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Tom Clancy was my favorite author, I think authors sign contracts that let some entity use their name and it turns into a brand. The Jack Ryan books after he pa

Tom Clancy was my favorite author, I think authors sign contracts that let some entity use their name and it turns into a brand. The Jack Ryan books after he passed or had other writers weren’t that good. How far can you go after the main character becomes President? I did stumble onto one of those authors, Mark Greaney, who wrote The Gray Man series of novels (the netflix movie is not a good representation at all). Spy/action thrillers, main character is CIA “ground branch” type, not a chess match kind of spy.

wkat4242 3y ago
Yeah they should stop that "branding" rights thing IMO. The books after he died were pure drivel. Like they were secreted by the authors from some kind of gooey gland in their brain. All kinda the same, like that op center and rainbow six stuff. The reason I read a few of them was that I didn't realise they were not written by him at the time and I thought they'd get better. But they didn't of course, they only got worse.
- nocoiner 3y ago
  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.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Yeah I thought Cardinal of the Kremlin was a decent book too. Had a bit of a spy who came in from the dark feel to it. But yeah his politics oozing through everything in later books (even written by him) also put me off.

wkat4242 3y ago

Yeah they should stop that "branding" rights thing IMO. The books after he died were pure drivel. Like they were secreted by the authors from some kind of gooey gland in their brain. All kinda the same, like that op center and rainbow six stuff. The reason I read a few of them was that I didn't realise they were not written by him at the time and I thought they'd get better. But they didn't of course, they only got worse.

nocoiner 3y ago
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.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Yeah I thought Cardinal of the Kremlin was a decent book too. Had a bit of a spy who came in from the dark feel to it. But yeah his politics oozing through everything in later books (even written by him) also put me off.