f13.net

Wow...

http://www.today.com/news/author-tom-clancy-dies-66-8C11319715

He was relatively young.

He was a terrible writer.

He was a worse human being.

I enjoyed his earlier stuff.

Yeah, I have a feeling this is going to get political, but I will say I really enjoyed a lot of his earlier cold war stuff.  The man provided a lot to pop culture.

The only especially nice thing I have to say is I really enjoyed the Red Storm Rising computer game way back when.

C'mon people the dude wrote Jurassic Park, show some respect.

 :heart:

It was really a great game. Wish someone would make something with the same flavor. The Silent Hunter series is ok, but overly complicated for very little payback (imo).

I enjoyed Clancy's early stuff, more for the cool technical stuff than the hamfisted politics and one dimensional characters. Also, Without Remorse was fun in a Charles Bronson Death Wish sort of way.

Don't know if serious... :ye_gods:

He was prolific as a writer, so for that I respected what he did.

Also Hunt for Red October is a great book.

That was the late Circhton who wrote that one.

I've never read any of his books but I played a couple games and I really like Jeff Goldblum a LOT! 

Whoosh.

Sorry to hear about him.

He used to be my favorite writer.  His first seven books were good, but I bailed out after Red Rabbit (I think it's called).  Not to mention his politics.

R.I.P.

I liked Splinter Cell, so I can't totally hate the guy but his politics were pretty shitty.

Still, he will be missed.

I'm glad he's dead, nothing he could have suffered comes close to what I believe he deserved. He would have been tolerable had he not said that if the highest paying job you've ever had only paid $120,000 you were a loser who had done nothing with your life. Fucking fuck him.

Not exactly Red Rabbit, but it looks like maybe a Jack Ryan (Jr) story (http://youtu.be/FZtVfmTZftk).

Wow, didn't know he died...5 years ago. Damn.

His first books were great. But yea, once it became "Tom Clancey's" brand I stopped.

I enjoyed a lot of his books in the early ninties. I was a teen back then. Tried rereading them, or to read any of his stuff past 9/11 and I just could not stomach it.

So it turns out he was not a very nice person. So I am indifferent to his death.

I had the misfortune of spending two nights trapped in a god-awful motorway hotel by snow (I was the only "guest"...). In a dresser draw was the usual Bible and (oddly) a ragged copy of Clear and Present Danger. It was hard to decide which was worse: both had improbabe plots with poorly realised unsympathetic characters and the main protagonists were preachy and impossible to relate to, exhibiting unlikely and flagrantly gittish behavior. In the end, both were shite.

I left that motel in the wake of snow plough, none the wiser.

 :oh_i_see:

I don't like the subject matter of Clancy's books.  I think I read Hunt for Red October. 

He was certainly no Hemingway, but then again he wasn't Kevin J. Anderson, either. 

Eh, try rewatching Commando or the first Total Recall and taking either seriously too :-)

But putting even that aside: the books were popular (iirc) in a time before Google and Wikipedia. Unearthing the "deep dark secrets" of government operations was still a marketing hook. That's how he got started (Red Storm Rising, pre-Jack Ryan series). His books weren't about the plausbility of the plots, but instead a purportedly-fact-based depiction of how the U.S. military would respond, both in its decision making process and the technology it would use.

I don't care about how he was as a person any more than I dislike Lethal Weapon because Mel Gibson's a dick or Mission Impossible 2 because Tom Cruise's a tool. I never quite understood why just because the media wants us to know everything about a talent's life we should care at all beyond the specific skill they offer to us. It's like complaining about the plumber's crack while the guy is re-piping your house.

I'm not sure when it was, but at some point it seemed that he wasn't writing any of 'his' novels anymore, either he was handing an outline to an uncredited ghostwriter or he was phoning it in, at any rate it read more like a pastiche in his style than the solid potboiler war-porn he had built the brand on.

I never expected much from his stuff, but it crossed the line from thriller to badly plotted alternate history and I just lost interest.

--Dave

Only one of his books that I actually read was the Hunt for Red October, which was mostly ok, except when his characters started preaching about how wonderful America was to the Russians which made me vomit as a conservative 19 year old. It spawned a great movie, and the rest of the Jack Ryan movies were alright in a forgettable kind of way.

Know nothing about the guy as a person. May he rest in peace.

Of the three, I only read Hunt, so can't comment on how the other 2 books where.  But I think The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, and Clear and Present Danger are all great\fun films that make an awesome trilogy together.  They still hold up very well, imo.  So he has my thanks for that, at the very least.

He partnered with Larry Bond for his first few books.  Those books are the more technical, wargamey ones.  Once he stopped working with Bond, they became more and more "If I ran the world ..." screeds.