I can’t see what’s wrong about that, presumably he didn’t build it on the same day and a helicopter isn’t exactly the kind of thing someone is just going to get replaced because they introduced a new model.
And some people own and collect and even fly antiques. Just like cars, boats and anything else. I have a friend who owns nothing but old 60s vintage Range Rovers [and boy do replacement parts cost!:eek:]
The most glaring error I can think of, and to his credit, it may not have been an error when he wrote it, were the lines in *Clear and Present Danger *about how cell phones were untappable by the police, which is why drug dealers used them. Aren’t unencrypted cell phone calls easily listened to with a modern radio scanner? (I already know that cordless phones were child’s play even back then.)
Is it possible some mistakes, like the paper/pepper one, could be transmission errors? How many steps did a manuscript take from Clancy’s word processor to the printed page? I think there are plenty of opportunities there for someone to replace “pepper” with “paper”.
Yeah, I read “Misquoting Jesus”.
Paper-flavored vodka, “actually flavored with old paper.” Hard to see how that could start out as anything else.
I actually signed up for straight dope because I noticed an error I’d never noticed before. I’m currently re-reading Red Rabbit and noticed that Jack Ryan refers to Sally as being four and a half. Mary Pat Foley also says that Eddie Jr is four and a half, but in Executive Orders, Eddie is said to be a starter on his college’s hockey team whereas Sally is a fifteen year old. I know it’s nit picking but it’s something I noticed. Doesn’t stop me from loving the Jack Ryan series though
My biggest gripe was all the time spent in The Bear and the Dragon on the seduction of the secretary, in order to plant spyware on her computer. The seducer’s cover was as a salesman/tech support for the computer vendor. He could and should have given her the spyware as part of a regular maintenance update, getting the needed intel WITHOUT revealing his spy status.
Not every plane he wrote about existed in anything other than slightly inaccurate* rumor and model airplane kits.
*I say “slightly inaccurate” because a “stealth fighter” did exist, but wasn’t an F-19 or really even a fighter. But that’s not Clancy’s fault; everything about that program seems to have been misdirection.
Wow! Zombie thread! :eek:
In another book (I don’t remember right offhand which), Clancy talks about the Red Baron and his “trimotor.”
The Fokker DR1 had three wings and was a triplane. Ford and Junkers both built planes with three engines. Those were trimotors.
Clancy calling the MP5/10 the “MP10” is also pretty obvious, considering the book came out seven years after the MP5/10 first came into service.
In Executive Orders, one of his characters claims that Taiwan has roughly 20 nuclear weapons - however, it’s fuzzy as to whether that’s a fictional development that happened in the Clancyverse, in which case it’s perfectly fine literary license, or whether he’s saying that Taiwan has nuclear weapons in real life (which it almost certainly doesn’t.)
I’m also curious about his claim that Ben-Gurion International Airport at Tel Aviv was still running commercial airline flight operations in the very midst of the shooting and chaos of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Was that really true? (This is in the prologue to The Sum of All Fears.)
Every few years I reread the books he wrote in what I call the Jack Ryan series, or Ryanverse as I have seen it called. Currently going through Rainbow Six again and just realized that on page 703, one of the characters Kirk Maclean is eating egg salad and noting that his companion is eating pastrami and not a vegan but maybe someday. On page 728, however, the same character is eating meat and explaining why humans aren’t meant to be vegans. Little things like that, when I notice them make me look online to see if anyone else noticed, but this forum was the only thing I could find.
I’m pretty sure that El-Al was bringing in special flights throughout the war of reservists and the odd active-duty soldier working abroad coming home to fight. Besides that, there was the U.S. airlift, some of which landed at the airport. Regular scheduled flights were most likely cancelled.
Of course, there’s also the fact that it wasn’t called Ben-Gurion Airport yet, seeing as David Ben-Gurion was still alive at the time.
Clancy made quite a few mistakes about Israel in that first chapter of Sum of All Fears. The ones I remember were the 18-year-old pilot (recruitment age is 18 and Flight School is two years long, so pilots under 20 couldn’t exist) and that he got his Hebrew wrong - Mazal Tov may literally translate as “good luck”, but it *means *“congratulations”.
Rainbow Six also had President Ryan pretty much stating that due to recent scientific advances global warming/climate change was an already solved problem.
Yeah, I was a touch skeptical of the claim myself. Glad to know I was right to be.
What expression would be used in that circumstance to say “good luck”?
“B’hatzlacha” - which literally translates as “successfully”.
About a third of the way through The Sum of All Fears (I’d have to go through my copy to find the exact page), I actually found a long, convoluted sentence that made no sense whatsoever, no matter how I parsed it. :smack:
In Without Remorse, Clark is modifying his .45 when a Woodsman appears out of nowhere and is not mentioned again (unless that’s the rifle he uses to whack the bad guys near the end, hundreds of pages later). Also, his journey up the river in North Vietnam is ludicrous when you think about it. How the hell is he going to navigate for hours underwater when he can’t see a bloody thing? And how long does a single tank of compressed air last? Amazingly, he knows just where to stop, and sure enough, he’s right within walking distance of the POW camp! Uncanny!
The most cringeworthy moment in all of Clancy’s books has to be when the Duke of Edinburgh calls Jack Ryan a “cheeky fellow” in Patriot Games. I actually groaned out loud when I read that. :smack: