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Casimir Radon posted:OH WHAT THE gently caress? I didn't read that far. The first three or four aren't bad. There's little to no "loving BROWN PEOPLE". The closest is in the second one, but it's not "fuckin brown people and Al Qaeda hatin on us" it's just one assassin or someshit. I dunno. Basically poo poo explodes and I skipped the "America is so awesome and so is conservatism and gently caress brown people" parts
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| # ? Nov 7, 2010 21:30 |
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| # ? May 20, 2013 22:23 |
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It sounds like a combination crazy Clancy and Dan Brown, with a good dash of "lets make the founding fathers look like jackasses".
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| # ? Nov 7, 2010 23:04 |
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Casimir Radon posted:It sounds like a combination crazy Clancy and Dan Brown, with a good dash of "lets make the founding fathers look like jackasses". The newest one, maybe The first two? Just straight up "gently caress Up Some Bad Dudes' poo poo, starring Blonde-haired Blue-eyed Awesome Dude and A Bunch Of Explosions" Seriously. The first one I read was the second book, Path of the Assassin. First of all, I was attracted to two things: One, a ridiculous title that's almost Ludlumesque. Second, Brad Thor The moment I fell in love with that book is easy to define. A plane is taken hostage (on the ground). Scot Harvath, the aforementioned "Blonde-Haired Blue-Eyed Awesome Dude", realizes that the plan to save the hostages is gonna get people killed. So what does he do? Goes it the gently caress alone. He's like coming in through the roof and poo poo and there's a gunfight and poo poo was just intense So, action sequence ends and you're like alright time for some quiet talking bullshit right? WRONG. loving WRONG. He goes to interview one of the hostages (an attractive woman he ends up loving, naturally) at the hospital they were all taken too. Like, four questions in? loving explosion. Hospital is being attacked by the same terrorists. These things are like twenty pages apart in paperback TL;DR: I seriously think Thor (god that's a BADASS name) is just trying to cash in on the crazy right-wing customer base by playing his own politics to an extreme because the books slowly (you can see it change drastically after about the fourth one) change from generic "let's blow some poo poo up" to "loving BROWN PEOPLE AMERICA gently caress YEAH"
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| # ? Nov 7, 2010 23:41 |
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The new book by the man mentioned in the thread title is out, just so you know. I read the first few chapters in Smiths, and skimmed the rest: looks like the usual Clancy stuff (albeit partly - mostly? - written by someone else). The US military is awesome, Jack Ryan is awesome, John Clark is awesome, Ding Chavez is awesome, liberals suck and are borderline traitors for weakening America's defences, etc etc. All done at great length (700+ pages) with lots of techno-porn and acronyms. Didn't notice any vast frothing right-wing tracts about abortion or atheists or comparative penis sizes, but as I said I was skimming. Tl;dr version of the plot: Notsama bin Laden - er, 'the Emir' plots to detonate a suitcase nuke inside a nuclear waste repository in order to poison the US with fallout. Jack Ryan shoots him. In the rear end.
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| # ? Dec 8, 2010 14:15 |
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Holy crap, Clancy is writing again? I must have this horrible horrible mess! e: oh it's ghostwritten, gently caress this. IRQ fucked around with this message at Dec 9, 2010 around 02:09 |
| # ? Dec 9, 2010 02:03 |
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I don't think I can bring myself to purchase new airport fiction books. I'll always just resort to the crap fiction I already own. Which means Wing Commander or Battletech books or comic trade paperbacks.
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| # ? Dec 10, 2010 21:38 |
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Payndz posted:Wait, my what now? Christ, I'm still trying to finalise the plot of the eighth Wilde/Chase book at the moment. I thought about challenging you to race grrm to the shelves with this, but wrong thread and well, it wouldn't be a challenge.
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| # ? Dec 11, 2010 00:36 |
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LooseChanj posted:I thought about challenging you to race grrm to the shelves with this, but wrong thread and well, it wouldn't be a challenge. I think even JRR Tolkien has put out several new books since A Feast for Crows was published and he's been dead since 1973.
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| # ? Dec 12, 2010 00:21 |
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IRQ posted:Holy crap, Clancy is writing again? Where did you see that it's ghost written?
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| # ? Dec 13, 2010 20:38 |
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Rhaegar posted:Where did you see that it's ghost written? Right on the cover: By TOM CLANCY! with Grant Blackwood To me that almost always means the big name isn't involved at all, just like the NetForce and OPS Center ones that also have Clancy's name slathered on them.
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| # ? Dec 13, 2010 22:13 |
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IRQ posted:Right on the cover: I'm surprised it took this long for him to farm out the "Jack Ryan" storyline. Especially since he hadn't written a book in that series in over five years.
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| # ? Dec 14, 2010 23:56 |
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muscles like this? posted:I'm surprised it took this long for him to farm out the "Jack Ryan" storyline. Especially since he hadn't written a book in that series in over five years. Or maybe all it took was there being a goddamned liberal back in the White House to spur him back into (co-written) action. I might actually have to read the thing just to see if the new president repealed his precious flat-rate tax.
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| # ? Dec 15, 2010 09:44 |
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Ludlum gets a bad rap, but The Holcroft Covenant is worth reading. Edit: Also, I hear Clancy is not a bad source of info on military vehicles if you don't have a subscription to Jane's or something. User fucked around with this message at Dec 15, 2010 around 10:52 |
| # ? Dec 15, 2010 10:48 |
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He's usually in the right neck of the woods when it comes to hardware. Hell, he even had the F-117/Frisbee as an awkward to handle turd(aerodynamically speaking) before it was ever revealed to the public in Red Storm Rising. Although once in a while you get something like the heartbeat sensor from Rainbow Six and in the same book the MP-10 instead of MP-5/10.
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| # ? Dec 15, 2010 11:28 |
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My favourite "wait, what?" bit of not-quite-right military tech wasn't Clancy, but from one of Patrick Robinson's books: a Phalanx point defence gun that fires bullets at almost the speed of light. Robinson makes Clancy look liberal, incidentally. His 'hero' is such a hard-right mouthpiece and repulsive Mary Sue that I can't even stomach reading any more of his books. (Yet for some reason he had a huge boner for Ted Kennedy, bizarrely.)
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| # ? Dec 15, 2010 12:27 |
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Unlike a lot of people, I actually liked Bear and the Dragon and found it to be a gripping page turner. Although everything Executive Orders-on strained the bounds of plausibility with Jack Ryan's Presidency and some of the policies that got passed. Oh, and I could have gone my entire life without having to repeatedly hear about one character's love for "Japanese Sausage". Teeth of the Tiger, however, just bored me. Maybe it's because terrorists shooting up a mall is a lot less scary than Washington D.C. being an Aegis Cruiser away from being nuked
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| # ? Dec 15, 2010 15:52 |
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DarthXaos posted:Washington D.C. being an Aegis Cruiser away from being nuked Looking back, I have to same I'm kind of surprised that he actually had Jack Ryan not be willing to nuke Beijing in retaliation.
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| # ? Dec 15, 2010 22:38 |
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Wikipedia posted:A roving CNN news team in China captures on videotape the murder of Cardinal Renato di Milo, the Papal Nuncio to Beijing, and a Chinese Baptist minister, Yu Fa An. They had attempted to stop Chinese authorities from performing a forced late-term abortion on a member of Yu's congregation.
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| # ? Dec 15, 2010 23:56 |
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Payndz posted:Would it be poor form to plug my own books? Oops, too late. They definitely fall into the category of 'airport fiction', and unashamedly so. I know this is from page 1, but I have to say that I really enjoyed the Genesis Covenant.
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| # ? Dec 15, 2010 23:59 |
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Alaan posted:He's usually in the right neck of the woods when it comes to hardware. Hell, he even had the F-117/Frisbee as an awkward to handle turd(aerodynamically speaking) before it was ever revealed to the public in Red Storm Rising. Although once in a while you get something like the heartbeat sensor from Rainbow Six and in the same book the MP-10 instead of MP-5/10. To be kind of fair to Clancy, wasn't the heartbeat sensor thing a scam that wasn't immediately obvious? So when he wrote Rainbow 6 it wasn't discredited yet. Doesn't change the other awful, awful things that he's written though. Like anything in Teeth of the Tiger. The weird thing about the Jack Ryan stuff was how quickly Clancy ended up glossing over his presidency.
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| # ? Dec 19, 2010 00:45 |
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Payndz posted:I wouldn't be surprised if his publishers suggested it, just to get some new product out of the door. "Untitled new Tom Clancy novel" was the Chinese Democracy of publishing, having been on the lists of upcoming titles for at least the past three years. The Chinese Democracy of publishing is actually the next GRRM book.
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| # ? Dec 19, 2010 17:12 |
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Payndz posted:The new book by the man mentioned in the thread title is out, just so you know. I read the first few chapters in Smiths, and skimmed the rest: looks like the usual Clancy stuff (albeit partly - mostly? - written by someone else). The US military is awesome, Jack Ryan is awesome, John Clark is awesome, Ding Chavez is awesome, liberals suck and are borderline traitors for weakening America's defences, etc etc. All done at great length (700+ pages) with lots of techno-porn and acronyms. Didn't notice any vast frothing right-wing tracts about abortion or atheists or comparative penis sizes, but as I said I was skimming. Why do some authors do this? I don't want to read about the same characters in every book. It always ends up feeling like it's more of the same. I used to love Dale Brown novels, until I realized it's Patrick McLanahan over and over again. In in books that McLanahan isn't the main character, he appears. I just get annoyed. I have the same issue with a lot of the Clancy books. They all blend together after a while.
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| # ? Dec 21, 2010 16:01 |
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Payndz's Eddie and Nina are more like Nick and Nora Charles. They get more amusing as the books add up.
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| # ? Dec 21, 2010 17:15 |
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I just finished the new ghostwritten Tom Clancy book, Dead or Alive. Surprisingly good - so good, in fact, that I'm a little conflicted. It's halfway between a Matthew Reilly book (complete with diagrams) and old Clancy... it's apparent that Blackwood's a fan of the Ryanverse (though I guess who isn't?). What I liked most was that it was resoundingly better than both Red Rabbit and Teeth of the Tiger - and while it does draw from the latter book a fair amount, it somehow succeeds in being a faster-paced, more muscular Ryanverse book, kind of like what Teeth of the Tiger was trying to be. I was amused by Clancy and Blackwood's way of patching the Ryanverse up with the current state of affairs - Kealty is blamed for getting us into Iraq and loving over the economy by undoing all of Ryan's reforms - and it turns out that Ryan himself technically was only in for one term somehow so he's gonna run again to unseat Kealty - nice way of symbolically declaring the king is back, hey! All in all - recommended. It's a poo poo-ton better than The Bear and the Dragon or Debt of Honor - not as good or as technical as Clear and Present Danger or any of those other early works, but it's a successful attempt at a new Clancy for a new age. </pretentiousbookcritic>
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| # ? Dec 25, 2010 12:47 |
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Payndz posted:Would it be poor form to plug my own books? Oops, too late. They definitely fall into the category of 'airport fiction', and unashamedly so. This was one of the first books I added to my new kindle based of off your description.
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| # ? Dec 27, 2010 00:07 |
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Smiling Jack posted:This was one of the first books I added to my new kindle based of off your description. Payndz stuff is really good and poo poo does explode, all the loving time.
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| # ? Dec 27, 2010 03:12 |
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Throwing down a little more Jack Reacher love. I'm a huge fan of Lee Child going all the way back to Killing Floor, which I picked up while working at a B Dalton back in 1993 and still have in a first edition hardcover. (Lee Child and Scott Smith both owe me a beer - Smith for A Simple Plan - for singlehandedly raising their sales by probably 8000% in the metro DC market.) Anyway, while Reacher's unapologetic badassery is certainly the main selling card, I think Child is among the very best talents in mainstream fiction, as evidenced by his flexibility in writing style and influences. He said in an interview that he intentionally made Killing Floor and Die Trying as far apart as possible genrewise (within the constraints of popular fiction and asskicking) because he knew by then that he had a good thing going and he wanted to establish some "goalposts" for the character to give himself as much latitude as possible right out of the gate. Thus Killing Floor is at heart a detective mystery with the odd beatdown here and there (and won an Edgar that year), while Die Trying is essentially the lost Die Hard files or something. In between he's done Running Blind which is basically pure whodunnit with almost no asskicking, 61 Hours with its countdown gimmick, and (my personal favorite) Echo Burning with its unabashed gothic-noir backdrop of sunbaked heat and Texas family politics. I like Child's willingness to try different approaches. He switches freely from first to third person throughout the series, touches on tricky and engrossing topics without losing credibility (Without Fail's behind-the-scenes approach to the Secret Service is a good example), and delivers the goods every time. The only ones that don't work much for me are The Enemy with its tedious backstory and Nothing to Lose for reasons that I can't put my finger on. I recently tracked down a short story by Child featuring Reacher as a supporting character. Despite only being in like three pages, he's still impossibly badass.
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| # ? Dec 27, 2010 17:54 |
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Lee Child is my favourite author although Vince Flynn is a close second. If you haven't read the Mitch Rapp series be sure to do so. Agree with you on Nothing To Lose. It just felt so utter dull, and parts of it just felt so ridiculous too(like the whole town coming out to block him from getting in). I did like the Enemy though although it got a bit ridiculous at the end - it was a solid mystery and it was great to read from Reachers army days. FYI the next book is set just before Killing Floor, Reachers last days in the Military. Only ones I haven't liked are Nothing To Lose, and Echo Burning. I reread the entire series once per year and I usually end up skipping those two. Persuader is probably the best just for the entire buildup to the fight with Paulie. BTW if you haven't noticed it yet - one thing Lee Child loves to use is the phrase Reacher Said Nothing over and over and over. I actually made myself a Reacher Said Nothing T-Shirt because it's just such an awesome phrase. What's funny is if I wear that in most places no-one gets it, but when I wore it going through the airport recently I had numerous people smile or comment on it.
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| # ? Dec 27, 2010 20:05 |
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Scotsman posted:BTW if you haven't noticed it yet - one thing Lee Child loves to use is the phrase Reacher Said Nothing over and over and over. I actually made myself a Reacher Said Nothing T-Shirt because it's just such an awesome phrase. Personal fave snippet of Reacher dialogue is the end of that phone conversation from One Shot, where he's sneaking around town trying to solve the mystery and the cops are futilely chasing their tails trying to track him down, and he's just repeatedly freakin' owning them without breaking a sweat. quote:Emerson (cop): We'll find you.  And I like Echo Burning for the same reason you like Persuader, the buildup to the climax. It seems like it gets hotter and hotter and more sweltering until that torrential rain and the fight out in the desert. I get that the whole thing is hokey and is pretty shamelessly cobbled from other, better works, but he makes it work. rivetz fucked around with this message at Dec 27, 2010 around 21:10 |
| # ? Dec 27, 2010 21:06 |
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Had to dig out Persuader just to recap my favourite part of it:quote:I kicked him in the kidney. Also someone mentioned on the last page here that in the most recent Reacher book he kills a guy by punching him in the chest and stopping his heart. What I really liked about that though was that it wasn't just a throwaway thing - Lee Child knew some people may consider that ridiculous, so he actually explained how it could happen at least 3 different times. Also made this Do Not Mess t-shirt haha. Always loved that line.
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| # ? Dec 27, 2010 21:39 |
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Just finished reading Seven maids a milking by Matt Reilly, and wow. Just... wow. I think he was getting paid by the exclamation point. I did love most of his other books, but this one is just... can something be TOO actiony? It just felt off somehow, like he had been snorting coke and drinking the aussie version of fourloco while writing it, and realized 3 sentences went by without a ! or something getting shot. It's written like the literary version of a Michael Bay film, but with less of an attention span to it, if that is even possible. Loved the scarecrow books, so I might give the Six geese a laying and Five golden rings a shot later on. I have to ask, does he DIAGRAM THE poo poo out of the other books?
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| # ? Dec 28, 2010 21:06 |
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I have to ask, does he DIAGRAM THE poo poo out of the other books?  I didn't mind the diagrams in his earlier books, because they were just simple maps that let you go "Ah, so the shark tank is two floors down and northeast of the plague lab." But the ones in the Jack West books start to replace actual description. Which if they were lavishly painted full-colour inserts might be barely acceptable, but not when they're stick figures on geometric shapes knocked up in Adobe Illustrator.
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| # ? Dec 28, 2010 23:28 |
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I am actally talking to a silk screening buddy of mine for a "Team Reacher" tshirt because someone said it was twilight for boys. That being said I can't wait for the next one, the most recent reacher outing had me completing it in 8 hours. My favorite reacher-ism is from his latest book as well. (Paraphrased) Reacher: I have a message from the association of american battered wives Guy about to be punched in the face: that's a real thing? Reacher:... probably. And then reacher BUSTS HIS NOSE INTO A BILLION PIECES God I love these books
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| # ? Dec 28, 2010 23:41 |
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When I was younger, I quite enjoyed Tom Clancy, but haven't been able to get into the more recent books. The fact that Red Storm Rising was one of my all-time favourite books got me into reading Larry Bond, and I've come to really enjoy his books. Can anyone recommend me some books along the lines of Bond's work?
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| # ? Dec 29, 2010 06:47 |
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PantlessBadger posted:When I was younger, I quite enjoyed Tom Clancy, but haven't been able to get into the more recent books. The fact that Red Storm Rising was one of my all-time favourite books got me into reading Larry Bond, and I've come to really enjoy his books. Can anyone recommend me some books along the lines of Bond's work?
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| # ? Dec 29, 2010 15:42 |
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In the Coonts books I've read (Flight of the Intruder, Cuba and Hong Kong), he has the annoying trait common to a lot of American techno-thriller authors of heavily pushing a particular right-wing viewpoint for vicarious wish-fulfilment: in his case, "the only way to deal with commies is to bomb the poo poo out of them." Intruder is basically him venting his frustrations at not being allowed to bomb Hanoi during the Vietnam war by letting his avatar do it. He also killed Fidel Castro in different ways in two different books that were part of the same series. Oops. (It must really burn guys like him and Clancy that Castro is still alive and flipping the bird at the US.)
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| # ? Dec 29, 2010 19:34 |
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Payndz posted:In the Coonts books I've read (Flight of the Intruder, Cuba and Hong Kong), he has the annoying trait common to a lot of American techno-thriller authors of heavily pushing a particular right-wing viewpoint for vicarious wish-fulfilment: in his case, "the only way to deal with commies is to bomb the poo poo out of them." Intruder is basically him venting his frustrations at not being allowed to bomb Hanoi during the Vietnam war by letting his avatar do it. Also, a woman gets gang-raped in an Iranian secret prison and is A-OK besides some bruises and being kinda pissed off. Good thing that's not a mentally and emotionally devastating thing to go through at all! Ugh, gently caress that book. Sorry, had to get all that off my chest. His other books were real good, I don't know what the hell happened with this one.
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| # ? Dec 29, 2010 20:26 |
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The regime change wish-fulfilment in Coonts' books was also pretty funny (and I see from the post above that he's still at it). I may be mixing Hong Kong up with a Clancy - it's some years since I read it - but I seem to remember that a group of idealistic (and pro-American, of course) Chinese students occupied government buildings and shamed the old guard commies into standing down from power. Rather than, er, using the same tactics they did in 1989, which unfortunately worked rather well for them. All these guys have a rather naive belief that the world's problems would be solved if only those countries that aren't like America became, y'know, just like America. I wonder how they feel about countries like China and Vietnam going directly from communism to ruthless, Darwinistic capitalism and skipping over the "democracy and human rights" stage.
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| # ? Dec 29, 2010 21:46 |
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Payndz posted:The regime change wish-fulfilment in Coonts' books was also pretty funny (and I see from the post above that he's still at it). I may be mixing Hong Kong up with a Clancy - it's some years since I read it - but I seem to remember that a group of idealistic (and pro-American, of course) Chinese students occupied government buildings and shamed the old guard commies into standing down from power. Rather than, er, using the same tactics they did in 1989, which unfortunately worked rather well for them.  If you want some good spy thrillers without right-wing lunacy, have you read Alex Berenson's John Wells novels? Berenson's a pretty liberal dude (wrote for the NYT, if that tells you anything), but he mostly keeps his personal politics out of his books (except for one eye-rolling scene in the second where Wells is being tortured by the Chinese and seriously thinks "  This must be well-deserved punishment for all the people America's unjustly tortured in the war on terror " where a real person would think "How do I get out of this" or, alternately, "Aaaaah oh god why owwwww aaaaaaauuuugh") Not that I disagree with the anti-torture sentiment, but it was even more jarring than right-wing wish fulfillment fantasy. Other than that one scene, it's a good series, and a refreshing break from the conservative monopoly on spy techno-thrillers.
WeaponGradeSadness fucked around with this message at Dec 29, 2010 around 22:22 |
| # ? Dec 29, 2010 22:20 |
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| # ? May 20, 2013 22:23 |
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WeaponGradeSadness posted:Nope, that was Hong Kong, although in the books defense it took an armed revolt assisted by remote control warbots (seriously) delivered by America because they were pro-America, so they didn't win just by virtue of being I love killer robots, but not so much in supposedly 'realistic' thrillers.Is it Dale Brown's books that have all but become Starship Troopers in today's world? I'm sure I flicked through one of his to find somebody leaping from a B-52 in power armour.
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| # ? Dec 29, 2010 22:33 |
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