Red Storm Rising
Terrorists attack the USSR, they respond by attacking western Europe to replace the oil assets destroyed by the terrorists. Who will win?
Stats for nerds
19recommend
44mentions
37people
2013–2025years
48% recommend50% neutral2% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Similarly the Clancy book Red Storm Rising really holds up well, and weirdly may be one of the best primers on Russian military practices, culture, and capabilities as the force was constituted during the first year of their full scale invasion of Ukraine.
- I thought and continue to think early Clancy is excellent — basically everything that became a movie with Harrison Ford or Alec Baldwin, plus “Red Storm Rising” — but even before he brought in the ghost authors, his reactionary politics started to get in the way of the stories. Yeah yeah, I can stand a feckless Democratic pol who just cares about getting elected as a dramatic fool/foil, but as I recall his last solo works went way beyond that and just got kind of tediously offensive for anyone who didn’t share his particular politics (even accounting for the typical politics of the average writer of military fiction).
It was actually kind of a surprising turn, because Tom Clancy on TV on the day of 9/11 was one of the most level-headed commentators about the vast majority of Muslims (i.e., not terrorists). And there’s a video of him presenting at the NSA in the mid ‘80s that shows him to be a very bright, very funny, very personable guy. Got the sense that in his later years, American politics just started to make him angry, and in my view it adversely affected his work.
But at his peak, he was damn fine at his craft.
- Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising.
I think most people usually don't consider Tom Clancy to be a science fiction writer, but these two books (his best two by far, FWIW) both feature speculative technology central to the story. Red October features a magneto-hydrodynamic drive for a submarine; MHD drives work for real in the small scale but without great superconductors it doesn't scale well to work for a full scale military submarine. In Red Storm Rising there are F-19 stealth jets based off rumors of the F-117. They get a few things wrong (smooth continuous curves instead of flat facets, poor stealth from below, armed with anti-aircraft missiles, etc) but on the whole they were reasonably grounded speculation.
If you're not convinced, here is a longer argument for Red October (the film) being hard science fiction: https://qntm.org/october
- I recommend About Face by Army Colonel Hackworth and Red Storm Rising
- Yeah I agree. Clancy movie adaptations seem to have all been downhill since Hunt for Red October. Arguably his books too, although Red Storm Rising is still my favorite (and probably impossible to make a good movie of, the scope is too large and Russia too competent.)
- It's a shame as it's one of my favourite films.
It's similar for books too - so few down-to-Earth action books like that like The Day Of The Jackal or maybe The Bourne Identity and Red Storm Rising.
