re: #15 ckkatz

Thanks for the summary! You have helped save me time by eliminating that as something I will ever bother read. :)

I do get tired of wing-nuts and their dystopias. And also the fact that the wing-nuts keep wanting to drag us into those dystopias.

Ben is trying to roll a half dozen Clancy novel concepts into one ball since he doesn’t have the chops to research any one of the scenarios into something feasible. So he is just going to through all the right-wing stereotypes about evil foreigners and liberals at the wall and hope one of them sticks with the readers.

I binge read Clancy’s novels in the early 1990s up through _Debt of Honor_ and _Rainbow Six_. By the last it was pretty clear to me that Clancy’s plots basically centered around one or more right wing boogeymen having a clever plot, almost pulling it off, and then getting their comeuppance due to the plucky heroes.

Which is pretty much the general trope of technothrillers. Some of the authors concentrate on getting the military stuff right*, while others… not so much. Which can sort of make/break them since it’s an area I have some knowledge in and if the author starts doing “it doesn’t work that way” stuff I lose suspension of disbelief pretty quickly and am much more prone of reaching “I don’t care about any of these characters” mode with a story.

And Clancy did write some decent non-fiction regarding US military structure and units, which shows that he was willing to do research.

* - I’d say Larry Bond is probably one of the better ones in this regard. That he co-authored _Red Storm Rising_ with Clancy says something since I consider that novel one of the better ones by Clancy.