Yesterday I finished Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October (1984), the military-espionage techno-thriller that launched a thousand others. This may have been an especially weird time to read it. Steeped in Cold War tensions, it takes on an uncomfortable resonance as the whole Russia-Ukraine war rages on the other side of the world. The zampolit (political officer) aboard the Red October was even named “Putin”. Must be one of those coincidences.

I didn’t have any of that in mind when I borrowed it from my parents. It was either 31 December 2021 or 1 January 2022, a few weeks before the crisis would explode onto front-page headlines, and I selected it off the shelf on a review (of the film) that started thus:

On reflection after a recent re-watch, I’ve decided that The Hunt for Red October has everything I look for in a hard science fiction film.

I see what he’s talking about. The aspect he highlighted that stood out to me was how highly competent the characters were. No dim-witted audience surrogate planted as an excuse for all the other characters to feed exposition to. No Watson, so to speak, slowing the plot down. Everyone’s going about their duties the way they would normally, because they know everyone else is competent. No plot devices hinge on somebody being stupid.

It’s clear that Tom Clancy did a lot of research for this one. Now, of course, none of this is my specialty so I can’t tell if there are cracks in the technobabble, but I came away feeling like there was a lot of substance here. (I feel that way about a lot of grad school lectures incidentally.) I liked the espionage bits, the multi-level “if we do X, then the Soviets will know Y, so let’s go with crazy idea Z instead” games of chess played by the White House against the Kremlin. I flew past some of the air combat sequences, though.

The book it reminded me of most is Andy Weir’s The Martian (2011). Maybe I enjoyed The Martian more for its humour and wisecracking protagonist and the fact that I have been at NASA but not the CIA, but a lot of the elements I liked there were here as well: The plot driven by technical considerations, the highly competent characters, the sheer amount of research that an industry outsider had to pull off.

Other scattered thoughts.

This may be the oldest book I’ve read in recent memory. Not by publication date, of course—I just read Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories, published in 1949, so it’s almost twice as old as The Hunt for Red October—but literally: I think that the physical copy I have is in fact from the 1980s! Latest date on the publication history page is October 1985. Everything about the trade dress—the font, the blurbs, the graphics—smells of mid-1980s mass-market paperback. Tom Clancy’s name is typeset much smaller than the title, which indicates that his name was not yet the thing that sold books when this copy was produced. And the inside text is set so small and cramped and dense that its 460-page extent would almost certainly be longer if it were published with to-day’s typesetting capabilities. My assumption is that my father picked this up, maybe at a campus bookstore when he was at SJSU in the eighties, and it just followed him around until it ended up consigned to our big wooden shelf for the past two decades. I felt a bit of reverence turning its pages. Now if I ever get to the 1910 copies of Dickens I picked up in Edinburgh…

I’m not sure how much will stick with me, given how quickly I flew through it (so that I can return it to its rightful place on my parents’ bookshelf to-morrow). Cynical prediction: by the end of the month I will be hard-pressed to describe a character other than Captain First Rank Marko Ramius, skipper of the Red October, or Jack Ryan, CIA analyst and future star of all of Tom Clancy’s other books. (I remember watching a Jack Ryan movie, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. My logs say that was 15 July 2014. At the time I didn’t realise how big of a franchise this was.)

I know that projecting my sensibilities onto the past says more about me than it does about the past, and that hard military fiction from the 1980s is already a highly constrained genre, but still: it bothered me that the word she referred more often to a ship than to a human. Ah well. Maybe it balances out my Shirley Jackson dalliance.

I still don’t know how big a submarine is.

Next up: Sea of Tranquility! My first author-signed novel! Whose distribution system somehow has it in LA right now, despite it being shipped from Mountain View and destined for San Jose!