OK, so I finished this a while back, and despite it appealing to a lot of my interests, I honestly found it pretty meh.
I really enjoyed the realistic military/tactical aspect of it all, as that part is right up my alley, but… I did not care about the characters, the plot seemed hollow, and it seems like some things that could have been explored further were simply ignored.
For example, in the beginning these guys blow up a refinery. There are vague descriptions as to why, but after this it is practically not mentioned again. Whatever movement they were part of apparently disappears, and there are no repercussions for their home oblast.
The only thing this book has going for it, in my opinion, is that military nerds like me enjoy the detailed writing about the different types of hardware involved in the book.
So, since I am by no means a literary connoseur, I’m curious about what others think of this one.
My second favourite crazy conspiracy theory is that Tom Clancy didn’t really exist and that he was the front man for the CIA’s public relations office. Red Storm especially leads this as the whole novel reads like someone took a high level war game and tried to make a novelisation out of it.
I’m pretty sure I remember reading that Clancy and a buddy essentially wargamed the conflict and wrote out the results.
Yeah his buddies from DOD’s PR and from the NSA. /s Yeah I’d believe that the whole novel really reminded me of a YouTube of some war games.
I suppose I could’ve just checked wikipedia, I was sort of right but also sort of wrong:
Development Tom Clancy met Larry Bond in 1982. The two discussed Convoy-84, a wargame Bond had been working on at the time that featured a new Battle of the North Atlantic. The idea became the basis for Red Storm Rising. “We plotted out the book together, then, while I researched the military issues, Tom wrote the book,” Bond said.[5] “I’m listed as co-author, but I wrote like 1 percent of the book,” Bond stated in a 2013 interview.[6] For research on the Politburo scenes, Clancy and Bond interviewed Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko.[7]
Clancy had purchased Bond’s wargame Harpoon as a primary source for his future novel The Hunt for Red October (1984).[8] Clancy and Bond used the board game’s second edition miniature rules to test key battle sequences, notably the Soviet operation to seize Iceland and the attack on the carrier battle group in the “Dance of the Vampires” chapter.
Dance of the Vampires This refers to the chapter where the Soviets lure a NATO carrier group into a trap and almost manages to wipe it out.[9]
The game sessions typically involved several players on each side (Clancy among them) acting in various roles.[10] with Bond refereeing. The games did not influence the outcome - the chapter’s ending was already decided - but they gave Clancy and Bond a “better understanding of what factors drove each side’s thinking”.[11][12]
This attention to detail made Vice consider Red Storm Rising a “great example of fictional military history.”[9]
The collected and annotated notes on the three Dance of the Vampires scenario playthroughs would later be published by Bond.[11][13]
I think it was mostly meant as military nerd porn.
Like, the guys who blow up the refinery are only important in asmuch as they create the need for a conflict with the West. Some oppressed group pulls off something wild but doesn’t have the men/material to do anything major afterwards (which is how a lot of terrorism goes.)
I once chose to read a Tom Clancy book over the summer for a book report in the following semester (I enjoyed those Rainbow Six games from the 90’s, so the books would probably be cool too right?). I stood up there in class and was like “I’m gonna be honest, I couldn’t bring myself to read more than half of this.” And the teacher was like, “I don’t blame you.”
I recall liking it, but I read it in like the 5th grade so my standards were low (before that I’d been reading my mom’s terrible ‘caterer turned detective’ novels).
I enjoyed Clancy for a long time after that but at this point I aim more towards militaristic speculative fiction.
RSR is the only Clancy book I’ve read. Is it comparable to his other books?
I specifically remember liking Rainbow Six around the same time and I liked his books until he started tag teaming with other authors which was probably around 2000?
Based on that I imagine his books from 1986-2000 are “similar” enough.
The old school Rainbow Six games were my gateway drug to the book.
The plot is essentially “what if tree huggers went batshit and weaponized a virus” so take that for what you will but the training and operations in that book were facinating to me. I saw it as world building for one of my favorite games of the time
Don’t get me wrong, I loved them as a kid, and it was a nice way to transition to “adult” books but not really my speed anymore and I imagine if I went back I’d think they were “bad.”
It’s not a great classical literature, for sure. The characters are almost entirely flat and forgettable, and even the handful that do grow (the young Soviet commander, the US destroyer captain) barely do so. Their experiences never almost never inform their later actions.
But among the techno-thriller/war-simulator genre, I found it more compelling than several more recent attempts (Ghost Fleet, Nuclear War: A Scenario, etc). Many of those seem to go out of their way to bend the plot to produce the author’s intended point, and while RSR wasn’t exactly innocent in that regard, I found it far less guilty than others - largely because Clancy was holding to the known or theorized-near-future capabilities.
Where I actually find it fascinating is how, in retrospect, we can see the biases of the era influencing how Clancy makes certain predictions:
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The Soviets place immense importance on taking Iceland to permit a “second Battle of the Atlantic” against US carrier groups. In retrospect, we know the Soviet Navy had no interest in this and intended to act as a cordon around northern Europe; specifically the Soviet SSBN bastions.
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While Clancy did loosely predict the nature, role, and value of Stealth aircraft, the design and air-to-air role he describes them in is actually too advanced for the 1980s setting. Essentially, Clancy bought the rumors, which were wrong.
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Land attack helicopters with ATGMs play relatively little role in the ground fighting. This was because the current generation (namely the AH-64) had just been introduced; their full capabilities and impact were not yet publicly available.
These mistakes, although understandable, provide an interesting insight into what the American defense establishment was thinking about in the early 80s.
