If you've never read it, this is as good a time as any to pick up a copy of The Hunt for Red October. I had never actually read it until three or four years ago (though I had seen the movie as a teen). It has held up remarkably well.
The Hunt for Red October is THE book that comes to my mind when I think of Tom Clancy. It was the only book I was thinking when I saw this link and came here. Glad to see it mentioned in the top comment.
On the games front, I am a huge fan of Splinter Cell series. Both the gamer, and the voracious reader in me would miss him.
I actually read the book before I saw the movie and it was great! I think partly it holds up because he wrote it before anyone was making any media out of his books.
All the other books clearly are written with (movie/video game) in the back of his mind, but that one was just straight prose.
Can't agree with you more, folks should definitely read it if they haven't. Then watch the movie again with a much greater appreciation for the story.
Maybe so, but HFRO was optioned for feature film production within two months of its publication, and planning began near immediately, so film adaptation would have been pretty heavy on Clancy’s mind at the time.
I devoured his books as a kid and I credit that with having a somewhat realistic view of politics and military. Most of it came from meticulously investigated details but even plots that seemed fantastic (a plane crushing into the Capitol) almost happened later.
I remember people after 9/11 saying "Who would ever have thought a plane could be used as a weapon?" and thinking that it had been a key plot point in a bestselling Tom Clancy book...
Want something a lot weirder? Watch the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen (the X-Files spinoff), which aired six months before the attacks:
> Foreshadowing a number of conspiracy theories which would arise in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the plot of the March 4, 2001 episode depicts a secret faction within the US government plotting to hijack a Boeing 727 and fly it into the World Trade Center by remote control. The stated motive was to increase the military defense budget by blaming the attack on foreign interests.
A lot of rally around the flag was going on around that time.
There was also a lot of talking up the amazing organizational skills of the hijackers. Meanwhile I'm thinking, um, let me get this straight... the amazing skill some stuffed suit is referring to is ... buying airline tickets?
Well, (this is a phrase that has never popped out of my mouth) in fairness to the hijackers, they planned for over a year. They flew enough to be top-tier elite frequent flyers, planned out which flights would have the fewest people and the most fuel, arranged their seats such that they could properly control the most real estate, and so on.
So, while I agree that security theater is everywhere, in the case of the hijackers, they actually planned and developed their process very carefully.
Its very easy if you're not pushing the performance envelope or trying to financially optimize. Its very hard to avoid crashing, although if your intent is to crash, no biggie.
I never soloed but got close and I've got friends with their ATP ticket working for minors and I assure you that 99% of flight training is "this is how not to get killed".
If they trained to do an instruments approach to the towers during a thunderstorm with a partial panel and an engine out, I'd be impressed. What they actually did, from a piloting perspective, eh. What minimal training they did, eh.
So if the pilot is out of the cockpit and its just you, and engine #2 experiences fuel starvation, and the lights are out (who cares why) the exact switches you need to flip to cross feed fuel and the exact gauges you need to look at with your flashlight to determine if its an engine problem or a fuel problem are ... and the exact procedures you follow depending on which it is are ... and you need to answer this instantly or fail your flight check. Or you're on an IFR approach in thunderstorms with one engine out and the primary VOR out now what do you do it doesn't handle the same and you're "uncomfortable" with alternate instruments. Also they test the pilots to destruction basically with distractions, in a simulator you lose cabin pressure and cabin lighting and engine 1 and the controls are feeling weird and there's a fire warning light and hydraulic caution so now what. Fire warning on APU #1 now what? OK now electric bus B just tripped off.
Its much more a damage control job than like being a perfect precise ballerina. Although if your flight maneuvers aren't as smooth as reasonably possible they're going to be pissed after you land, unless your a hijacker so you don't care...
Flying an airplane straight & level in good weather that's already up in the air is fairly easy - and from what I've read about it, they still did a poor job of that. Airliners are designed to be easy to fly, with minimal input. I.e. they are stable, and if you just take your hands off the controls they'll fly straight & level.
What's hard are takeoffs, landings (especially landings), flying in bad weather, emergency conditions, etc.
There are many cases of people with no flight training whatsoever being able to successfully take off and fly, but are unable to land.
"There are many cases of people with no flight training whatsoever being able to successfully take off and fly, but are unable to land."
I would agree with that and this strikes me as the kind of thing that isn't resolved by anecdotes but via someones first five minutes with a PC flight simulator. Anything beyond arcade level.
Some of the more outlandish claims I've read about flying pretty obviously come from people who's shadow has never darkened a keyboard of a PC running MS FS or X-Plane, or even talked to someone who has flown a plane or even played a PC flight sim. I did a ton of PC sim work to wrap my brain around navigation concepts (like the to/from VOR flag, and how approaches "feel" at speed while under cognitive load) and PC flight sims help a lot with nav, but latency combined with lack of feedback and weird controls made it not so useful to replace actual flight time.
As for straight and level that depends on having been properly trimmed, but its really not all that much harder than driving. I don't think an aircraft can be FAA certified if its not stable in at least some axes. I know several exotic research x-planes were not stable in some axes at some parts of the flight envelope and some .mil planes were (are?) not. If a plane is stable, hands off it'll more or less smoothly point to some velocity vector and nose direction (first noob pilot discovery is those two need not be pointed the same way, and almost never are... planes are in an eternal skid, sorta, unlike a car). That 3-d velocity vector might not be where you want, not at all, but it'll smoothly stabilize there unless you adjust the trim tabs.
Um, your ground vector won't match your nose direction if there's a crosswind, but I can't quite make that fit into "planes are in an eternal skid, sorta, unlike a car". Any stable aircraft in a genuine skid will quickly weathercock until the nose is pointing forwards again, and if you hold it in a skid with the rudder it'll eventually raise a wing to bank in the direction the nose is pointing (and if you hold that wing down with aileron you'll gradually change course as your engine(s) pull(s) you around until you've flown in a large and stomach-churning flat circle).
Incidentally, do they teach that you should crab into a crosswind for your entire final approach nowadays?
Bad word choice on my part as I was thinking of "skid" like a car as in aircraft spend about zero time at zero angle of attack on the airfoil, not skid as in poor rudder use during turns.
I donno about crabbing all the way into the ground now a days but if you're crabbing when you hit the ground I suspect thats very hard on non-castering gear and/or its ground loop time.
Well, the hardest thing is landing, followed by taking off. Although I guess certain in-flight emergencies would really be the hardest - mainly during landing or take off. The hardest thing they had to do was fly them straight and low enough to hit the buildings.
Relative to the air it's flying through, yes. Relative to the ground? Not so much. And that's what matters most when transitioning from or to being a ground vehicle (takeoff/landing).
I credit my realistic view of politics and military to my military background and life experience coupled along with a metric-shit-ton of non-fiction reading.
There were other books before his that used commandeered airplanes as weapons. Clancy was just a much more adept and educated thriller writer than most in the field.
I also grew up reading both Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton and it greatly shaped the way I look at the world. It's sad to see them go and I've yet to find someone who writes in a style either of these men that can compare lately.
Let's also remember the fantastically silly geopolitical predictions that he made in that book. How's our big rivalry with a nuclear armed Japan looking?
Tom Clancy can be somewhat spot on with "predicting" the future of Geopolitics. In the 2006 Ghost Recon game: Advanced Warfighter (took place in 2013) was about heavy US entanglement in Mexico. Mexican mafia are getting pretty strong these days in RL....
> even plots that seemed fantastic (a plane crushing into the Capitol) almost happened later
I'm surprised actual terrorist plots similar to Rainbow Six have not happened yet. I was drawn to the book by the game, and while the latter is a landmark in tactical shooters, it's a mess in terms of delivering the actual story.
Are you referring to the game being a mess at delivering the story? In fairness, that games aren't supposed to be replicas of the book, but rather set in the same style (tactical anti-terrorism and hostage recovery). If the game was supposed to deliver the same story as the book, you're right that it completely failed. I've played almost every game in the series and I've never seen the connection.
The first book by Clancy I read was "Red Storm Rising", I picked it up at 6pm and read until 3am. Some of the titles of chapters would have made great band names such as "Frisbees in Dreamland".
I wish they had actually made a movie of one of his books instead of just using the title.
One of my all time favorite books. I'm not sure if the newer generations would appreciate the nature of this book as it basically takes place in the Cold War. Yet as a story it is one of the most comprehensive and riveting.
What has fundamentally changed WRT the situation on the ground and the plot in the book?
Doesn't Russia and former USSR still burn oil? Doesn't the middle east still have oil? Wouldn't you need to distract the western powers somehow if they planned to sieze a country in the middle east, Imperial American style?
The main plot hole I see is invading the west is not going to help much with natgas exports which is a good source of incoming money. So they'd have some interesting economic issues. Then again eventually you'll be exporting natgas to "someone" in the long run and you need oil now, so no problemo.
Another plot issue would be it would be harder to frame the Germans precisely as described in the book. Well, adapt and overcome, something could be thought up pretty similar with the same outcome.
It is true, politicans now make smiley faces at each other, but when the rubber meets the road, and they need oil, and someone else has oil, and they've got the power to take it and believe theres no alternative, you do the math...
The other problem is the "newer generations" not appreciating something from the past, unless its a sequel of a sequel of a FPS WWII game, in which case they love it.
I was thinking of rolling the natgas and german problem together, such that red storm rising 2015 (as opposed to 1985) would look a lot like they threaten to cut off natgas exports to europe (knowing the upcoming war is going to temporarily cut off exports anyway) then things escalate until it appears some (fill in the blank nationality) blows up a .ru pipeline outta spite therefore its time to retaliate against Germany.
Probably the biggest plot hole would be since the book was written both sides learned from Afghanistan (and the US from Iraq) that simply rolling tanks in works WRT militarily controlling the territory the tanks sit on, but not at controlling the rest of the territory or the economy or pretty much anything else. In the very long run, a tank is pretty good at controlling the sand shaded underneath it, not much beyond.
You'd need a new strategy for controlling the oil. Probably indirect WRT govt coup / support in the M.E. Maybe use conventional WWIII in europe to lure as many US forces as possible out of the middle east then coup time and install puppets in charge of Saudi Arabia and Iraq and maybe some others.
If I were playing a cardboard or silicon wargame as the USSR in a RSR scenario, that's pretty much how I'd play it. I think I'd have reasonably good chance as long as it stays conventional. In the long run I'd worry about natgas exports in the future, the west is not going to be amused at buying gas from their recent enemies, so how are you going to fix your massive trade imbalance? Maybe sell the excess natgas to China for A.N. fertilizer production, they always want more food... Yeah, I could win it, I think. The USA/NATO player would be fighting a logistics war to keep the M.E. and .eu under control at the same time. Leading to unrestrained submarine warfare by .ru? Crazier things have happened.
Everything that is fundamental has changed, though.
While the focus of the book was Moscow's panic in the face of geopolitical decline, the Warsaw Pact was still on approximate equal footing with NATO in the early 1980s. So, in addition to the two having military forces and training built up over decades, they had similar sized populations and economies to credibly support an all out war effort beyond the first engagements.
To get something similar today would need a military conflict between the US and the EU, except in an alternate reality where the EU was as politically unified as the USSR was, and where military spending took up as much of the EU economy as it now does of the US economy.
Here is some rough context of the current (or recent past) geopolitical landscape taken from some Wikipedia & CIA World Factbook stats:
GDP | Pop | Country | Mil% | Mil$
---------------------------------------
16.3T | 507.9M | EU | 1.1%?| 179B
15.7T | 316.8M | US | 4.6% | 722B
12.4T | 1.35 B | China | 2.6% | 322B
4.71T | 1.21 B | India | 1.8% | 85B
4.78T | 126.7M | Japan | 1.0% | 48B
3.38T | 143.5M | Russia | 3.9% | 132B
2.36T | 201.0M | Brazil | 1.3% | 31B
1.76T | 118.4M | Mexico | 0.5% | 9B
It's an important point, because it gets lost all the time: the US does not face foes that offer any existential threat. There aren't any countries or groups of countries that currently threaten the survival of the United States, and there aren't any reasonable fears about loss of territorial integrity.
Even if you conceptualize terrorism into a broad movement rather than a basket of tactics and behaviors, "it" still isn't a monolith and hasn't enough political unity to control a single nation, much less one that with a manufacturing base to speak of or any technological sophistication.
Red Storm Rising requires, at the least, a foe that is politically monolithic (China not the EU), that has a technologically advanced military (maybe Russia), and a sophisticated enough economy that it could sustain a war effort beyond the first couple weeks of engagement (EU not China).
"While the focus of the book was Moscow's panic in the face of geopolitical decline,"
Panic in the face of a specific petroleum shortage where all alternatives were politically unacceptable, or maybe rephrased war was the least unacceptable. I suppose some kind of wheat harvest disaster would have been a good precursor although it would have screwed up the outcome of the book.
Your analysis is good other than the US economy being very far away from the possible scene of activity and a major subplot was closing the Atlantic to the USSR. Until that happened the US was in a severe logistics crunch. That was a major theme of the book... the USSR didn't give up until they lost the logistics war supplying the front lines with fuel due to a cruise missile strike and the US closed the Atlantic to USSR subs which opened the US logistics. That made the USSR side really panic, come up with some dumb last ditch ideas, and finally disappear in a coup.
The political solutions being unacceptable was somewhat covered in the book, toward the end there was a bit of a WTF were they thinking moment in the conversation at the end. Irrational fear or political outlook can lead to decisions that are not rational. Maybe that's the moral of the book. Most wars seem to have an irrational component to them on one side if not both sides...
From a wargamer perspective its all about the logistics... the US position is not good at all in some limited scenarios. And its still fun to play the American South in the civil war even if you know in the long run they're gonna lose. I tentatively agree with your apparent conclusion that the .ru would be doomed in a RSR-2013 scenario, but it would still make a heck of a book / hex based wargame / whatever.
I read the book only a year or two after it came out, so I don't remember much of the details other than the importance of fuel.
However, I don't think there's a way to create an interesting war simulation that is based on current geopolitical reality. Even without the US as a counterbalance, could today's Russia pose a threat to western (or eastern) Europe, or conquer and control oil production in a significant part of the Middle East? With the US involved, there isn't the prospect of achieving anything, even as part of a wild gamble.
I think Daniel Drezner described the context pretty well here:
"Red Storm Rising" was Clancy's best, probably because of the co-authorship by Larry Bond. The book is engrossing due to its depth of detail and realistic timeline.
Clancy also credited Bond's warfare sim, "Harpoon", for helping in the writing of "The Hunt for Red October". I still have the original Harpoon for DOS and Harpoon II for Windows. Both are amazing games.
Damn, that was unexpected. I must say that his books were pretty awesome.
I especially liked his "Red dawn rising" which is one of the only WWIII books that doesn't go to a nuclear holocaust right away - if you a like to watch politics and have a military interest I recommend you check it out.
Yes although you only played the (attack) submarine thread of the story your success or failure was reflected in the balance of the war shown on a world map if I remember correctly.
Right. You would get a mission as the attack sub to, say, sink a Russian ship transporting Marines to Norway. If you failed, then the Russians would start occupying Norway on the map. Was a very cool dynamic campaign for the time.
In my high school you had to do a senior English thesis by reading three books of one author and then writing a thesis tying together the themes and characters.
I chose Tom Clancy. My English teacher said I was crazy and "would never find anything in those books writing about".
Somehow I pulled it off and got an A on that project.
So basically, I got to read Clancy books for school. :)
Thanks for all the memories, TC. My first shipped game title was Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent, and throughout high school, I read all his Jack Ryan novels.
Even though his later novels devolved into ghost-written, right-wing political soapboxes, still sad to see him go.
I'm terribly sad to hear this. Tom Clancy's "Into the Storm: A Study in Command" was one of the first books outside of the fantasy genre to inspire me as a child. It led to years of creating RTS total conversions based on his work; activity that laid the foundation for the broad range of programming and design skills I have today.
I was never a big fan of his writing or politics, but the original Harpoon computer game (based on the tabletop game he was partially responsible for) stands as one of the best computer wargames I've ever played.
IIRC, it wasn't Clancy that had anything to do with the creation of Harpoon.
It was Larry Bond, who was an uncredited (I think) co-author on the early Clancy books. Bond and Clancy used Harpoon to help visualize the naval battles in the first few books.
A side note... I was chosen as the developer to port Harpoon to OS/2 in the early '90s but the company I worked for backed out. It pissed me off enough that I changed jobs. Anyway, I still have a few unopened boxes of the Harpoon software floating around here, which were handed to me by Gordon Walton himself.
"Red Rabbit" woke up the inner foreign policy wonk in me, despite how transparent Clancy's imperatives were - it's a pity he could never end up working his same genuine interest with China; I all recall is supposed Chinese naivety being dredged up - corporate espionage ("Chinese secretary has sex with supposed Japanese computer salesman in the name of her company"); "China: We Kill Priests and Babies".
They'd nevertheless invoked a great deal of meaningful machinery, though - certainly compared to the sheer suppository of machismatic agency that was Chavez-verse (credit probably required yet again, though: he was probably first to tread within the grounds of "contemporary tacticool".)
I will miss his books, "Red Storm Rising" and "Clear and Present Danger" are both in my library. Some of his later books [1] suffered from too much detail, where I would have appreciated an editor with the guts to say "Tom, its great that this character has a full life history and several motivating events in their past, but we don't actually need all of that in the book to tell this story ...".
It's also sad to see a talented writer die at such a young age. Goodbye Tom, thanks for the great books.
[1] I am specifically referring to "The Bear and the Dragon" in this example.
A friend's dad loaned me The Sum of All Fears when I was 11, and that was the first Clancy novel I read (Having seen the movie of The Hunt for Red October, I figured I'd enjoy it). Those 914 pages took me a couple weeks to read while relaxing in a recliner, especially since I was kind of OCD at that age about looking up every word I didn't understand in a massive dictionary that sat on my lap. After hearing about nukes throughout the 80s, the story felt to my young mind like it could happen any moment in real life.
I agree with you on Red October, which is one of my two favorite naval movies. The plot is fairly compressed and "amped up" compared to the book, but it still holds up pretty well. I suppose the only thing one could wish for is that Harrison Ford, rather than Alec Baldwin, had been playing Jack Ryan.
Well, we still have one movie left. Tom Clancy was a writer on the new Jack Ryan movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1205537/ is in post-production and will be released on Christmas.
I'm a big fan of the Ryanverse and I am really sad to hear about his passing.. I've read and listened to the books countless times and it makes me sad to think that there is now an end once the next book comes out.
(I know that he has had ghostwriters for the last x books but the characters and stories are now finite)
The problem with ghostwriters is as a wargamer (both cardboard and silicon) I always read his books as Very accurate realistic wargamer fanfic with lots of background material for those outside of the hobby. Oh and he tried to add a little color to his counters ... err I mean characters ... by making up little stories about this guy always wanted to visit the state of Montana after he defected or whatever.
A real "Tom Clancy" style book would be take an exciting game of, say, Steel Wolves or Hornet Commander and remove all the dice rolling and turn it into fan fiction by adding a little imagination to the characters and tons of background for people outside .mil and outside the wargaming hobby.
Unfortunately what we'll get is a ghostwriter who will probably steal the plot of an ancient WWII era submarine movie and make it Clancy-style by adding a dude who wants to defect to visit Montana and the main character would be named Ryan and the tech details and "wargaming" would be completely butchered into laugh ability by anyone actually in the .mil or into wargaming.
At the exact moment I read this headline, I was cropping a picture of Sam Fisher, one of Clancy's characters, for a fan website. (I'm a nerd, I know.) Terrible news. I'll definitely miss his knack for portraying action and suspense.
I especially remember the first chapter of Red Storm Rising being absolutely gripping. Wonder if they'll ever make a film from that one (the plot is basically WW3 in the late 80s).
Really sad to see him pass. Some of his books were absolutely superb: Rid Storm Rising, Hunt for the Red October, Patriot Games, Without remorse. RIP :(
