Dineley on Books: SSN

With the first segment of Dineley on books There Is No Override is at the beginning of a new chapter... see what I did there. Anyways this book review is kind of a cheapo update because I got suckered into reading this Tom Clancy book for the last two days which basically stopped me from keeping on top of my updates, so I figured I would make something productive out of it.

Several years ago I was at Value Village and I spent around 20 dollars on like 9 Tom Clancy books, the other day I was rooting around and found one of the ones I hadn't read so I decided to give it a go since most of the ones I had read had been decent books and The Hunt for Red October had been a fucking awesome book. So this time the book was SSN a sort of submarine thriller apparently.

This book was much less of a thriller as it was a blatant piece of racist propaganda. Now as any of you who know me know racial jokes do not offend me in the slightest but this book was written with such an insanely pro American bias it was frustrating to read. The book contains absolutely no character development of any sort, the prelude to the book is called the lead up to war, and is essentially a series of fake news clippings explaining how America and China were now at war.

The rest of the book consists of shitty narratives of naval battles in which one boat, the USS Cheyenne singlehandedly sinks basically the entire Chinese Navy without being hit once. They paint the Chinese as these boneheaded characters similar to the oaf in the Rogers commercials that always fails at everything and has to watch the handsome guy walk by and make creepy eye contact. In every battle sequence it was nearly identical series of events, one American sub and one American helicopter are the only casualties in this epic naval war while one sub apparently takes on the entire Chinese navy which was also heavily supplanted with a seemingly endless supply of Russian forces. Basically the Cheyenne was the submarine equivalent of Paris Hilton taking on anything she could.

With the suggested support of the Russians that the book implied it seems Clancy is one of those extreme right wing anti communist characters. I mean this book was published in 1996 hardly during the height of Cold War tensions like when some of his other books were written. Clancy is probably among the ranks of crazies who thinks that Barack Obama is secretly a Kenyan. There was a video game made of this book too maybe it is better than the book although based on the Rainbow 6 games I played for Nintendo 64 it's probably overly complicated and about as entertaining as watching two amputees play tether ball.

Comments

  1. Rainbow 6 was amazing for PC when it first came out ... I liked it way better than Doom because there was actually some strategy to it.

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