A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

My latest Achievements to Date report.  All game elements in this and other screenshots are © 2017 Killerfish Games.  After I completed the South China Sea 2000 campaign late last month, I told myself that as fun and rewarding it was to finally complete a “tour of duty” in Cold Waters, it might be a good idea if I waited a few months to tackle one of the other two campaigns in the game – North Atlantic 1984 and North Atlantic 1968. The Strategic Transit Map. It's a much-refined version of the one in 1988's Red Storm Rising . I had several good reasons, including the need to focus on a new screenplay for Popcorn Sky Productions, the fact that I spend way too much time at my desk 24/7, and the realization that I’m not in my late 20s and early 30s (which is how old I was when I played MicroProse Software’s Red Storm Rising, the game that inspired the designers of Cold Waters ). And, more relevantly, I was bothered by my performance as a submarine skipper in the South China Sea ...

Single Mission menu from Cold Waters, with Junks on Parade selected. © 2017 Killerfish Games   Death in the Taiwan Straits If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I've been playing a cool submarine simulation by Killerfish Games, Cold Waters. Released three years ago by the Australia-based game designer behind Atlantic Fleet, Cold Waters is the spiritual successor to one of my all-time favorite games, Red Storm Rising,  Like that 1988 MicroProse classic based on Tom Clancy's eponymous 1986 novel — which I've written about in both my blogs — Cold Waters puts the player in command of a nuclear-powered attack sub in a hypothetical conflict set in the latter part of the 20th Century. Unlike Red Storm Rising, which posited a Third World War in what would have been the "near future" in 1986, Cold Waters examines three different "alternative histories" set in three different time periods: 1968: In this alternate version of the tumultuous year...

#80sChristmasList The 1980s coincided with my high school and college years. They also coincided with the last decade of the Cold War, the advent of new technologies, and the emergence of Tom Clancy and the technothriller genre of popular fiction. The following is a sampling of various Christmastime lists from across the decade, although the default year is 1985, which was my freshman year at Miami-Dade Community College. I eventually ended up owning all of them; if I didn't receive them during the holidays, I'd get them later as birthday presents or, as in the case of my first personal computer, an out-of-the-blue gift from a relative. And, of course, once I got a few jobs, I'd buy things on my own. Personal computer (I was given one in 1987, an Apple IIe that cost approximately $2,100, or $4,774.56 in 2019) New-release VHS tapes of feature films (average cost in 1985: $79.99, or $190.85 in 2019) Novels by Stephen King Novels by Tom Clancy Music albums on...

On August 31, 2018, Amazon's Prime Video began streaming Season One of  Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, an eight-episode action-adventure/political thriller web television series based on the eponymous character created by the late Tom Clancy. Starring John Krasinki ( The Office, A Quiet Place ) as Ryan, Wendell Pierce as James Greer, Abbie Cornish as Dr. Cathy Mueller, Ali Suliman as Mousa Bin Suleiman, and Dina Shibabi as Hanin Ali, Jack Ryan is not an adaptation of any of Clancy's novels but is a reimagining of the best-selling author's multimedia "Ryanverse" that borrows elements of the literary character's DNA to create a story set in the troubled times we live in. Created by Carlton Cuse ( The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and Lost ) and Graham Roland ( Fringe, Prison Break, and Lost ), Jack Ryan focuses on the efforts of Central Intelligence Agency analyst John Patrick Ryan to find a shadowy Muslim terrorist and prevent him from carrying out a terro...

Harrison Ford starred in two Jack Ryan films. © 1992 Paramount Pictures On Quora, member Maya Lachman asks: Was Jack Ryan a Republican or a Democrat? My reply: If you’re talking about Tom Clancy’s iconic character John Patrick Ryan, Sr., he is depicted in the novels as being Republican, especially in most of the books that follow 1991’s  The Sum of All Fears. In the early Jack Ryan novels ( The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, The Cardinal of the Cardinal, Clear and Present Danger,  and  The Sum of All Fears ), Ryan works his way up the ranks in the Central Intelligence Agency, starting out as a recently-recruited analyst and rising all the way to Deputy Director (Intelligence), or DDI. During his time at CIA, Ryan doesn’t have much to say about politics (except in the context of U.S.-Soviet relations, in which case he is obviously a Cold War Republican), but his pre-CIA resume includes a stint as a Marine Corps lieutenant, a successful stockbroker...

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...

On August 2, 1994, the Los Angeles-based label Milan Entertainment released Clear and Present Danger: Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on compact disc and cassette. The album presents 10 selections from composer/conductor James Horner's score for Phillip Noyce's adaptation of Tom Clancy's best-selling novel. Reflecting the film's focus on a covert military operation in Colombia against a notorious drug trafficker loosely based on Pablo Escobar, Horner's music is more martial and eerie than his previous score for another Clancy-based film, Patriot Games.  The late Horner (who died in a single-plane crash on June 22, 1995) had written a score that in album form would have contained 31 tracks for a grand total of 88 minutes' worth of music, but like most record labels, Milan only released an album with a running time of only 50minutes and 35 seconds. (19 years later, Intrada Records, a label that specializes in film and TV music albums, release...

© 1989 Putnam Reviewer's Note: I originally wrote this in August of 1989 for the Miami-Dade Community College - South Campus student newspaper, Catalyst.  Summer, that prime time for readers, may be over, but Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin, the third entry in the Jack Ryan series, is a spy novel for all seasons. Ryan, a CIA analyst introduced in Clancy's first novel, The Hunt for Red October, finds himself in a web of intrigue involving a highly placed "mole" - code-named Cardinal - in the Kremlin, a husband-and-wife CIA team stationed in Moscow, KGB surveillance teams, Afghan rebels and a race between American and Soviet scientists to develop a Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars" system. Although this sounds complex, Cardinal is fast-paced and engrossing. And although there's a lot of gadgetry involved, don't expect Ryan to give you James Bond-style heroics. As in his previous novels ( Red October, Red Storm Rising an...

(C) 1997 Berkley Books and Jack Ryan Limited Partnership On November 1, 1997, Berkley Books (G.P. Putnam's Sons' paperback division) published Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force. Co-written by the top-billed Tom Clancy and his researcher John D. Gresham, this was the fifth book in a series of non-fiction works devoted to specific unit types of America's armed forces.  Clancy, of course, is best known to readers as the creator and principal author of the long-running Jack Ryan series of novels. He also co-wrote (with former Navy officer and wargame designer Larry Bond) Red Storm Rising, one of the 1980s top-selling novels and his most popular work of fiction that's not set in the still-expanding "Ryanverse." In addition, he was also a respected conservative commentator and self-taught expert on military and intelligence matters, a successful entrepreneur who turned his name into one of the most recognizable names in American mass media.  ...

(C) 1996 Berkley Books and Jack Ryan Limited Partnership On November 1, 1996, Berkley Books (which at the time was the paperback division of G.P. Putnam's Sons but has since been folded into the larger Penguin Random House conglomerate) published Tom Clancy's Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Force. Co-written by Clancy's researcher and defense expert John D. Gresham, Marine is the fourth volume in what is now billed as The Tom Clancy Military Library but was originally known as the Guided Tour series.  Fans of the late novelist and conservative commentator know that Clancy was an unabashed admirer of the United States Marine Corps. His best known fictional character, John Patrick Ryan, Sr. started his career in government as a second lieutenant in the Marines, a fact that has been mentioned in three of the five "Jack Ryan" films and Amazon's Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, as well as in several of Clancy's novels.  "Marine." S...