Tom Clancy Dead: Celebrated Thriller Author Dies At Age 66

[Viking]

I read Red Storm Rising in 8 hours  in transit from Toukyo to Singapore (with a stop over at Chiang Kai Shek). I felt giddy about the Iceland bit, but was a bit confused since the place the soviet marines landed looks like this




and there are some quite much nicer places to land, like the undefended port facilities just up the coast a bit

plus, I went to summer camp where the heroes are hiding out in the wilderness

[Maximus]

RIP

Red Storm Rising was awesome.

The video game was better than the book.

Wasn't it pretty much just a sub simulator? I never played it.

[crazy canuck]

I enjoyed his early books.  That is really too young to die. RIP

[derspiess]

RIP

Red Storm Rising was awesome.

The video game was better than the book.

Wasn't it pretty much just a sub simulator? I never played it.

Yes, pretty much.  But it did a great job of narrating the ground & air war and showing how your actions impacted it.

I wouldn't necessarily put the game over the book (both were awesome), but the game was fun as hell to play.  One of the best games published by Microprose.

Someone other than Microprose did a Hunt for Red October game, and it was complete shit IMO.  Confusing controls and it gave no clue as to what your objectives were.

[Caliga]

Yes, pretty much.  But it did a great job of narrating the ground & air war and showing how your actions impacted it.

I wouldn't necessarily put the game over the book (both were awesome), but the game was fun as hell to play.  One of the best games published by Microprose.

Someone other than Microprose did a Hunt for Red October game, and it was complete shit IMO.  Confusing controls and it gave no clue as to what your objectives were.

I agree with everything spiess said.

[alfred russel]

Obamacare?

[Darth Wagtaros]

The Hunt for Red October game was absolute shit. They should have been ashamed to make it.  Clancy should have had Rainbow Six go Gitmo on their asses.

[Eddie Teach]

I enjoyed his early books. 

Almost a shame the Cold War didn't go on longer.

[Josephus]

 

[Darth Wagtaros]

I enjoyed his early books. 

Almost a shame the Cold War didn't go on longer.

That's what ruined his vibe.

[grumbler]

I saw his bibliography in an obituary and will be honest and say that I had no idea he had written so many books after the last book of his I tried to read, The Cardinal of the Kremlin.  Many of them were apparently best-sellers, so I must have seen them advertised, but I guess I just kinda lumped them together in my mind.  Clancy was certainly prolific:  eighteen novels in thirty years is a lot.

I may have told this story here before, but it probably is worth repeating:

Back in the early 1980s, I worked on the US Navy's Anti-Submarine Warfare Requirements Study, which looked at the state of ASW in the near future (+1 years), mid-term future (+10 years) and far-term future (+20 years), all based on the Navy's procurement plans, ASW strategy, CIA projections of Soviet force levels, and CIA projections of Soviet submarine employment strategies.  We'd brief this stuff up through the Navy chain of command, and then the ASW sub-panel (no pun intended) of the Defense Science Board.  Admiral bobby Inman sat on that board, and every year he asked why the Soviets were using so few of their subs offensively, against our carriers and convoys.  The answer always was that the CIA projections had the Soviets using most of their SSNs to protect their SSBNs.  It was a weird question for him to be asking, we thought, because he was the deputy Director of the CIA, and we had already told him we had gotten our data through him.

He pressed, every year, for the answer to the question "what if the estimate is wrong?  What is the Soviets use their submarines aggressively?  How does that change the results?"  Every year, we had to admit that we hadn't looked at that, since that was not an approved scenario and we couldn't spend time/money on unapproved scenarios.

So, after a coupla years of this, out comes this book about a hypothetical war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, with a big naval component, and which has the Soviets using the "bastion' strategy that Adm Inman had proposed they might use, freeing up the SSNs to attack western carriers and shipping.  Sure enough, even though it isn't an "approved scenario," our Navy sponsors tell us to run the analysis in all three time frames using the "bastion" strategy (which everyone calls the "Red Storm Rising scenario").  The results, of course, are not nearly so rosy for the USN as the old scenarios, and this leads to the "ASW New Initiatives" program, which was where Inman had been pushing his DSB colleagues all along.

The publication of RSR also doomed the Spruance class.  None of the "New Initiatives" for the Spruance worked out, and without major improvements the Spruances were not worth keeping against the RSR threat. 

[derspiess]

And if it weren't for Clancy I wouldn't have understood any of that

[Sheilbh]

Never actually managed to read one of his books. The only ones I tried got bogged down in hundred page chunks of lovingly described hardware. He was to military machinery what Tolstoy was to history.

But I know a lot of people enjoyed him a lot - and I liked some of the games. Also 66 is shockingly young

[Legbiter]

Never actually managed to read one of his books. The only ones I tried got bogged down in hundred page chunks of lovingly described hardware.

That's my Clancy.

Sometimes I fantasize about the results had Clancy written Lord Of The Rings.

[KRonn]

Gave us some good books, and some good videogames. RIP.

And lots of movies spun off of his books.