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I think it might have been Mike-O who originally had this idea sometime before Christmas, so thanks to you or whoever it was for the steal . Red Storm Rising might be Tom Clancy's second best story after hunt for the red october, but it's def the most Tom Clancyest. I don't know if it was the first right wing masturbatory alt-history novel, but with Tanks through the Fulda Gap, Subs through the GIUK and a zoomie weather forecaster filling some iceland chick's gap, it's the archetype of the genre AFAIC. It was written after young Tom met a guy named Larry Bond who had written the boardgame version of Harpoon and many parts of the book are based on scenarios played out by Clancy and other grognards, a good genesis for any book I'm sure you'll agree. I don't know how one let's reads a book so I presume I read the book while the rest of youse mock it. Feel free to read along with your own copy or read another TC or anything you drat well like, I ain't gonna force you to do the one book. I expect it's cheap and easy to come by on e-readers or failing that a second hand bookstore would have a copy for sure. Here's my copy, I found it while clearing 30 years of rubbish out of my parent's home this summer. Pretty sure before that it was my late granddad's, a notable world authority on books with crashing planes on the cover.  For a quick catchup, Wikipedia has a plot summary.  Correction - Wikipedia has 90% of the novel as it's plot summary. Somehow I'm not surprised. Foreword:  If he did so much, why didn't you put him on the cover, ya ungrateful bastard? Quote with suitably low reading age  ~*so profound*~ As for the rest, hopefully I'll cover two to three chapters a week until I finish or get bored with it.
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Feb 21, 2018 10:39
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Tom Clancy was amazing when I was a teenager. I haven’t tried reading his stuff since. Hunt for Red October is amazing though.
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Feb 26, 2018 23:29
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Most of the rest blur together for me. I know I've read Without Remorse and the one with the blimp nuke (it was that, right? the one where they nuke Denver anyway.) I remember an isolated scene about the IRA attacking some British royal but nothing about the rest of that one. A decent set piece about the Chinese attacking Russian border defences made of bunkerized tanks that must have come from the Bear & the Dragon. There were also a book that was just a series of sub encounters and another one that involved cyberspace somehow that stand out as particularly bad. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that I've seen the movie of red october so much as just snippets of it on youtube videos. I'll have to fix that up at some point.
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Feb 27, 2018 05:07
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The last one I read was when terrorists infiltrated through Mexico and shot up a mall in Va. One of the protagonists gave a dying baddy a football to hold...
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Feb 27, 2018 05:22
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Syrian Lannister posted:The last one I read was when terrorists infiltrated through Mexico and shot up a mall in Va. One of the protagonists gave a dying baddy a football to hold... That scene of peak "I have no idea how Islam works" was one of the most memorable, along with the entirety of Netforce's "I cannot write children".
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Feb 27, 2018 17:38
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I was working on a Clancy drinking game, but I have to think it's probably already been done better somewhere.
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Feb 27, 2018 18:48
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Well, since this thread didn't disappear into the aether like I thought it had, I guess I'd better read some chapters! The Oil refinery scene at the start isn't terrible. Update tonight, maybe.
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Feb 27, 2018 20:19
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What’s the one where the SEAL dude raw dogs a hooker and gets the clap then gets shot by her pimp then goes all Liam Neeson on the pimp? Did the SEAL kill the hooker and the pimp was revenging or what I don’t remember it was like 20 years ago...
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Feb 28, 2018 00:28
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Sounds like Without Remorse, that's the only one with hooker action, I think.
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Feb 28, 2018 00:34
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Yep.
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Feb 28, 2018 00:44
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Without Remorse is Clarke's origin story. It reads like it wants to be a Punisher comic.
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Feb 28, 2018 00:52
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Jaguars! posted:The Oil refinery scene at the start isn't terrible. 
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Feb 28, 2018 01:00
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Where’s the wedding ring?
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Feb 28, 2018 01:14
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Nostalgia4Murder posted:Where’s the wedding ring? Right foreground
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Feb 28, 2018 01:36
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Good god, the body language there.
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Feb 28, 2018 07:15
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Chapter One: The Slow Fuse We start off in an Oil Refinery in Nizhnevartovsk in Western Siberia. Three Azerbaijani Islamic terrorists are infiltrating the refinery, There's Ibrahim Tolkaze, a renegade engineer, Rasul who does the messy bits and Mohammed, who's the Islamic equivalent of the guy with the Mohawk and fatigue trousers who gets beaten up in action films. His part in this book is to smash up some telephones. Anyway, they slaughter their former employers in the control room, fight off a KGB security squad and use the incoming oil to fuel a massive firestorm that destroys the refinery. The Americans are watching, of course, and a satellite flags it as a possible missile launch. There's a technojargon conversation about things satellite command have to do and they watch the fires. Chapter Two: Odd Man In An AP wire story all done up in teletype font tells us about the results of the fire, esp. the loss of 31% of oil production. First mention of a main character, Mikhail Sergetov, Petroleum Minister of the USSR. Next Sergetov thinks over his report while flying to meet the politburo. We learn all the implications of the disaster and damage to oil production. He reports and successfully deflects most of his blame onto his predecessor. Once again we hear the news on oil production is even worse, because almost half of high grade production is gone. There's four pages of discussion on the Russian energy industry which dismisses lots of ideas and show us more how important the oil loss is. The USSR will have to make sacrifices in many areas. Then about a page and a half of how out of touch the Politburo is. The rest of the politburo is referred to as chairman, defense minister, etc. instead of by name. Bob Toland is introduced at the NSA. He doesn't worry too much about Russian oil fires. The Politburo meets again, more exposition on how Russian politics works. The Defense minister wants to seize the Persian gulf. But that's not practical at the moment, so they just have to neutralize NATO first. But that's OK! The KGB has a plan! They will muddy the waters somehow and the Army can invade western Europe. Sergetov equivocates, but elder statesman Pyotr Bromkovskiy fights against the plan, letting us hear various details. Nuclear war is mentioned, but the means of avoiding it are not elaborated. The Chapter ends with another wire report; the USSR has confirmed the oil fire but claims it was caused by a technical problem. ********** As some of us have noticed, the refinery attack carries a fair bit of grim irony in the 21st century. Clancy was correct in predicting that terrorism would become more influential, but there's no sign here that he ever considered that the US might be the victim. This book was published before suicide bombing as a tactic, before Lockerbie or the original WTC bomb plot. To westerners it was mostly taking planes over to Cuba or Palestine, or the occasional hostage crisis, like winning the lottery in reverse. The oil field scene is ok, it's reasonably tight writing, but Clancy's terrorists are pretty weak. They're Muslims in an officially atheist state but they don't have any motivation, they aren't part of a larger campaign or group. Their act is hopeless as a piece of terrorism because it's not even in the public view - The Russians can claim it was an accident and no-one knows any better! Tolkaze especially is an unlikely terrorist - he's a golden boy who can thank the russians for plucking him from obscurity and making him someone, even his former workmates are described as being friendly but unknowingly condescending, hardly cause to give it all away. The Politburo stuff goes on for a long time. It's not horribly dry, but there's an awful lot of background detail that's on a tangent to the story. Perhaps Tom wanted to convince himself as well as everyone else that his non-nuclear scenario was plausible? There's an awful lot of alternate scenarios being discussed and dismissed. A bit of mild racism here too, the Politburo isn't impressed by this black-rear end Muslim (their words) who ruined their lovely refinery. For a much, much better 'Kremlin hawks gather and conspire' scene, read From Russia With Love. Prose of the day: quote:Narod, they called it, a masculine noun that was nonetheless raped in every sense: The masses, the faceless, collection of men and women who toiled every day in Moscow and throughout the nation, their thoughts hidden behind unsmiling masks. The members of the politburo told themselves that these workers and peasants did not grudge their leaders the luxuries that accompanied responsibility. After all, life in the country had improved in measurable terms. But the compact was about to be broken. What might happen then. Nicholas II had not known. These men did. Clancyfacts:
Jaguars! fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Feb 28, 2018 |
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Feb 28, 2018 12:59
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Davethulhu posted:Without Remorse is Clarke's origin story. It reads like it wants to be a Punisher comic. It involves a torture scene in a decompression chamber.
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Feb 28, 2018 17:40
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Point of order: we'd seen the first of the high-profile suicide bombers by this point, in the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing.
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Feb 28, 2018 20:09
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Let's not
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Feb 28, 2018 20:19
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McNally posted:Right foreground I meant shouldn’t Reagan be wearing one?
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Mar 1, 2018 04:25
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Nostalgia4Murder posted:I meant shouldn’t Reagan be wearing one? Out of curiosity, I GISed up some Reagan photos and apparently he never wore one.
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Mar 1, 2018 04:28
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McNally posted:Out of curiosity, I GISed up some Reagan photos and apparently he never wore one. Weird
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Mar 1, 2018 04:32
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Madurai posted:Point of order: we'd seen the first of the high-profile suicide bombers by this point, in the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing. Fair enough. Seems like there were quite a few throughout the Lebanese civil war and then they spread through to other places in the late '80s and the 1990s.
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Mar 1, 2018 20:20
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McNally posted:Out of curiosity, I GISed up some Reagan photos and apparently he never wore one. Nancy was married to her first love, all of hollywood
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Mar 1, 2018 21:37
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I read The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Red Storm Rising and Rainbow Six when I was in elementary school. Most of it except R6 probably went straight over my head, and that's because it has a really simple plot and doesn't ramble about boring stock broker poo poo for 50 pages. I tried one of his books on Audible a couple years back. It committed the sin of having a scene of Clark and Chavez capturing not-Gadhaffi, followed by 50 pages of boring stock broker poo poo. I'm never reading anything he's written ever again.
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Mar 1, 2018 22:53
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Casimir Radon posted:I read The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Red Storm Rising and Rainbow Six when I was in elementary school. Most of it except R6 probably went straight over my head, and that's because it has a really simple plot and doesn't ramble about boring stock broker poo poo for 50 pages. You should at least read Hunt for Red October if you haven't. It's his only book that's actually good.
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Mar 1, 2018 23:51
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Wikipedia posted:The Cardinal of the Kremlin is also the title of a 1990 video game based on the novel. In a 1994 survey of wargames Computer Gaming World gave the title one-plus stars out of five, stating that it "utilized intensive bar graphs as a replacement for action and entertainment".[3] Never read it, but I'm sure Clancy handled a lesbian KGB agent sub-plot with sensitivity and respect
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Mar 2, 2018 07:49
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Jaguars! posted:hmm Of course, simply by treating "lesbian" and "KGB agent" as synonyms.
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Mar 2, 2018 15:06
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I can tolerate Red Storm Rising better than anything else Clancy has written, because at least it's not fellating Jack loving Ryan and John loving Clark.
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Mar 3, 2018 11:13
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Chapter Three: Correlation Of Forces A Couple of Generals discuss the war plans. They have about 4 months to prepare. They hope political masking plans will allow them the element of surprise. They also decide to take action to improve discipline. Dan McCafferty is preparing to leave on submarine USS Chicago. The visiting Mayor of Cicago was hoping to drink a toast but it's against regulations so they have coffee. The Soviet general staff goes to a sauna and where they recieve the news about the planned war. General Alekseyev wants to attack immediately to maximise the surprise. He is opposed by the powerful CINC West. The Navy moots Op Polar Glory, which will close the north atlantic and keep the US Navy away from the Barents Sea Chapter Four: Maskirovka 1 The Soviets are going to decommission some old Yankee class Ballistic Missile submarines in order to reduce the nuclear arms race. Reporters Calloway and Flynn are covering the press release. Bob Toland reads about it on the press wire service. Alekseyev discusses unit training back at Kiev. They decide to execute a few officers who have been falsifying training reports. They are responsible for seizing the oilfields after NATO is defeated, but they expect the European theatre to divert lots of their troops. Chapter Five: Sailors and Spooks Bob Toland is fishing with his father-in-law, another spook and ex naval captain. Bob has heard about the soviet officer executions and has a bad feeling about them. The Russians have a shortage of car and truck batteries. Next he's off for his naval reserve duty and meets Ed Morris, a Frigate Commander. (He has the commissioning number as his car number plate) They meet with McCafferty, who tells a story about watching a yacht crew loving through the periscope of a sub. Then he talks about russian activity that he's seen up north. Bob realizes that the battery shortage is because the subs are all having their batteries replaced. Later, Toland briefs McCaffery's admiral to get around his obstructive chain of command. Toland is put on extended active duty as Naval Intelligence staff. Chapter Six: The Watchers Toland moves in. The russians are increasing the private plots on their collective farms to improve productivity. Toland is now expecting military action by the russians. Meanwhile, General Alekseyev reviews a regimental attack exercise for the third time. The unit is ok, but it's been diverted to the european theatre command. Morris is also training on his frigate, USS Pharris. Chicago is also heading back to sea early. Chapter Seven: Initial Observations Toland briefs some officers on all his findings, the russians executed a bunch more rankers as predicted. Various intelligence agencies are now investigating. General Alekseyev's units are improving readiness. Chicago exercises tracking an oil tanker. Photos confirm the russians are replacing the batteries on their subs. Reproters Flynn and Calloway watch some Yankee Submarines being decommissioned, accompanied by a soviet captain who spouts cringe inducing rhetoric about peace. The shipyard is noticeably quiet. Chapter Eight: Further Observations NBC has an oportunity to film a russian military exercise. There's a funny little bit about russian officers arguing about the route. Toland watches the Soviet evening news at Intel HQ. Alekseyev is pleased with progress. ***** All these chapters are grouped together because they're all the same - 'The plot thickens'. As you guys have put it, pages 43-106 are just tutorial on stockbroking. It's just dribbles of information about intelligence gathering. Most of them are in the form of conversations during meetings and briefings, usually with the inner dialog of one of the main characters. Toland is kind of annoying. He's worked out all this stuff and put the US on alert because he just happens to have a father-in-law who knows vital information and just happens to be a naval reservist who just happens to have influential friends who can corroborate the case and pass it up the chain. The book doesn't mention how his wife reated to suddenly getting put on duty in Norfolk in the middle of peacetime when he lives in Maryland. Lol at Calloway the BBC correspondent grumbling about his unreliable soviet car which he wishes he could replace - with a Morris in 1986. I guess its true, but, well, a Lada for an 1500 or Marina, really? Bit of a failure of Clancy's research there. I guess an english ford would have been his best bet, but wouldn't have been exotic enough for the book. And another, more in the nature of Cold War secretivity: The foreign minister says there are twenty Yankee class subs, but according to Wikipedia, there were 34, the vast majority of which were still operational in 1986. Prose of the day: quote:'They are, Comrade. Another tank division lost to Germany. Well, he needs it more than we. I tell you, we will sweep the Arabs aside like dirt on a smooth tile floor. In truth, we always could. There are not so many of them, and if these Arabs are like the Libyans I saw three years ago - These have no mountains to hide in. This is not Afghanistan. Our mission is to conquer, not to pacify. This we can do. I estimate two weeks. The only problem I foresee is the destruction of the oil fields. They can use scorched earth as a defense just as we have, and that will be difficult for us to prevent, even with paratroops. Still and all, our objective is achievable. Our men will be ready.' Monologs and asides: Plan Zhukov 4, the winter plan for preemptive strike on NATO The capabilities and dangers of an American Carrier Groups attack against the Kola Peninsula The Russian conscript system and it's effect on readiness. Jaguars! fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Mar 3, 2018 |
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Mar 3, 2018 23:10
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it's been legit twenty-five years* since I've read this book, but I seem to recall Morris' story being the most compelling of the narratives. *and by twenty-five, I mean thirty
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Mar 3, 2018 23:29
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He hasn't done much yet, just met with his friends and a brief bit to show the increase in training levels. I'm a fast reader, but not naturally very critical of what I read or watch. Having to write about it brings home just how much is written while not very much happens.
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Mar 3, 2018 23:54
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This is why Arc-light is the infinitely superior technothriller. You get a nuclear war within the first hundred pages.
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Mar 4, 2018 05:18
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The wreck of the Andrea Doris getting nuked is my favorite part of that whole mess. Although Teeth of the Tiger has got to be my favorite lovely Clancy book, with the whole pointless holocaust cybersex sub plot
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Mar 4, 2018 21:05
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FrozenVent posted:The wreck of the Andrea Doris getting nuked is my favorite part of that whole mess. I read Teeth of the Tiger but I do not remember that part
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Mar 4, 2018 21:08
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One of the Muslim terrorist is role playing raping a Jewish chick in a concentration camp, but it turns out the chick was a fat dude all along, or something as dumb as that. Could have been one of the Op Center book too, it’s been a while.
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Mar 4, 2018 21:14
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Oh I'm not saying it isn't, just that it was a bad book and I can't remember much, other then at one point Clancy went into considerable detail about foreskins and circumcision because that was how someone was identified or some poo poo
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Mar 4, 2018 21:18
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It had a thing about the two Special Ops Killer driving a Porsche down to Italy while Jack Ryan Jr, stock broker, had to take a plane because the Porsche was a two seater. Man what a lovely book that was. Once we’re done with RSR maybe I should let’s read it.
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Mar 4, 2018 21:20
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FrozenVent posted:It had a thing about the two Special Ops Killer driving a Porsche down to Italy while Jack Ryan Jr, stock broker, had to take a plane because the Porsche was a two seater. You're quite welcome to  if you want, no need to wait for me.Chapter Nine: A Final Look Hey! something of interest happens! Nah, just kidding. Bob Toland and his boss watch Eisenstein's masterpiece Alexander Nevsky on his bootleg russian satellite connection. (5 pages) In the Kremlin, some cleaning supplies are inspected and delivered. (2.5 pages) When the truck leaves, it goes to KGB headquarters. Martha Toland seduces her husband in a scene that just about fits on twitter. I would call this Tom Clancy at his worst but that's his other books. This is Tom at his most widespread, I think. Just in case you really want to beat your head against the wall, here's all you ever wanted to know about Alexander Nevsky:    And hell, if you've read this far, might as well read the rest of the KGB's cunning plan and Bob Toland getting it on:  I'm def gonna start skipping chapters. Separating the wheat from the chaff is just too painful. Just wanted to show this one as an example of how much irrelevant poo poo works it's way in here.
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Mar 5, 2018 11:32
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Stackin paperbacks
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Mar 5, 2018 18:20
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