I started reading The Hunt for Red October a few years ago. I had to put it down halfway through and go read something else before coming back to it. While I enjoyed the story itself, I found his endless detailing of every dial, knob, lever, button, screen and gauge in the submarine to be tedious and unnecessary. The technical detail just became mind-numbing after a while.
I always preferred Asimov’s style of just dropping the reader into the story: our heroes are on a spaceship in the distant future, there’s all sorts of technology but I’m not going to explain how it works unless doing so somehow advances the story, which of course is the most important thing.
[sub]Yeah, yeah, I know - two different genres. But still…[/sub]
Another doper who liked the first several Clancys I’d read. And I haven’t bothered to read any since Debt of Honor. I’m keeping my copy of Hunt, but none of the rest.
I agree. I’d been dying to read that book, so I bought it and tried reading it. The man has no sense of pacing, and gets bogged down in detail, to the detriment of plot movement.
I thought “The Hunt for Red October” was a prety good yarn.
Clancy can come up with good stories; he just can’t write, is underedited, and his novels are getting increasingly preachy and have always been vaguely racist. If you took a 900-page Clancy novel and removed 500 pages of submarine filler and political grandstanding you’d have a terrific book.
I’ve read every Tom Clancy Book. I enjoyed them all the way up to Debt of Honor.
The past few years, he has been just terrible. Clancy has no idea how to be subtle with his views. He has to hit you over the head with the Clinton bad-Bush good stuff.
Even with something minor such as no smoking on airlines. How many times does he remind us in Red Rabbit that Ryan lights a cigarette on his flight?
Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Cardinal of the Kremlin, and Clear and Present Danger are all good. Sum of all Fears started to slip a bit with lots of sub plots that didn’t move the story along. Debt of Honor is probably my favorite. However, I know enough economics so the entire middle of the book sense to me.
Executive Orders starts the downhill slide. At least half of this book should have been edited out. Lots of confusing side plots. Still, the basic plot of a killer virus was interesting.
Rainbox 6. Another killer virus? This is the book which doesn’t mention Jack Ryan by name, but takes place in the same “world.” This book hits you over the head with Clancy’s hatred of environmentalists.
The Bear and the Dragon. I finished this one, but I know I skipped major sections of the book. I have no idea where my copy is and I have no desire to reread it. This is the one with badly written porn and a ridiculous plot.
Red Rabbit. This one goes back into Ryan’s past. I think that if Clancy writes any more Ryan books this is what he should do. Red Rabbit kinda reads like something that Clancy probably had started 20 something years ago and picked back up. I like it more than anything else he’d done recently, but there are still many annoying points in the book.
Teeth of the Tiger. I didn’t even buy this one. I checked it out from the library. This was just terrible. I’ve seen it on the bargain shelf at Barnes and Noble and I still won’t buy it.
Are there any writers in the military-espionage-technothriller subgenre who, IYO, are not hacks?
(I can offer one example: Bruce Sterling, whose latest novel, Zenith Angle, (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345468651/qid=1126511229/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-8889631-7055829?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) is shelved in the SF section because that’s where Sterling established his reputation – but it’s really not SF, it’s more of a technothriller. Really a technothriller – all the protagonists are engineers and scientists, or acting as the lieutenants/facilitators of such. And it’s a really, really good book, too, with rich characterization, a fast-paced plot, and lots of insightful social/political/philosophical musings woven seamlessly into the narrative.)
I’ve read most of Clancys stuff and liked most of it. The problem I think Clancy has now is that the world went and changed on him and he’s not sure how to write novels about the new world. He was very good with the USA/USSR stuff. He really knows the military stuff. I am not so sure he has a good grasp of the terrorist stuff. The Sum of All fears dealt with terrorists but it was against the back drop of USA/USSR tensions.
His last couple books didn’t do much for me. I tried one of the Clancy Op-Center books and it pretty much sucked.
I’d add Neal Stephenson, too. He and Clancy actually have a lot in common - the obsession with detail, the long-windedness, the tangents, the intense, nearly pornographic love of technology - the main difference being that Stephenson can also write prose, and create interesting characters…
Read the WW2 portions of Cryptonomican (the modern day stuff isn’t nearly as good). They’re like a Tom Clancy novel written by an actual writer.
I lost it with the author about the fifth time the Admiral or National Security Director or whomever the boss-man is took NO RESPONSIBILITY WHATSOEVER for the secret mission to destroy a sub owned by another country which led to the death of one of the SEALs. He would just escalate the (illegal) actions against the foreigners to “avenge the murder” of the good-ol’-boy who was just following the boss-man’s (clandestine and illegal) orders.
And not even any pretended sympathy for the crews of the five or seven foreign subs he ordered sent to the bottom.
(If there’s one thing I know it is that submariners have traditionally held the greatest respect for their opposite numbers; anyone who serves silent and deep is a member of the club regardless of which team they work for. The tin-can sailors who float around on targets all day, well, that’s a different story.)
Look up Dale Brown for the same stories with magic stealth B-52s instead of subs.
I’ll second that. The only problem is Stephenson’s apparent inability to write a book shorter than 700 pages these days. Not that I don’t like a long book, but dammit, I have to carry these things around…
Gotta admit, the only Clancy novel I ever liked was Red October, and even then I felt he was going on a bit.
I’ve reached an understanding with blockbuster authors like Tom Clancy. When they have other writers write their books for them, I let other readers read them for me.
As for Clancy in particular, personally I find his attitudes about the military tiresome. Never served; never saw combat; nonetheless lionized by the officers who themselves may as well be on another planet as in the wardroom six decks above the filth, racism and vicious latent homosexualty of enlisted life; like a pampered little boy on a tiger cruise.
