The Hunt for Red October

Again, I imagine most people are more familiar with the film adaptation of this novel, which kicked off the long-running Jack Ryan franchise. (Trivia break: name all 5 different actors who have portrayed the character on screen!)

And again, when I cracked open the book after seeing the movie, I was (wait for it) TECHNO-THRILLED (see what I did there?) to learn all about nuclear submarine operations. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details, and one little thing can either make or ruin a spy’s day on the job.

With The Hunt For Red October, unknown insurance salesman Tom Clancy single-handedly invented a genre—the “techno-thriller”. 

This has come to mean a thriller where the author has done everything they could to make sure even the tiniest details in their book were technically accurate—and nobody did it with a bigger splash than Clancy. The CIA read the book and immediately started searching for whoever had released the information in it, which they thought was still classified. 

THFRO was passed all around Washington D.C., and eventually even President Reagan publicly praised it. But beyond all the technically correct tech around Navy… show more.

If you’ve only seen the movie, you’re missing out.

The Hunt for Red October is the godfather of submarine adventure novels: a tense, high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse driven by unforgettable characters, breathless twists, and painstaking real-world accuracy. Any good list of modern submarine fiction should start with the runaway bestseller that put author Tom Clancy on the map and spawned a thousand imitators. 

This classic political thriller has a CIA operative gathering information as the US tries to stop a renegade Russian nuclear submarine headed for the east coast of the United States.

Jack Ryan knows the captain of the boat. He’s met the man in Moscow. He knows his history and life story. He knows he’s not a threat. Can he convince his superiors, the President of the United States and the Captain of the hunter-killer submarine USS Dallas that the Russian sub is not a threat before the Russian hunt and kill the Red October?

My brother also brought home Tom Clancy’s first book, which is one of his best.

Where did that book come from? Was this some retired submarine captain? No, it was an insurance salesman from middle America that told parallel stories in multiple countries, with submarine combat and high-stakes diplomacy.

It's an amazing story, even better because almost all the tropes about modern submarine combat in books and movies are from that story. He also created the genre of military technothriller. Prior to that book, it was always sub against ship, ships against a submarine.

Clancy really opened up the undersea… show more.

Clancy combined his familiarity with cutting-edge military technology, command structures of both the military and the government, and acronyms to craft a compelling story about the defection of the most advanced Soviet submarine and its captain. Reading this inspired me to thoroughly vet technology, science, geography, and institutional hierarchy for anything I write. 

This was Clancy’s first book and I immediately became a fan of Jack Ryan, his unforgettable leading character. I like marine biology and much of the story takes place underwater with Ryan and cast trying to locate a Soviet nuclear submarine. Clancy is a detail man, but I got tired of reading about how many miles of wire were used to construct a submarine. Thus, I did lose some focus and committed my writing to fewer details and more discussion about how fewer details impact my stories.

In this cold-war era submarine thriller, Tom Clancy turned everything into world-imperiling stakes. He multiplied points of view so we could see the effects of events on friend and enemy—hero, bystander, and villain, alike.

Clancy showed us that deeply principled men, willing to sacrifice to protect others, existed on both sides of military and espionage conflicts. That while there might be villains on both sides, there could also be heroes on both sides. A character's motivations and actions defined them, not which uniform they wore.

His deep technical accuracy, combined with fast-paced adventure, caught my multiple interests, and… show more.