunch of people are convinced that Jack Ryan must be the antichrist because only diabolical intervention could explain the comically unlikely sequence of events that led to his becoming president. Good times
So…going by the blurb about this new one, it looks like it’s basically “Jack Ryan jr. vs. not!Osama.” It even mentions the War on Terror.
Y’know, taking this from another angle, what are the chances of that kind of analogous situation even existing in the Jack Ryan universe? I mean, when you look at all the events that’ve happened in the books, Clancy’s basically been writing outright alternate universe science fiction since about the mid-90s. Or earlier.
It’s a good thing you quit there because that’s the last book Clancy wrote!
(Don’t be confused by anything with the brand name “Tom Clancy’s” on it, they’re not his books. Just his multi-million dollar name.)
Clancy’s works become impossible to reconcile with real-world history as of Clear and Present Danger, in which the President throws the election because of the events of the book. That is of course if you assume that president was Reagan or Bush (dates are not especially clear in Clancy’s books) and not some other fictional president. Mind you he’s also obliquely referenced Clinton (something to do with sexual shenanigans in the Oval Office) so who knows where the line is supposed to be drawn?
Just for fun, presidents in the Ryanverse since 1989: unnamed President (CaPD - one term president), Fowler (resigned), Durling (3/4 term then KIA), Ryan (at least one full term), Jackson (KIA), Kealty. Reagan, Bush and Clinton may or may not be in there somewhere.
I wonder if he’s going to try to reconcile some of his plots with reality. In an America that has had the heart of a city blown away by Middle Eastern nuclear terrorists, the 9/11 attacks are kind of small potatoes. And in an America where the entire government was destroyed by a suicide attacker in a jumbo jet, again 9/11 pales in comparison.
I think - I am trying to forget the later books! - Ryan selected him as his Vice President and he was elected after after Ryan’s second term only to be assasinated by a white supremacist.
