Horay! Tom Clancy is dead! Follow

I've been aboard a submarine, but not while it was.

Missionary work never counts.

There wasn't a whole lot of intelligence parts in the book (and even less in the film) though. And nothing at all on how they obtained it (at least not any I recall). Clancy hadn't developed the Clark character yet when he wrote that book, so the intelligence gathering process wasn't much more than "Many Bothans died to bring us this information" in terms of detail.

That would be a much better criticism to level at say The Cardinal and the Kremlin, or The Sum of All Fears, or Clear and Present Danger.

Must have been a slow post day, too.

That's hawt.

*scribbles furiously in her "Things I Know About Samira" notebook.

Nexa

A thorough psychoanalysis of Mr. Winky alone would fill chapters.

Um... Ok. So providing information you'd only know if you'd read the book rather than just seen the film isn't sufficient evidence that I've read the book? Strange...

Compared to pretty much all of Clancy's later books, The Hunt for Red October is incredibly intelligence light. Of all the books to point at and say "boy he got the intelligence part of that totally wrong", it really should be at the bottom of the list. If you think otherwise, how about instead of me having to guess at what you're referring to, you actually tell us what parts he got so horribly wrong then? You know, since you bothered to make the comment in the first place.

I'm beginning to suspect that *you* have never read the book and are basing your observations on the film instead. And yeah, in the film they gloss over several key facts in a really short handed way. Like, for example how Ryan is magically the only person in the world who can figure out what Ramius is actually doing, when in the book, they knew the Soviet story was BS pretty much from day one and spent significant resources arranging the whole "fake sinking" thing (including taking an old sub that was slated for scrap and sending it out to be "sunk" in a deep part of the ocean so as to cover for the fact that the RO was snagged). That, and the film basically merges like 3 different sub encounters into one (and there were a whole lot more subs involved in the book to start with). Simplified for the screen, but you lose some of the explanation as to how/why things happened along the way.

As far as I recall, the only intelligence gathering or analysis in the book involved two parts:

1. Information about the sub itself. Again, this was more of the form of "British operatives got these pictures", and "Hey. I wonder if that's a new silent drive system?".

2. Figuring out that the letter from Ramius purporting to plan to nuke the US the soviets provide is faked. Again though, this is sorta hand waved over in the book. There's a bit more to it than in the film (which amounts to Ryan just deciding that he knows that Ramius wouldn't do such a thing), but IIRC, in the book it was just a "double agent tells us it's faked and he really wants to defect" type of deal.

The rest of the book deals pretty exclusively with technical details and plot development (and sub chases). Again, the intelligence parts of it are pretty much just handed out. By far the bigger stretch in the whole thing is why Ryan ends out being personally involved in the whole thing. But that's sort of a staple in Clancy's books, so chalk it up to suspension of disbelief. It's not a story if Ryan doesn't end out involved in improbable ways. Kinda like asking "Hey! Why the hell is Ryan hopping on that chopper to take part in the rescue of one of the three (yes, there were three) assault teams in Clear and Present Danger?" (btw, that was a film they massively changed from the book, almost as much as Sum of All Fears). You just kinda go with it.

But hey. I get that sometimes people get **** about such things.

Edited, Oct 7th 2013 1:26pm by gbaji

For those just joining us, this is how Smash admits he was wrong.

Says the guy who has shown no sign that he's read the book to the guy who has.

Says the guy who has shown no sign that he's read the book to the guy who has.

Right. It's widely known I rarely read books. When I haven't read them, though, I will absolutely make offhand comments about why I thought they were poorly written. Because I like the waves of loving praise I receive for doing so. It's the only thing that keeps me going.

I care, but only because of a severe mental problem. I fixate on random, irrelevant stories under the delusional belief that they're relevant on the world stage.

Life was really rough for me before I started working for a media conglomerate.

I was going to make a haunted house set on a replica of an abandoned soviet submarine. I struggled with a good name for it though. I finally settled on "The Iosef Stalin Happy fun time 5 year plan hour!"

Needless to say I never got any backers. All the potential investors kept insisting on a name change. "The haunt for red october"? I don't get it.