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...

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 V...

It's 1990. The Cold War is over, and Communism is being rejected by most of the dying Soviet Union's former vassals. Only a handful of die-hard regimes still hangs on to Marxism-Leninism, grasping at power with the grip of those who are about to die.  One of these nations is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which rules the northern half of the Korean peninsula with uncommonly fanatical dedication to socialism and the discredited theories now being discarded by Eastern Europe and even the cradle of World Revolution, the USSR. With a population of less than 20 million, North Korea has the largest per capita standing army in the world, with some 784,000 men under arms. It is also a poor country, has little contact with the outside world, is heavily into the "personality cult" of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung and his succesor, Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader. Now, with South Korea once again embroiled in a cycle of student riots and apparent political inst...

(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 refi...