Yes, Tom Clancy really does need a technical advisor...

[ffutures]

I was telling someone about the gaping plot holes in most of Tom Clancy's work, and he was a little sceptical. Pausing only briefly to gaze in awe at The Bear and the Dragon whose Chinese government computers connect to the internet via a built in modem, not a network, and have no firewalls, anti-trojan protection or (apparently) compartmentalization to make sure that the person who types up super-secret minutes is not also browsing the web on the same PC, and to wonder why TC thought that the Chinese government couldn't stop its citizens accessing western web sites, we move swiftly on to Rainbow Six.

I shall say relatively little about the plot, which basically consists of the bad guys (who want to go unnoticed until they can destroy 99%+ of the human race, and can do so very easily) then deciding to sponsor repeated terrorist attacks that serve no purpose except to heighten government alert levels. This leads, inevitably, to the guy who is supposed to destroy the world (by relasing a virus at the Australian Olympics) getting caught because the terrorists have aroused governmment interest...

OK, that's fairly standard contrived plotting. What isn't is that the delivery system for the virus is a water sprayer system designed to cool down the stadium from the searing summer heat. Except that we're talking the Olympics, and Australia, which is a Southern Hemisphere country. E.g., it's an event that is taking place in the middle of WINTER. No searing summer heat.

I could have fixed this by e.g. saying that it's the water supply for the Olympic Village or the drinking fountains rather than the stadium cooling system.

I'm pretty sure that any good editor could do so much more elegantly. I can only assume that by the time he wrote Rainbow Six he was such an enormous success that nobody was doing this sort of proofreading.

Comments

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

I've often thought that about really famous authors, having caught some horrible howlers in books by such luminaries as Pratchett and Barker. I'm sure they wouldn't want not to be edited competently, so it must be a publisher's decision--"Don't upset them or they might leave."

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I think it's more that there's an assumption that "Clancy gets this stuff right," so they pay much less attention to that sort of thing than to e.g. is he libelling someone, and don't get a specialised editor in to do the work.

His first books were published by a militaria press, and they knew when he was talking bollocks re. the hardware.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I don't know; in The Hunt for Red October he seems to believe that large military sonar-processing suites run in interpreted BASIC...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Forgot that bit. Yes, that was a bit stupid.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

I did my military service in underwater activity defense, and I honestly wouldn't even blink at that one.

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

An ex-Navy friend gave up on Dale Brown's _Sky Masters_ because of errors in the introductory naval engagements - he had no confidence in the rest of the book as a result (Dale Brown is ex-USAF).

[averageshmoe.livejournal.com]

When Clancy wrote the "Red October" novel large parts of it were reviewed by submarine specialists and their observations were incorporated into the final work.

He doesn't do that sort of thing anymore.

Outside of his first couple of novels I've lost all interest in him as a writer.

pgavigan

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I like to think of him as an awful warning.

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

His first couple of novels (especially 'Red Storm Rising') relied heavily on input from Larry Bond - when that input stopped the technical accuracy dropped off.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed - shame that on his own Bond isn't a terribly readable author, at least in my opinion.

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

I loved 'Cauldron' - but that's because of the almost cartoonish caricaturisation of the French; wickedly funny, although probably unintentionally so.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

To make matters worse:

The Bad Guys in Rainbow Six are supposedly deep green eco-weenie environmentalists and animal lovers.

So they go underground and fund their DESTROY HUMANITY!!!?!! project by founding a huge, evil animal-experimentin' pharmaceutical multinational corporation over a 30 year period.

Er ... no. The bad guys Clancy sets up wouldn't do that, or if they did, their ideological committment would be dust on the wind after 30 years of conspiring to trample everything they stand for. This is on the same order as a plot that requires early 20th century Zionists to join the Nazi party and implement the Final Solution as an intermediate step on the plan to found the state of Israel by generating Jewish refugees. Or anti-nuclear campaigners setting up a reactor construction corporation so they can corner the world supply of reactor fuel rods. Or something equally fatuous.

Plot: FAIL.

Protagonist motivation: FAIL.

Evil McGuffin: FAIL.

What's left?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yup. I really can't see the militant Green guy they recruit fairly late in the story even wanting to talk to them, given that male conspirator runs the multinational and his allegedly estranged ex. is a senior scientific adviser to the US government. It's an idiot plot in every sense.

[danel4d.livejournal.com]

Well, stranger things have happened - some corners of some movements can go completely off the deep end. There were some Marxists who became avid supporters of Thatcher in the belief that by worsening the status of workers they would bring yet closer the glorious revolution.

Of course, I doubt that what's Clancy was talking about - he wasn't argued that these people were lunatics who'd perverted their own beliefs, but trying to say something about real Greens. When I read the book - and enjoyed it - I didn't even see these people as environmentalists at all - they just wanted to destroy most of the world's population so they could do what the hell they liked. But this was many years ago, and I was much younger then. My Clancy collection has been gathering dust for the better part of a decade now.

[jonnynexus.livejournal.com]

Was Rainbow Six the novel that had a supposedly fanatical vegan eating an egg salad? And was it also the one that didn't seem to realise that in the SAS the other ranks (i.e. soldiers and NCOs) do all the work, with the officers merely being transitory appointments who do liaison and general supervision?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I really can't face dipping into it again to check, but the egg thing sounds likely - you're certainly right about the officers.

[booster17.livejournal.com]

Reminds me a lot of Laurell K Hamilton : Some authors seem to get to such a point in sales, that editors don't dare to change a thing or point out tiny possible flaws.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Or late Heinlein, especially the posthumous publication of his uncut work - which showed mainly that his editors earned whatever they were being paid!

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

There is a very well-known UK fantasy author whose books suddenly get much, much thicker from #4 onwards, allegedly because that was the point at which said writer could tell the editor what to do on pain of taking the books elsewhere.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Whose initials would not, of course, be JKR

[booster17.livejournal.com]

Shocked I am, shocked. And obviously have no idea who you mean at all.

*whistles*

[trinfaneb.livejournal.com]

Its been more than a decade since I read "Rainbox Six," but I believe the bad guys wanted to raise the government alert levels in order to somehow make sure their sham security agency could get the contract for the Sydney Games and thus be in a position to release the poison through water sprayers.

It was a very weak justification for Clancy being able to write more action scenes as Rainbow Six dealt with various terrorist situations. At least a pretty decent video game resulted from the book. It holds up much better than its source material now, as does the "Red Storm Rising" video game.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

Rainbow Six became a "How many times can I describe someone getting shot in the head?" book.

The Bear and the Dragon became "How many times can I call Mao a pedophile?"

Even in his earlier books, I found that Clancy lost credibility as soon as he strayed into areas that I knew much about.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Ah, yeah, nothing saddens me more in the world of books quite as much as the way Tom Clancy fell apart. I loved the early ones, but by the time he reached the stage where Editors Happen To Other People... actually I half suspect the later ones weren't even written by him, or he had editorial control over a group of ghost writers or something. Something along the lines of all of those 'Tom Clancy Presents' novels that came out.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I think he wrote the stuff that appeared under his own name - they're fairly consistent in ways that I think a ghost writer would miss. The last one, Teeth of the Tiger, is obviously written as the first of two parts. It's also total crap even by Clancy standards, and is now five years old, so I suspect that he's pretty much given up on writing and doesn't want anyone else to use his name - he's a multi-millionaire and I suspect has decided to rest on his laurels.

I just checked his Wikipedia entry and the only thing it says about him after 2003 is

In 2008, Clancy's name was purchased by Ubisoft for an undisclosed sum for the use in conjunction with video games and related products such as movies and books.

So I suspect he still has a big readership, but they're reading old books and all the spinoffs.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

The Bear And The Dragon is where I stopped reading and following him, so I wasn't aware that he'd stopped writing. Can't say I'm surprised though, given how crap it was.

Hmm... I wonder if there is some way to crossover Laurell K Hamilton with Tom Clancy...

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Ha, Amazon.com reader reviews, when compared to the Amazon.co.uk reader reviews, seems to indicate the Americans give the later Tom Clancy books approximately 1 star more.

So that's 2 stars instead of one. :)