I’m reading Tom Clancy books right now. Red Storm Rising a little while ago, Red Rabbit now. I like his Jack Ryan books especially because Harrison Ford plays him in my head. They are spy thrillers and they are dense and they aren’t poetically written but they certainly distract and the political environment of the 80s with its easy black and white (or red vs red white and blue) is refreshingly innocent. Of course, it’s horribly dated, the “cutting edge” technology of VHS tapes and floppy discs and plenty of manly men and women who stay home outside of that one cowgirl, Mary Pat Foley – and even she makes a mean steak for her husband….
Subtly homophobic, slightly racist, occasionally misogynistic and often Islamophobic. Everyone in England says “chap” every other sentence and you can tell the good guys from the bad because the good guys all talk football and the bad guys have inner monologs justifying their actions that go on for pages and pages and pages and pages. Tom writes a Republican fantasy where the good guys don’t REALLY want to use their guns, but damn it, they’re not going to miss when they finally do. He eventually wrote the Libertarian fantasy : someone decapitating the United States government with a jet airliner flown into a full session of Congress…
Yeah, that was before 9/11.
I always wondered if he saw the connection and ever felt guilty.
Jack Ryan (presumably still played by Harrison Ford, co-starring a steady stream of 30-something actresses as Dr. Cathy Ryan – Jack and his kids age but she never does) is elevated, however unwillingly, to the Presidency in a Tea Partier’s wet dream of zero previous government experience…
So, yeah – there’s an innocence to them. We’ve kind of seen how that works out.
I was looking for some sort of modern equivalent. Something where the spies have to face the internet and America faces something other than the Big Red Bear, but something with a similar optimism. I haven’t found it yet, and maybe it wouldn’t scratch the same itch. For all the paranoid horror that is the world today, for all the division in the country, for all that we seem to be falling backwards into a selfish, me-first and to Hell with the rest dystopia – maybe I just enjoy reminding myself that we just came through an us-first, nuclear arms racing mutually-assured destruction dystopia when we thought we KNEW who the bad guys were and weren’t afraid to play games with a world-ending arsenal of hydrogen bombs to antagonize them.
Meanwhile, strangely enough, Terry Pratchett continues to be my Bible. I know plenty of people who read scripture – plenty who believe it, and plenty who don’t. I read it cover to cover once in high school just to say I did and so I could have an educated opinion, but people who read a little every day, it’s more like reading Tarot or looking for shapes in ink. It’s more a blank slate to cast your thoughts on them, get the measure of what’s going on in the world as you let your mind wander over something known already. The Discworld is like that for me, and these familiar books, books that I’ve found I now know like the back of my hand – they haven’t aged that much better than Tom Clancy, frankly – with some slightly homophobic, slightly racist, occasionally sexist undertones – but sort of like Clancy you can tell he’s trying to rise above those stereotypes even as he stumbles over them here and there. But yeah, returning to Ankh-Morpork I see different things in Vimes today. Prescient commentary on Trump and Fake News where before I read current events about Russia or technophobia or before that solace over losing my father and friends and family and MORE friends.
For all the familiarity of the characters, there’s always something new. So some of it doesn’t age well, but most of it just grows right along with me. There are worse companions than Jack Ryan and Sam Vimes. Paul Atriedes on the other hand… I don’t think he ever quite grew up.
