Tag: Thrillers

The Hunt for Red October (Jack Ryan, #4)

The Hunt for Red OctoberThe Hunt for Red October
by Tom Clancy
Rating: ★★★★★
isbn: 0870212850
Series: Jack Ryan #4
Publication Date: October 1, 1984
Pages: 387
Genre: Political Fiction, Thriller
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

I haven’t read this since soon after it came out in the late 80’s, although I’ve seen the movies numerous times over the years.  It’s every bit as good as I remember – even better, really, because this time around I didn’t have any trouble keeping track of the boats and the subs.  True, bits of it are dated (the average American salary being 20k a year, or even more startling, the superiority of the CRAY-2 supercomputer, which cost tens of millions of dollars, was available only at NASA and a few military centers, ,,,  and had the same computing power of the first iPad.), but overall the action is fast, the writing intelligent, and the suspense top notch.

Having gone so long between reads, and having seen the movie enough times in between, I had forgotten how much the movie deviates – especially at the end – from the book.  I’m generally pretty vitriolic about movie adaptations, especially when they significantly alter things, but full credit to the screenwriters; I don’t know that the book’s ending would have worked as well on-screen, but the spirit of the thing was caught perfectly.  Re-reading this ending was like experiencing it for the first time and it was tense.

I’m thankful to Peregrinations for getting me thinking about this book again.  I’m sort of tempted to re-read a few other Ryan books now.  Or, at least, after Halloween Bingo.

I read this for Halloween Bingo 2022, but I’m still not sure which square I want to use it for – either Fear the Drowning Deep, or Film at 11.  For now, I think I’ll assign it to Fear the Drowning Deep, since that square has already been called.

Executive Orders re-read

Executive OrdersExecutive Orders
by Tom Clancy
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 0399142185
Series: Jack Ryan #9
Publication Date: July 1, 1996
Pages: 875
Genre: Political Fiction, Thriller
Publisher: Putnam

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 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.