I stopped reading with The Bear and the Dragon, but it is still a sad thing that he has passed. The enjoyment I had with Red Storm Rising, The Hunt For The Red October, and the earlier Jack Ryan novels underpinned my summer reading for many years.
While that era for me may have passed, his near-future visions of economic and cyber warfare, and the use of civilian planes as weapons, was pretty on the money.
My thoughts are with his family.
Started reading Clancy books when I was about 13; read all of his books through Red Rabbit, when I finally tapped out. I’m not sure if it was my maturing as a reader, or his decline as an author, but the last couple books were barely readable. The love/sex scenes in particular felt completely forced.
Still enjoy Red Storm Rising, though.
66 is “so young?”
I’ve read a lot of Clancy’s work. Red Storm Rising is probably my favorite, but he had a lot of good ones. I think Teeth of the Tiger was the last one I read, and it was…less enjoyable than most.
According to Wikipedia, he died 10 years short of the average life expectancy for a male in the US. As an aside, I see on the same list that the US is 33 in rank for average life expectancy.
ETA: I read the first 4 Jack Ryan books (I loved Cardinal of the Kremlin). I tried to read Clear and Present Danger, and just couldn’t get through it. Haven’t read anything since.
Echoing all of the above. I stopped with Dragon & Bear. Hours of enjoyment reading the earlier books, though, and I reread RSR for about the 6th time this summer.
Just a guess that life expectancy increases with wealth, so it might be more than 10 years premature given his megabucks.
No more great Clancy thrillers. I’ll miss his characters and story telling. His early books were the best but even his later books were better than most writers.
R.I.P. Tom
I think he went off the boil after* Executive Orders*.
Yep, ain’t life a bitch? 
RIP. I enjoyed his early books immensely, particularly The Sum of All Fears. In his later years I feel like he became a bit of a right wing pro-military blow hard, but TSoAF had a great twist at the end where
Baddies set off a nuke at the super bowl, are captured, are tortured, and, as was part of their plan all along, confess falsely that they were working for a specific middle Eastern country, hoping to incite the US to nuke that country in retaliation. (I think it’s implied but not outright stated that it was Iran.) Jack Ryan is the National Security Adviser or something like that at the time, and the launch order requires confirmation from a senior official and he sticks out his neck and refuses to go along with it. So one of his most heroic moments of badassery was NOT attacking.
The very underwhelming movie of that book also left out another fantastic detail:
There’s a lot of confusion right after the nuking of the super bowl because the guys who go in to do a quick inspection are reporting what they saw over the phone, and “15 megatons” is understood over a bad phone connection as “50 megatons”, making it seem more likely to be state-sponsored nuke
Jack Ryan lived at Peregrine Cliff . Tom Clancy lived at Peregrine Cliff…
Like most others here I loved his earlier books . * The Bear and the Dragon * was the last book I managed to read.
I briefly collaborated with Tom when I was at Red Storm Entertainment. (I was the lead designer on Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon.) He was very enthusiastic and involved for a few months at the beginning, then got bored with the pace of game development and left us alone to do what we wanted. (Which was the best thing he could have done actually. He didn’t know anything about making games.)
I can’t say he was a pleasure to work with. He was a bit of a crank and a blowhard in person. My archetypical Tom story was what he did right after we’d shipped the original Rainbow Six. The whole team had endured a year of crunch time, and we were really burned out and exhausted. By that point in the project, Tom’s contribution consisted of dropping in once a month for a brief update. At the wrap party he showed up and graciously offered to autograph our personal copies of the game. :rolleyes:
I’m sorry he died so young though. He definitely didn’t deserve that. RIP, Tom.
You mean the Soviets.
YOU SIR ARE MY PERSONAL, LIFELONG HERO! You have NO idea how many hundreds of hours I spent on those two games and I frickin’ loved every minute of it. My god, R6 was a revelation in gaming for me.
ahem
That aside, yes I am sad at the passing of the man as well, but I haven’t read a new book of his since he started collaborating with others. **Red Storm Rising **is without doubt one of my top 10 all-time favorite books (and the computer game from the mid-80’s my second-all-time favorite game), and Rainbow Six isn’t far behind.
Thank you.
Like many others i enjoyed his earlier work and lost interest when he started plastering his name on everything.
Later I tried reading “Dead or Alive”, his return to the Jack Ryan universe back in 2010. It was both terrible and deeply weird.
Mild spoilers below
The quality of writing had, as mentioned above, fallen of a cliff. Probably because it was co-written by Grant Blackwood, whose name appears in letters so small you’d be forgiven for not noticing. Which is probably the idea.
The weirdness comes from the world-building. Everthing that happened in the previous books seems to have happened, along with the actual real world 9/11 attack and subsequent invasion of Iraq and Afganistan.
So 100,000 people vaporised at a Superbowl, attempted biowarfare attack and subsequent crushing of already combined Iran/Iraq caliphate, wars with Japan and China. All happened, while simultaneous real world history followed?!
Other highlights. Senator “Ted” Kennedy-expy,is apparently the democratic president, and is portrayed exactly as straw-man liberal as you’d expect.
Ex-President Ryan, who resigned in his first elected term, so his black VP (remember his best friend the navy pilot/later Admiral)can become president,only to be murdered shortly thereafter?!
So Ryan, who naturally is beloved by real Americans as the greatest and bestest president of all time decides to run again on a platform that curiously mirrors Tom Clancys beliefs circa 2010.
My personal favourite however is the Presidential Pardons. The super secret group set up by Ryan before he resigned, is both around the globe and domestically murdering people , torturing prisoners, systematically stealing state secrets (via super-hacking obviously),amongst many other crimes. But it’s all good. You see before he resigned a few years ago. He drew up a 100 pre-signed blank presidential pardons. All they have to do if they are caught is fill in the blanks and they are golden. These pardons for crimes committed years after the president in question no longer has any authority to issue them are legally airtight. You can literally dance around in front of prosecutors singing “Nyah, Nyah,Nyah”. In fact you can punch one in the face, quickly write in “Face punching is copacetic” in a space at the bottom you left blank for precisely this contingency, and there is nothing they can do but throw their hats on the floor and impotently jump up and down on them.
You forgot the best part of the secret pardons. Not only do they work for future crimes, they also work all over the world. Some of the characters were planning on using them if they got caught killing terrorists in Italy.
Well to be fair, my brain may have erased that part in a last desparate attempt to preserve my ability to suspend disbelief.
Assuming they were able to make it back to America (in their super-secret corporate jet), would the USA extradite a citizen to Italy if they had been pardoned?
Regards,
Shodan