A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

In the mid-1980s, after the late Tom Clancy became a “name brand’ author with two back-to-back best-selling novels ( The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising ), it seemed as though a platoon of new writers who specialized in military-themed fiction emerged seemingly from thin air. Soon, book stores were seemingly full of late Cold War-era novels which featured stories featuring characters similar to Clancy’s CIA analyst Jack Ryan or focused on military themes and scenarios in which Soviet and American forces faced off against each other in various parts of the world. Because these stories described modern weapons, their effects, and their use in great detail, the publishing world – much to Clancy’s dismay – even came up with a new sobriquet for the military fiction genre: technothriller and anointed the former Maryland insurance salesman as its master scribe .   Among this new crop of writers who specialized in technothrillers was Harold Coyle, a graduate of the Virgi