In 1997, an Improved Los Angeles-class attack submarine, USS
Cheyenne, joins the war against China.
Apparently by Clancy himself, unlike many of the books which went
out over his name, SSN was written as a tie-in to the computer game of
the same name. The game didn't get good reviews: not enough whiz-bang
action for arcade-style gamers, not enough complexity in play for
serious submarine fans.
The book is similarly unsatisfying. All right, I admit I know more
about submarine warfare than the typical computer gamer. But much of
the action feels like by-the-numbers copy and paste of standard
verbiage. How many times do we have to hear "Make tubes one and two
ready in all respects, including opening the outer doors"? Twenty-one,
apparently. All right, that includes a couple of times when it's tubes
three and four instead.
Clancy says in an interview at the end of the book that combat is "not
really a technical exercise. It's a human exercise, and a
psychological exercise." But alas, this book is almost exclusively
about the technical. The captain of the submarine is very nearly the
only character with a name (everyone else is referred to by their
titles), and even he doesn't have a personality. The Hunt for Red
October and Red Storm Rising, the books that made Clancy's
reputation, handled this much better.
There are a couple of errors ("flaming datum" does not mean a flame
from a recently-launched missile pointing at the submarine, it means
learning that there's an attacker in the area when one of your ships
suddenly gets hit; and when you haven't yet classified the sort of
submarine you're listening to, you don't know how many blades are on
the propeller or how fast a given blade rate means she's going) which
I would not have expected Clancy to commit; I wonder, in spite of the
total lack of other credit, whether he really did write this himself.
The real problem with the book, though, is an utter lack of tension.
Everything basically works: the good guys always get their kills, the
bad guys never do. Coordination between Cheyenne and the surface
fleet is perfect at all times. Only one American ship is sunk and two
are somewhat damaged, off-stage; not even one American aircraft is
shot down; but the entire Chinese submarine fleet is eliminated,
almost all by the Cheyenne, along with most of its surface ships.
Sometimes they even panic and collide with, or attack, each other.
It's all very well to show us how concerned the captain is, but
there's never any real feeling of danger.
The book is a technical exercise, and a distinctly imperfect one.
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