Remembering Tom Clancy

I was working at the USS Bowfin submarine museum in Pearl Harbor through high school and college when Tom Clancy emerged as a bestselling author in the ’80s, so naturally, his suspenseful tale of a rogue Soviet submarine skipper defecting with his state-of-the-art ballistic missile submarine was irresistible. The Hunt for Red October (1984) and Red Storm Rising (1987) felt like passports into the real world of modern espionage and warfare, even though they were fiction.

These books also meant something to me as a young writer. First, there was Clancy's style, simultaneously journalistic and cinematic. Crisp, active sentences efficiently take the reader around the world, from the White House to the Kremlin to the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, or the stateroom of a ship's captain, alone with his worries. Second, there was Clancy's origin story—don't all superheroes have origin stories?—of the anonymous insurance salesman turned bestselling author, seemingly overnight.

It wasn't that simple for Clancy, of course. Here's a great interview with Deborah Grovsenor, the Naval Institute Press editor who took a chance on publishing The Hunt for Red October when that house mainly published textbooks and histories. We wouldn't see a similar breakout from niche publishing to mass market until J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books took off when brought to the U.S. by just-for-kids publisher, Scholastic.

A careful student of world events and military technology, Clancy put a lot of ideas into his fiction that made him seem prescient. Now that he has passed away, folks are rounding up his uncanny "predictions." For me, one of his most perceptive insights formed the basis for his depiction of a limited World War III in Red Storm Rising. The book now seems like a Cold War time capsule, playing out a war between the Soviet Union and NATO in Western Europe. However, the incident that started the war could be lifted from today's headlines: the book opens at a Soviet oil production facility where some of the staff engineers turn out to be jihadist terrorists. They shoot up the Russian engineers they had worked alongside for years, then blow up the facility, taking themselves out in the process. The loss of this key facility sends the USSR into a massive energy crisis, just before winter, forcing the Kremlin to launch a war for resources.

So there was Clancy, way back in 1987, warning that Islamist terrorism could very well go beyond the random hijackings of the 1970s to cripple the global superpowers themselves. It's the kind of "what if" that makes Clancy now seem like some kind of prophet when, really, he was simply paying attention.