Tom Clancy (1) (1947–2013)

Given my current country of residence's complete incompetence and the news that my native land is trying to be the world leader in everything including incompetence, I needed to escape to a world where real problems are met and dealt with by leaders with integrity and the skills to think through issues rationally with a view towards the long-term.

In other words, a fantasy.

I have always been and will always be, an unapologetic fan of Clancy's works - the ones he wrote himself - so falling show more back into Jack Ryan's world was, if not a comfort, at least familiar and comfortable. It's been 2 decades since I last read this, and it generally holds up perfectly. The first half of the book is a bit overly idealistic, but what struck me about it is that Tom Clancy showed a startling degree of prescience not just in some of his major plot lines, but in his story arc.

Executive Orders is the story about a non-politician ending up as President of the United States, vowing to eject the political riff-raff out of Washington, and appointing business sector executives to the cabinet to get things done.

Sound familiar? Of course, Jack Ryan wasn't a paranoid narcissist and he was highly educated and qualified regardless of his lack of political savvy. He also had more integrity than your garden variety black widow spider. But Clancy imagined the world we live in today twenty years ago, with startling accuracy, albeit in the most idealistic light.

His idealism extended to America's response (and only America because his plot extended no further) to the epidemic that grips the country in Executive Orders; his national lockdown works flawlessly; almost nobody ignores the mandate, there are no rushes on grocery stores, and there's no general panic. Of course, I'd like to think that any country's population would react to an epidemic of ebola exponentially better than they're reacting (or not) to the corona pandemic, so maybe my faith in humanity hasn't been completely snuffed out.

Either way, it was good to revisit a world that works, even when everything is pear-shaped. show less

I've got a fondness for airport reading, and when he's on, Clancy is as good as any. Cardinal of the Kremlin centers around the CIA's top source in Moscow, three time Hero of the Soviet Union Colonel Misha Filitov, who's been passing secrets to for 30 years. But bad luck blows his courier chain, and Jack Ryan and friends have to break every unwritten rule in the CIA-KGB game to get him out. There's lots of tradecraft and spy versus spy. Meanwhile on the tech side of the technothriller, show more American and Russian missile defense programs are working themselves up--the Russian have the laser, the Americans the mirror. As usual, Clancy writes a great yarn, and this is actually a decent layman's primer on nuclear war strategy and why missile defense could be destabilizing, although Clancy is strongly pro-Star Wars, against the professional consensus.

Some parts have not aged well. Our heroic allies the Afghan Mujaheddin is sadly ironic in a Rambo 3 kind of way. But this book is way more homophobic than I remember. Not that I expect 80s era Clancy to be progressive or anything, but the most evil character is a traitorous lesbian mole out to seduce her best friend by any means necessary, including having the KGB kidnap her husband. A thinly veiled version of Representative Barney Frank shows up just so Ryan can call him a queer. Super awkward, but still better than anything Clancy wrote after the fall of the Berlin Wall. show less

I recently reread this book after more than 20 years and I still find it to be Clancy's most interesting novel, if only--for no other reason--because the villains are environmentalists. This idea is so rare in modern writing and story-telling that only Michael Crichton's "State of Fear" really shares the same space as this book. But it is also a fun Clancy-style international thriller.

Madmen plan to wipe humanity out except they are well-regarded, well-educated, and well-financed. A show more horrible, modified Ebola strain is engineered in a lab and tested on the homeless and the lonely. A brand-new anti-terror group has been quietly established that works internationally when the locals can't/don't want to handle it. Someone is bringing old terrorists out of retirement to stage international incidents. What's it all for? How is any of it connected? Will the good guys find out who the actual bad guys are and what they're up to in time for it to matter? These are the questions that Rainbow Six answers in 900 pages.

The ending is very memorable. Pure Clancy, pure fun! show less

I was a huge fan of this movie when it came out but had never read a Tom Clancy book. It seemed like a good time to do so. The adaptation from book to screen was expertly done....the book is so long and has a ton of characters, with the main characters from the movie disappearing in the book for long chunks of time. There are entire characters and sections of the book (including the final action scene) that weren't in the movie. I always enjoy those kind of adaptations because they provide show more two distinct and enjoyable experiences.

It shocks me that Tom Clancy was not in the military and the amount of research he must have done is staggering. If the book occasionally bogs down in technical jargon, that also fuels the feeling of realism that the book has. I also like that our hero, Jack Ryan, isn't invulnerable or omniscient...no character in this book is. It's a good, exciting read and if it's perhaps a little jingoistic, I'm willing to let it slide as its not offensively so. show less