A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

First hardcover edition. © 1989 Presidio Press On August 1, 1989. Novato, California-based Presidio Press (now owned by Ballantine Books) published Joe Weber's DEFCON One, a techno-thriller that imagined what would happen if Soviet hardliners "disposed of" then-General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Mikhail Gorbachev and reversed his liberalization policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika  (restructuring). Judging from the novel's title (a reference to the Pentagon's Defense Readiness Conditions - DEFCONs - highest level) and the stark silhouette of a U.S. Navy carrier on the dust jacket art, such a development in the Soviet Union's internal affairs is not going to be a pleasant one. Weber, a retired Marine Corps aviator and - before becoming a full-time author - corporate jet captain based in Colorado, had no illusions about the CPSU, its conservative (in Soviet terms) "old guard," or the notion that a mor

A Mk. 48 ADCAP torpedo is about to make a Soviet Kresta II cruiser's day very, very bad in this screenshot from a session of Red Storm Rising.  (C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd. I've owned quite a few personal computers since the mid-1980s. My first one, an Apple II, was a gift from my late father's older brother Sixto; I remember it fondly because, you know, it was my first real computer. It was the most expensive of all the PCs; with its Imagewriter II printer and color monitor, it cost my uncle $2100 plus whatever the sales tax was in 1987. It was not my first choice; the computer that I'd really wanted to get was a Macintosh, but when my uncle asked the sales rep at Computer Village how much that one cost, the reply was a cool $3200. My uncle said that was a bit too pricey, so I ended up with an Apple II, which was my second choice. (I already used them in my college campus' Apple Lab, so I was familiar with them and liked them well enough.

(C) 1989 G.P. Putnam's Sons  Reviewer's Note: I originally wrote this review in November of 1989 for Catalyst, the student newspaper of Miami-Dade Community College's South Campus. Clancy's new novel clearly a success Alex Diaz-Granados Managing Editor What would happen if a U.S. President were to approve a covert military operation against the Medellin Cartel in the mountains and jungles of Colombia? In Clear and Present Danger, Tom Clancy, author of the best-selling novels The Hunt for Red October and Cardinal of the Kremlin, creates a scenario pitting the U.S. military's special operations assets and the CIA's stalwart Jack Ryan against the ruthless Colombian drug barons. After a seemingly routine arrest at sea of two cartel hit men who have killed a wealthy yacht owner and his family, the FBI stumbles onto a complex money-laundering scheme linked to the drug lords. When the U.S, government begins freezing the cartel's financial assets, t

(C) 1986 Jack Ryan Enterprises & Larry Bond “Red Storm Rising” (1986) is a technothriller by Tom Clancy about a conventional war in Western Europe between the Soviet Union and the U.S.-led NATO alliance in the mid-1980s. Like its predecessor, “The Hunt for Red October,” Clancy’s sophomore work was a game-changer in the military fiction genre. It not only told a sprawling story with multiple plot threads –including a third Battle of the Atlantic, a Soviet invasion of Iceland, and a massive land campaign in Germany –  but it also avoided the apocalyptic vision of most Third World War scenarios: a nuclear exchange between East and West. “Red Storm Rising” begins – literally -with a bang as a group of Islamic jihadis from the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan commits a destructive act of sabotage against an oil production facility near Nizhnevartovsk, Russia. Though the terrorists are killed by a Soviet fast response team, they cripple the country’s ability to produce and refine o