Outside of a Dog: Clancy, Tom: Red Storm Rising

Trent Goulding

Trent Goulding wrote on June 6, 2005 at 11:40 AM:

You might choke a bit on Rainbow Six. Clancy gets progressively more didactic and politically preachy, and (IMO) his characters get more cardboardy (and his villains more straw-manish), the later you get in his ouevre. If I'm remembering Rainbow Six correctly, his nasty eco-terrorists are real eye-rolling fun. But whatever you do, stay away from The Bear and the Dragon....

Kate

Kate wrote on June 6, 2005 at 12:21 PM:

Trent: Well, see, the reason I'm embarrased is that I've *read* _Rainbow Six_. The ridiculous villains were indeed ridiculous, but I recall the set-pieces about the team being likely to scratch the bedtime reading itch. I'm skipping all Jack Ryan novels after _The Hunt for Red October_--actually _Patriot Games_ might be okay, but I read them through _Executive Orders_ and have no desire to go back there.

David Tate

David Tate wrote on September 19, 2005 at 3:30 PM:

I don’t think Patriot Games counts as “after THfRO”. It’s set earlier in time, and is MUCH rougher in both style and craft. I suspect an early work, unpublishable prior to the success of tHfRO but brought out of mothballs thereafter. (There’s a name for that sort of thing, but derned if I can remember it.)

Personally, I stopped after reading Clear and Present Danger, and haven’t ever regretted that. I got quite a bit of enjoyment out of the early ones, but the handwriting was clearly on the wall, and everything I’ve heard about The Sum of All Fears et seq. makes me think I chose wisely.

Kate

Kate wrote on September 19, 2005 at 7:42 PM:

David, the phrase you want is “trunk novel,” I believe. I seem to have left Patriot Games in the backlog, but yeah, it was pretty bad.

I only read half of The Sum of All Fears, skipping all the “how to build a nuclear bomb” parts. That may well have been where I stopped reading as well, except for Rainbow Six. (looks guilty)