OK, so I finished this a while back, and despite it appealing to a lot of my interests, I honestly found it pretty meh.
I really enjoyed the realistic military/tactical aspect of it all, as that part is right up my alley, but… I did not care about the characters, the plot seemed hollow, and it seems like some things that could have been explored further were simply ignored.
For example, in the beginning these guys blow up a refinery. There are vague descriptions as to why, but after this it is practically not mentioned again. Whatever movement they were part of apparently disappears, and there are no repercussions for their home oblast.
The only thing this book has going for it, in my opinion, is that military nerds like me enjoy the detailed writing about the different types of hardware involved in the book.
So, since I am by no means a literary connoseur, I’m curious about what others think of this one.
I’m pretty sure I remember reading that Clancy and a buddy essentially wargamed the conflict and wrote out the results.
Yeah his buddies from DOD’s PR and from the NSA. /s Yeah I’d believe that the whole novel really reminded me of a YouTube of some war games.
I suppose I could’ve just checked wikipedia, I was sort of right but also sort of wrong:
Development Tom Clancy met Larry Bond in 1982. The two discussed Convoy-84, a wargame Bond had been working on at the time that featured a new Battle of the North Atlantic. The idea became the basis for Red Storm Rising. “We plotted out the book together, then, while I researched the military issues, Tom wrote the book,” Bond said.[5] “I’m listed as co-author, but I wrote like 1 percent of the book,” Bond stated in a 2013 interview.[6] For research on the Politburo scenes, Clancy and Bond interviewed Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko.[7]
Clancy had purchased Bond’s wargame Harpoon as a primary source for his future novel The Hunt for Red October (1984).[8] Clancy and Bond used the board game’s second edition miniature rules to test key battle sequences, notably the Soviet operation to seize Iceland and the attack on the carrier battle group in the “Dance of the Vampires” chapter.
Dance of the Vampires This refers to the chapter where the Soviets lure a NATO carrier group into a trap and almost manages to wipe it out.[9]
The game sessions typically involved several players on each side (Clancy among them) acting in various roles.[10] with Bond refereeing. The games did not influence the outcome - the chapter’s ending was already decided - but they gave Clancy and Bond a “better understanding of what factors drove each side’s thinking”.[11][12]
This attention to detail made Vice consider Red Storm Rising a “great example of fictional military history.”[9]
The collected and annotated notes on the three Dance of the Vampires scenario playthroughs would later be published by Bond.[11][13]