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There was that one navy reserve lieutenant that had a name and everything. The guy who ended up conning the carrier after it was busted five ways to poo poo. (As someone who's had the conn of busted up ships more than once, let me assure you that the feeling isn't so much "excitement and nervousness" as "boredom and annoyance", but then none of those ships were still burning because they had just gotten shot at so  )What I'm trying to say is that Clancy wasn't a very good character writer. Red Storm Rising, The Hunt for Red October, The Sum of All Fear and The Cardinal of the Gremlin are pretty much his only good books, too...
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May 20, 2014 14:36
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In a book like Red Storm Rising, you can swap any sort of relationship development for more poo poo like an F-19A skipping CBUs off a runway right into a Il-76 carrying the entire DDR General Staff and I don't think anyone would consider it a bad trade off. A book like that doesn't need any more character development then to set the scene for the next explosion. Mazz fucked around with this message at 14:44 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 14:41
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FrozenVent posted:There was that one navy reserve lieutenant that had a name and everything. The guy who ended up conning the carrier after it was busted five ways to poo poo. I didn't really like Sum of All Fears. Agree on the rest except Without Remorse is clearly his best book. I liked Rainbow Six as well, not because it was good, but because of how hilariously dumb and pulpy it was. Out of villains? Eco-terrorists did it! :iamafag: also heartbeat sensor dowsing rods Fun fact: Toland (the guy you're thinking of) is an author-insert of Larry Bond, who was also a reserve naval intel officer.
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May 20, 2014 14:43
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Mortabis posted:I'm not saying it was well-executed, but the book is filled with characters with which you have no investment whatsoever pretty much with the exception of Iceland, and maybe Alekseyev and his aide. Edwards and his party are pretty much the only sizable group of named characters in one place. I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily. I approached the book as a series of short vignettes exploring the different areas of a (roughly!) modern conflict. The book dips and dives between the different characters, I didn't really notice the lack of development. It was a great excuse for Clancy to sperg out on the various nuances of the conflict and I think he should have stuck to that.
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May 20, 2014 14:44
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Mortabis posted:I didn't really like Sum of All Fears. Agree on the rest except Without Remorse is clearly his best book. I liked Rainbow Six as well, not because it was good, but because of how hilariously dumb and pulpy it was. Out of villains? Eco-terrorists did it! :iamafag: also heartbeat sensor dowsing rods Oh God, how could I forget Without Remorse? Agree that it's his best book; it's got everything. Vietnam vet on a murderous revenge rampage, long digressions about pleasure boat seamanship, torture by hyperbaric chamber, fake death by boat explosion and special force raids. What the gently caress else do you want in a book? Rainbow Six is probably one of the best video game books there is out there, because that's what it is. Of course the bar for "video game book" is insanely low. It's good pulpy fun though. Teeth of the Tiger, or whatever it was that Jack Ryan's grandson twice removed or whatever is a terrorist-killing financial analyst, though, that was offensively bad.
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May 20, 2014 14:49
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FrozenVent posted:If you read the book and skip every Iceland chapters after they meet the girl except the one where they get rescued, it makes absolutely no difference to the story. That's a Clancy hallmark. Executive Orders had two or three entire subplots that have nothing to do with anything else and don't effect anything else. The guys with the cement truck full of ANFO spend all this time planning an attack that never happens because they randomly get caught at a truck stop. Dozens and dozens of pages that could have been completely excised from the book and changed *nothing*. Ditto for the disgraced ex-Vice President trying to get Ryan kicked out of office, much ado about nothing. Mortabis posted:Forgive me but I find it incredulous that anyone would ever, ever use nuclear weapons in live fire maneuvers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Rock_exercises Phanatic fucked around with this message at 15:01 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 14:58
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Obligatory: http://tcpgen.tripod.com/
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May 20, 2014 15:17
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The charlatans behind those heartbeat sensor dowsing rods are responsible for a staggering number of deaths. They sold the same "technology" as bomb detectors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
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May 20, 2014 15:37
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Smiling Jack posted:The charlatans behind those heartbeat sensor dowsing rods are responsible for a staggering number of deaths. They sold the same "technology" as bomb detectors. hahaha of course it was englishmen
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May 20, 2014 16:09
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Groda posted:hahaha of course it was englishmen I don't think anyone involved with the US companies that ran similar scams went to jail. 
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May 20, 2014 16:12
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Phanatic posted:That's a Clancy hallmark. Executive Orders had two or three entire subplots that have nothing to do with anything else and don't effect anything else. The guys with the cement truck full of ANFO spend all this time planning an attack that never happens because they randomly get caught at a truck stop. Dozens and dozens of pages that could have been completely excised from the book and changed *nothing*. Ditto for the disgraced ex-Vice President trying to get Ryan kicked out of office, much ado about Isn't that subplot the one where Ryan ends up being "confirmed" the president because someone says the right "magic words" in a meeting? Something like " you referred to him as President while on record, so now he IS President!! GOTCHA!!"
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May 20, 2014 16:23
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NosmoKing posted:Isn't that subplot the one where Ryan ends up being "confirmed" the president because someone says the right "magic words" in a meeting? Yup. I think it's something like Ryan is referred to as the President in the lawsuit that challenges his legitimacy and the judge is all "I mean, your lawsuit is right, and he shouldn't be President, but you called him the President, so..."
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May 20, 2014 16:39
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I never read Without Remorse, but in Red Storm Rising, the characters being kind of weak and irrelevant can be seen through the lens of, in a real war, the individual pawns themselves have almost no agency and their individual effects on the war are vanishingly small. Every now and then you have that one guy who lands a divebomb right on the elevator of the enemy carrier, or calculates the firing solution on the Lusitania, or jams the Graf Spee's rudder or something, but those are exceedingly rare events and the odds of any people being involved in multiples of those events are essentially zero. That's why actual history tends to focus on the macro movements and the high-up commands. The Iceland subplot was dumb (I thought they were supposed to be providing ground intel for the air attacks or something) but imagine how unbearably dull the submarine / antisubmarine parts of the book would be if it was just 'the ships did this, the helos did this, the weapons did this' without a bunch of otherwise anonymous mooks thrown in sweatily grasping the handrails and thinking "Get 'em" for reader flavor.
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May 20, 2014 17:13
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FrozenVent posted:What I'm trying to say is that Clancy wasn't a very good character writer. Red Storm Rising, The Hunt for Red October, The Sum of All Fear and The Cardinal of the Gremlin are pretty much his only good books, too... The Cardinal of the Gremlin is a awesome title. I'm picturing a Tom Clancy type technothriller written between acid hits by Phillip K. Dick. What clancy book is it where there's a plot to assassinate the pope? That's the only Clancy book I've read aside from Red Storm rising, and one of the subplots is the foolishness of universal healthcare. Which is pretty much the content of the argument too; the best thing Clancy can throw at us is Ryan's hot doctor wife being horrified that British surgeons have a beer over lunch.
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May 20, 2014 17:17
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Nebakenezzer posted:The Cardinal of the Gremlin is a awesome title. I'm picturing a Tom Clancy type technothriller written between acid hits by Phillip K. Dick. Is that the one with the partial birth abortion scene in China or is that a different book? NosmoKing fucked around with this message at 17:51 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 17:22
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Snowdens Secret posted:I never read Without Remorse, but in Red Storm Rising, the characters being kind of weak and irrelevant can be seen through the lens of, in a real war, the individual pawns themselves have almost no agency and their individual effects on the war are vanishingly small. Every now and then you have that one guy who lands a divebomb right on the elevator of the enemy carrier, or calculates the firing solution on the Lusitania, or jams the Graf Spee's rudder or something, but those are exceedingly rare events and the odds of any people being involved in multiples of those events are essentially zero. That's why actual history tends to focus on the macro movements and the high-up commands. To be honest I thought just about everything relating to submarines was boring as poo poo even with that flavor. But, like some other people said, you wouldn't really miss it if you took out a lot of the various subplots in Tom Clancy books so any time I've re-read Red Storm Rising I just skip the submarine sections because I just want to read about armies slugging it out in Germany. NosmoKing posted:Is that the one with the partial birth abortion scene in China or is that a different book? That would be The Bear and the Dragon, which is a treasure trove of hilariously stupid stuff. Pornographic Memory fucked around with this message at 17:28 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 17:24
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As long as we are hitting up 80's era WWIII fiction, for Euro ground combat I LOVED Harold Coyle's "Team Yankee" as a kid.
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May 20, 2014 17:32
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Red Rabbit was the one that went back to the 80s and the Pope assassination attempt.
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May 20, 2014 17:36
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Nebakenezzer posted:The Cardinal of the Gremlin is a awesome title. I'm picturing a Tom Clancy type technothriller written between acid hits by Phillip K. Dick. Cardinal of the Kremlin is actually really good. Some of the spy stuff gets silly but even the characters involved realize how silly it is and how they should in no way be doing it because it's almost certain to fail.
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May 20, 2014 17:40
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Pornographic Memory posted:That would be The Bear and the Dragon, which is a treasure trove of hilariously stupid stuff. Is that the one where a Japanese naval formation does a saluting pass inside a US CVBG, launches torpedoes on two carriers and they basically go "Welp, computer error!" and the US Navy buys it? Or is that Debt of Honor? Phanatic posted:Cardinal of the Kremlin is actually really good. Some of the spy stuff gets silly but even the characters involved realize how silly it is and how they should in no way be doing it because it's almost certain to fail. Cardinal of the Kremlin is "What if Tom Clancy wrote a James Bond book?" and it's awesome.
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May 20, 2014 17:44
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Pretty sure that is Debt of Honor which I remember as being a fun read. Clark and Ding taking out the super fancy Japanese solid state AWACS with an ungodly powerful flashlight 747 kamikaze into the Capitol building, prescient
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May 20, 2014 17:52
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FrozenVent posted:Is that the one where a Japanese naval formation does a saluting pass inside a US CVBG, launches torpedoes on two carriers and they basically go "Welp, computer error!" and the US Navy buys it? Or is that Debt of Honor? That's Debt of Honor, I'm pretty sure. The Bear & The Dragon is PRC vs. US and Russia, in Siberia, with the US Fleet demolishing the PLAN. It ends with Tiananmen Sq. v. 2.0 overthrowing the Communists.
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May 20, 2014 17:54
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FrozenVent posted:Is that the one where a Japanese naval formation does a saluting pass inside a US CVBG, launches torpedoes on two carriers and they basically go "Welp, computer error!" and the US Navy buys it? Or is that Debt of Honor? The Bear and the Dragon is after the war between Japan and the USA. It's the one about a Catholic priest in China being murdered on film trying to stop an involuntary partial birth abortion, which triggers a boycott of Chinese goods so severe it forces China to invade Siberia for...some reason, resources I guess, which causes Russia to join NATO and defeat the Chinese invasion of poorly trained conscripts with its own poorly trained conscripts with old (WWII-era, even, I think) equipment imbued with the power of  and US air support. And I want to say NSA-sponsored streams of US cable news covering the Chinese military disasters provokes Tianenmen redux except the students win and everybody lives happily ever after.
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May 20, 2014 17:58
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Pornographic Memory posted:The Bear and the Dragon is after the war between Japan and the USA.  That's down there with America vs. Canada in terms of plausibility. Not sure if that's in the book's favor...
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May 20, 2014 18:05
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Nebakenezzer posted:
It's a war that's in part over Japan having ICBM-mounted nukes, for what it's worth. Oh yeah, Japan shot first. It's a solid 12 on the Clancy scale.
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May 20, 2014 18:07
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Pornographic Memory posted:To be honest I thought just about everything relating to submarines was boring as poo poo even with that flavor. But, like some other people said, you wouldn't really miss it if you took out a lot of the various subplots in Tom Clancy books so any time I've re-read Red Storm Rising I just skip the submarine sections because I just want to read about armies slugging it out in Germany. That's because actual submarine combat is boring as poo poo. Nerve-wracking at times, but still boring. Clancy tried to ritz it up with all the "My sonar tells me this is Victor hull #270 whose captain is Alexy Lebedev, and I know he enjoys borsht on Thursdays so he'll turn to port at 1630 to stir the beets, here's three paragraphs on how my bow array picks up his sodium coolant pumps and one on the flavor of coffee my sonar techs prefer" but actual combat is more like "I'm tracking this thing I'm 40% sure isn't a school of fish, I've been doing so for hours, the only thing I 100% know about it is that it hasn't killed me yet, either by warshot or collision, and when I shoot at it we'll see if it starts actually making engine noise to flee, or just disperses into the nothing it actually was."
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May 20, 2014 18:13
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Jesus, what'd you do for that av?
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May 20, 2014 18:19
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FrozenVent posted:It's a war that's in part over Japan having ICBM-mounted nukes, for what it's worth. Oh yeah, Japan shot first. Apparently everyone else disarmed most of their nukes, because LIBERALS. Pretty sure Tom Clancy is one of the few people in the west who honestly mourns the end of the Cold War. Shame he died, though, because you can be sure he'd have a book out right now where hypernationalistic Russians leave NATO and invade Ukraine. Dark Helmut posted:As long as we are hitting up 80's era WWIII fiction, for Euro ground combat I LOVED Harold Coyle's "Team Yankee" as a kid. Team Yankee is pretty good. It doesn't pretend to go too deep on the characterization and focuses on the tank action, which is good. The counterpiece is Ralph Peter's "Red Army", which shows the whole thing from the other side, but spends a lot of time on describing the character's backstories, most of which are problematic. This Colonel only went into the Army because of his father but would rather play piano, this Lieutenant is in love with a Polish girl but the Poles hate the Russians, this guy has a demanding wife who doesn't understand him etc. Still pretty good though.
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May 20, 2014 18:21
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ArchangeI posted:
I read the poo poo out of that too. I still have a milk crate in my garage of old books from the late 80s/early 90s filled with war fiction, historical and otherwise. There goes my weekend...
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May 20, 2014 18:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:Jesus, what'd you do for that av? http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3599252&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=113#post429809691 Snowdens Secret fucked around with this message at 18:32 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 18:29
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ArchangeI posted:Apparently everyone else disarmed most of their nukes, because LIBERALS. Pretty sure Tom Clancy is one of the few people in the west who honestly mourns the end of the Cold War. Well, it did gently caress with his business model something fierce. ArchangeI posted:Team Yankee is pretty good. It doesn't pretend to go too deep on the characterization and focuses on the tank action, which is good. The counterpiece is Ralph Peter's "Red Army", which shows the whole thing from the other side, but spends a lot of time on describing the character's backstories, most of which are problematic. This Colonel only went into the Army because of his father but would rather play piano, this Lieutenant is in love with a Polish girl but the Poles hate the Russians, this guy has a demanding wife who doesn't understand him etc. Still pretty good though. I'll have to check that out; I really liked Chieftains, from the perspective of a British tank crew. It ends exactly how you'd expect a WWIII novel to end.
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May 20, 2014 18:34
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FrozenVent posted:It's a war that's in part over Japan having ICBM-mounted nukes, for what it's worth. Oh yeah, Japan shot first. It's a war that starts because of a Japanese Auto Manufacturer having a Pinto-esque defect that resulted from exposure to seawater while shipping. Public outrage led to a big Anti-Japan boycott. (I last read this book in the 90's, but that plot point stuck with me.) It was also a super sekrit war! Nothing official. Oh, and I think the Japanese conspirators were longing for Imperial Japan or something.
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May 20, 2014 18:36
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Taerkar posted:It's a war that starts because of a Japanese Auto Manufacturer having a Pinto-esque defect that resulted from exposure to seawater while shipping. Public outrage led to a big Anti-Japan boycott. (I last read this book in the 90's, but that plot point stuck with me.) Yeah that causes the US to impose trade restrictions on Japanese auto import, ("BUT WE'RE JUST DOING WHAT THEY DO TO US!"), meanwhile the Japanese are buying tons of real estate on American Pacific islands, and uh... Anyway the commercial impasse somehow escalate so they crash the NYSE computer? Something like that. So anyway the US Navy and Japanese SDF naval forces are just completing exercises and the Japanese torpedo a couple of US carriers and... Why do I remember this poo poo but not the stuff I actually have to study, I'll never know.
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May 20, 2014 18:40
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You've got to remember that the early 90s there was a bit of patriot-paranoia in the US that an economically successful Japanese superpower was going to buy the US one beachfront property at a time. It was just silly nonsense that politicians abused for votes back then, but it got reflected in some of the sillier airport fiction. Rising Sun by Crichton represents the real high water mark of it in somewhat mainstream culture and media, but it staggered along on the sidelines for a bit later.
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May 20, 2014 18:43
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ArchangeI posted:Shame he died, though, because you can be sure he'd have a book out right now where hypernationalistic Russians leave NATO and invade Ukraine. Don't worry, the "Tom Clancy's X" ghostwriters are probably working on it as we speak.
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May 20, 2014 18:47
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Veritek83 posted:That's Debt of Honor, I'm pretty sure. The Bear & The Dragon is PRC vs. US and Russia, in Siberia, with the US Fleet demolishing the PLAN. It ends with Tiananmen Sq. v. 2.0 overthrowing the Communists. B&D is the one where an Apache shoots down an ICBM and a few JSOWs basically destroy the entire armored component of China's army. It's throw-across-the-room bad. Dark Helmut posted:I read the poo poo out of that too. I still have a milk crate in my garage of old books from the late 80s/early 90s filled with war fiction, historical and otherwise. There goes my weekend... Best cheesy Cold War fiction I ever read was the first few books of the Guardians series. First one has this amazing set-piece battle between two armored cars and an AC-130 that's stuck on the ground. And it's actually really well written for airport-bookstore-level stuff. The scene where they're sitting under the White House and the bombs are falling is amazing. Later ones got ridiculous, and had actual magic and poo poo in them, but the first one at least is solid. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 19:10 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 19:02
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Taerkar posted:Oh, and I think the Japanese conspirators were longing for Imperial Japan or something. Don't forget that China and Iran were secretly in league with the evil Japanese businessmen. Didn't they also use a Comanche stealth chopper to assassinate one of the Japanese ringleaders? Phanatic posted:B&D is the one where an Apache shoots down an ICBM and a few JSOWs basically destroy the entire armored component of China's army. Bear and Dragon was the book the made me give up on Clancy entirely, what a pile of garbage.
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May 20, 2014 19:20
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howe_sam posted:Don't forget that China and Iran were secretly in league with the evil Japanese businessmen. They use it shoot down an AWACS after flying right on top of a bullet train so the AWACS computer would filter out the signal because it mistook them for the train.
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May 20, 2014 19:24
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Please don't forget the part where they do a refueling for said Comanches on a Ohio SSBN in the middle of the pacific ocean.
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May 20, 2014 19:31
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I think B&D was the last actual Clancy book I read and I have pretty much forgotten all about it aside from the stupid turtle joke and vague recollections of plot. Sadly the the last Clancy franchise book I read was the HAWX one. Hooooo booooy is it bad and has nothing, and I really mean nothing aside from name, to do with the first game.
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May 20, 2014 19:33
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