Post #3870921

2026-07-16 22:55 UTC

- The last third is SO steeped in pro-Capitalist / pro-American propaganda, it's the part of the book that's aged the most poorly. It's basically Clancy jacking off while thinking of Reagan and Country. - I was mildly entertained to identify a few technical inaccuracies in the novel wrt some of the submarine stuff. Not a criticism of Clancy's research, more than certain things weren't KNOWN at the time he wrote it (notably about the Alfa-class boat's reactors, lead-bismuth cooled beasts). - Clancy's quick and free shifting between various POV characters, wherever he needed to go to tell his story, is good. I like that style. It gives a broad feeling to the story. - Clancy is famously for obscenely detailed technical research, but to his credit the characters are often quite well written. I mean, none have complex character arcs, but they feel alive enough to make you believe everyone from the SOSUS operators to the CNO have interior and exterior lives. - It's fascinating reading it again now and comparing the believably messy operation it depicts to the streamlined version in the movie. A case study in good adaptation IMO - takes the core of the story and strips it back to its major beats. - I forgot that if anything the film version cut BACK some of the action sequences - Red October actually RAMS Tupolev's Alfa to destroy it in the book, believable given Typhoons are designed to be ice-breakers.

Replies (1)

@vampiress@eigenmagic.net 2026-07-16 23:00

- It was interesting to note that Robert Ritter (one of the CIA antagonists in Clear & Present Danger) appears in this as someone helping Ryan. Makes me want to keep reading the series. If he features heavily in Cardinal of the Kremlin before turncoating in Clear & Present Danger, that'd make it an extra sad development. In the film he's slimy and villainous from the start. - Clancy's conservative Republican (in the '80s sense) politics sometimes shine through in funny ways. Some of his characters like Jonesy gush about Cal Tech and California as 'the place to live', but the author insert characters like Ryan explicitly talk about west coasters (or, Californians at least) being 'odd' (by inference, the crazy bastards are progressive!) - The details about Skip Tyler designing a program to calculate the performance of the Red October to give to the commanders in the field was entertaining - remembering just how different doing large scale simulations was in the early '80s. When Compute meant huge cathedral-sized Crays you had to book time on. - The fapping over Apple Computer and Jobs/Wozniak fits perfectly with Clancy's Capitalism fetish. They're not even mentioned by name, but are mentioned as exemplars of Why America is Great(tm).

Open ##3870920