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).