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...

(C) 1994 Warner Books The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a blessing in disguise not only for the Pentagon but for writers of military fiction. Just as the armed services have had to develop new doctrines, strategies, tactics, and weapons systems to contend with new enemies (potential and real), authors such as Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts, Harold Coyle, and Larry Bond have had to look at the world situation, read the proverbial "tea leaves," and write plausible scenarios pitting American soldiers against foes that are very different from the by-now all-too-familiar Soviet "Ivan." The writing team of Bond and Patrick Larkin ( Red Phoenix, Vortex ) was one of the earliest practitioners of "the-Cold-War-is-ending, let's-look-at-other-story-possibilities" idea. Although the Soviet Union was still in existence when their first two novels were published in the early 1990s, its role in Red Phoenix (about a second ...

(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...