He was an early New Space investor, in Rotary Rocket. Stephen Green has some thoughts.
12 thoughts on “Tom Clancy, RIP”
I have not read his last few books but enjoyed his earlier works. For some reason, it seems to me that he actually wrote “Patriot Games” before “The Hunt for Red October.” Games just reads more like a first novel but of course, I could be wrong.
Damn. I read the Hunt for Red October back in 88 and devoured all the Jack Ryan novels after that. Red Storm Rising is still my all time favorite. You could tell when his health started to go on him as the branded stuff and the co-authored books never really captured what was so good about his stories. He will be missed!
I had studied at Caltech both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and I don’t know of any student who had majored in “Cybernetics, with a strong minor in Signal Processing.”
Other than that, just loved his books. His non-fiction “Special Forces” had interesting insights into the Global War on Terror, long before George W Bush declared that war. Sum of All Fears is probably his best fiction work in explaining what it is that we face and what declaring a “War on Terror” actually means, that is, everyone with a grievance in this globalized world pretty much knows each other and cooperates at some level.
Do I know Sum of All Fears to be Ground Truth when I am picking apart Red October? Maybe not, but I believe Mr. Clancy did his research in his eye-opening account of the Achille Lauro hijacking, and Sum of all Fears is a fiction work giving the flavor of what is “going on.”
Do I know Sum of All Fears to be Ground Truth when I am picking apart Red October? Maybe not, but I believe Mr. Clancy did his research in his eye-opening account of the Achille Lauro hijacking, and Sum of all Fears is a fiction work giving the flavor of what is “going on.”
I work with the man who led the combined Delta Force/SEAL force that captured the Achille Lauro hijackers. He’s a great storyteller and I’m working on him to write his own book. He is “Major Johnny” in Clancy’s book “Shadow Warriors” and is on the dedication page of many of W.E.B. Griffin’s books.
If I recall, he actually had the story for Patriot Games worked out before he wrote The Hunt for Red October, but like Rand’s book, he didn’t complete it until later. It’s been a long time since I read his discussions on the books, and those discussion pre-date HTML.
I’ve read more Clancy than any other author.
RIP
I was just looking through Mr. Clancy’s books the other day at HPB. Since sci-fi writers aren’t putting out near-Earth/near-future stories (with a few exceptions), I’ve been digging through the “Men’s Adventure Tales” genre for stories of space stations under attack and spaceships undertaking daring rescues. It takes some looking, but they are out there.
Maybe the technothriller folks will take up some of the slack in near-space stories.
Ahem: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006PNL48I
Hope Rand doesn’t mind the shameless self-promotion but this is exactly the approach I take. The upcoming sequel, ECLIPTIC, is best described as a mashup of Apollo 13 and Hunt for Red October. Tom Clancy was my single biggest inspiration to write and I like to think if he wrote about spaceflight it would have this kind of flavor.
We’ve finally reached a point where “spaceflight” doesn’t have to equal “sci-fi”. It’s great fun being able to frame these kinds of stories as techno-thrillers and have casual readers accept them as such.
A good man and a good friend.
When I picked up my first copy of Hunt for Red October, the book fell open to a mention of an accident the Tullibee (SSN-597) suffered while on patrol in the Med. Tom got the story right, and I was impressed, since a college friend was the Exec on that boat and I had originally heard it from him directly. That was typical of Tom’s insight and competence. I bought the book and met him a few years later.
I was glad to have him as an investor in Rotary. He loved the idea of private commercial spaceflight and it is sad to see him go before we achieve that.
Jerry Pournelle posted a picture of Tom Clancy at the Rotary Rocket roll out. 🙂
Speaking of aerodynamic vertical lift systems, the other day I was wondering about a stage zero that combined the titanium & composite fan from a GE 90-115B (which should be able to generate about 100,000 lbsf), dispensing with the heavy gas turbine section, and powering it through a gearbox driven by the turbine stage of something like an RD-170 or SSME LH pump, which should give a thrust-to-weight ratio of 30 to 50 to one. A upscaled thirty foot fan diameter should lift maybe 600,000 lbs, and three of those lifting a conventional rocket might be useful.
I read The Hunt for Red October in one sitting. Couldn’t put it down. But I was never able to get through another of his books. I have a hole in my brain when it comes to names. I can’t remember many, and the multithreaded story technique he used was in overdrive in all of his subsequent works.
It’s a shame that he never came out with some obvious sequels: The Product of All Fears, The Quotient of All Fears, the Product of All Fears, and The Complex Conjugate of All Fears.
Those topics were already covered quite thoroughly in “The Audacity of Hope.”
I devoured “The Hunt for Red October”. Loved it.
When Red Storm Rising came out, I eagerly started that one. But it lost me within 150 pages. Never read a Clancy novel since.
I have not read his last few books but enjoyed his earlier works. For some reason, it seems to me that he actually wrote “Patriot Games” before “The Hunt for Red October.” Games just reads more like a first novel but of course, I could be wrong.
Damn. I read the Hunt for Red October back in 88 and devoured all the Jack Ryan novels after that. Red Storm Rising is still my all time favorite. You could tell when his health started to go on him as the branded stuff and the co-authored books never really captured what was so good about his stories. He will be missed!
I had studied at Caltech both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and I don’t know of any student who had majored in “Cybernetics, with a strong minor in Signal Processing.”
Other than that, just loved his books. His non-fiction “Special Forces” had interesting insights into the Global War on Terror, long before George W Bush declared that war. Sum of All Fears is probably his best fiction work in explaining what it is that we face and what declaring a “War on Terror” actually means, that is, everyone with a grievance in this globalized world pretty much knows each other and cooperates at some level.
Do I know Sum of All Fears to be Ground Truth when I am picking apart Red October? Maybe not, but I believe Mr. Clancy did his research in his eye-opening account of the Achille Lauro hijacking, and Sum of all Fears is a fiction work giving the flavor of what is “going on.”
Do I know Sum of All Fears to be Ground Truth when I am picking apart Red October? Maybe not, but I believe Mr. Clancy did his research in his eye-opening account of the Achille Lauro hijacking, and Sum of all Fears is a fiction work giving the flavor of what is “going on.”
I work with the man who led the combined Delta Force/SEAL force that captured the Achille Lauro hijackers. He’s a great storyteller and I’m working on him to write his own book. He is “Major Johnny” in Clancy’s book “Shadow Warriors” and is on the dedication page of many of W.E.B. Griffin’s books.
If I recall, he actually had the story for Patriot Games worked out before he wrote The Hunt for Red October, but like Rand’s book, he didn’t complete it until later. It’s been a long time since I read his discussions on the books, and those discussion pre-date HTML.
I’ve read more Clancy than any other author.
RIP
I was just looking through Mr. Clancy’s books the other day at HPB. Since sci-fi writers aren’t putting out near-Earth/near-future stories (with a few exceptions), I’ve been digging through the “Men’s Adventure Tales” genre for stories of space stations under attack and spaceships undertaking daring rescues. It takes some looking, but they are out there.
Maybe the technothriller folks will take up some of the slack in near-space stories.
Ahem: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006PNL48I
Hope Rand doesn’t mind the shameless self-promotion but this is exactly the approach I take. The upcoming sequel, ECLIPTIC, is best described as a mashup of Apollo 13 and Hunt for Red October. Tom Clancy was my single biggest inspiration to write and I like to think if he wrote about spaceflight it would have this kind of flavor.
We’ve finally reached a point where “spaceflight” doesn’t have to equal “sci-fi”. It’s great fun being able to frame these kinds of stories as techno-thrillers and have casual readers accept them as such.
A good man and a good friend.
When I picked up my first copy of Hunt for Red October, the book fell open to a mention of an accident the Tullibee (SSN-597) suffered while on patrol in the Med. Tom got the story right, and I was impressed, since a college friend was the Exec on that boat and I had originally heard it from him directly. That was typical of Tom’s insight and competence. I bought the book and met him a few years later.
I was glad to have him as an investor in Rotary. He loved the idea of private commercial spaceflight and it is sad to see him go before we achieve that.
Jerry Pournelle posted a picture of Tom Clancy at the Rotary Rocket roll out. 🙂
Speaking of aerodynamic vertical lift systems, the other day I was wondering about a stage zero that combined the titanium & composite fan from a GE 90-115B (which should be able to generate about 100,000 lbsf), dispensing with the heavy gas turbine section, and powering it through a gearbox driven by the turbine stage of something like an RD-170 or SSME LH pump, which should give a thrust-to-weight ratio of 30 to 50 to one. A upscaled thirty foot fan diameter should lift maybe 600,000 lbs, and three of those lifting a conventional rocket might be useful.
I read The Hunt for Red October in one sitting. Couldn’t put it down. But I was never able to get through another of his books. I have a hole in my brain when it comes to names. I can’t remember many, and the multithreaded story technique he used was in overdrive in all of his subsequent works.
It’s a shame that he never came out with some obvious sequels: The Product of All Fears, The Quotient of All Fears, the Product of All Fears, and The Complex Conjugate of All Fears.
Those topics were already covered quite thoroughly in “The Audacity of Hope.”
I devoured “The Hunt for Red October”. Loved it.
When Red Storm Rising came out, I eagerly started that one. But it lost me within 150 pages. Never read a Clancy novel since.