Tom Clancy RIP
By What to say about Tom Clancy… He wasn’t a particularly good writer, and his books got worse as he got older. Nevertheless, it takes a certain degree of talent to make the techno-thriller, well, thrilling, and I think that his earlier works certainly succeeded on this metric. I haven’t re-read recently, so I can’t say that the following “hold up,” but given infinite time I might actually consider revisiting the following:
As a few have noted on twitter, Clancy was enormously influential on a generation of defense wonks and journalists. Almost everyone who works in the field today is familiar enough with Clancy’s work to make reference and analogy with some degree of comfort that the audience will understand.