The Hunt for Red October

I've been reading old thrillers lately, and I realized part of the pleasure is that Tom Clancy cannot suddenly post something stupid on social media.

There. That's one advantage of reading dead people.

I'm only half kidding.

I just finished reading Ward Larsen's David Slaton Assassin series, and something about his writing keeps reminding me of Clancy. Larsen gets extremely specific about weaponry, aviation, ships, military operations, intelligence work and geography. Sometimes too specific. His plots can get tangled, and after having devoured nine Slaton books in about two months, I can see some of the machinery working underneath them. There are only so many international threats, secretive intelligence agencies and alarmingly competent assassins a person can keep straight before all the acronyms start forming their own government.

Then Larsen pulls the book out of a stall. A twist, a pursuit, a wonderfully stressful scene.

Or a paragraph about icebreakers.

In Assassin's Edge, Larsen explains that intelligence agencies pay special attention to icebreakers because warming Arctic waters are opening northern sea routes and creating another arena for geopolitical competition.

I stopped reading. Wait. Of course they are.

An icebreaker isn't merely a ship that can go through ice. It gives a country access to places other ships can't reliably reach. Suddenly we're talking shipping routes, submarines, military access, surveillance, resources and control of increasingly navigable territory.

That's the kind of detail I used to love in Tom Clancy. He could take some obscure piece of military or geopolitical reality and make you realize, several hundred pages later, that somebody inside all these global alphabet-soup organizations should have been paying attention.

The Cardinal of the Kremlin was one of my favorites. And then there was The Sum of All Fears. Published in 1991, it imagined terrorists detonating a nuclear bomb at the Super Bowl, setting off a chain of events that nearly brought the United States and Soviet Union into nuclear war.

At his best, Clancy seemed almost prophetic. He was unusually good at noticing fault lines. Nuclear proliferation. Terrorism. Intelligence failures. Places where technology, politics and human ambition rubbed against each other hard enough that something eventually had to crack.

Reading those books now is interesting for another reason, though. They're old. And increasingly, I think that's part of why I like them.

Sometimes I want to read without first figuring out where the writer gets their news.

That sounds ridiculous until you notice how often the little sorting machine starts running in your head while you're reading something contemporary. What does this person believe? What tribe are they in? Is the author criticizing an idea or endorsing it? Am I being recruited into something here? Did this person say something horrible on the internet three years ago that everybody else apparently knows about except me?

It's exhausting.

Older books don't eliminate ideology. Good grief, no. Writers in the twentieth century had politics and prejudices and agendas and blind spots just like writers do now. Their characters reflected them. So did their assumptions about how the world worked.

But time creates distance. Their context is already history.

I can examine it instead of feeling like I'm being asked to enlist.

I can read Clancy and wonder what Americans feared about the Soviet Union in 1988. I can recognize assumptions that seem ridiculous now, alongside concerns that turned out to be remarkably perceptive. I can enjoy a story without agreeing with everything its author believed.

I don't need every book to affirm what I believe. Sometimes I just want to follow a good story, learn something I didn't know, and enjoy the company of people who aren't asking me to choose a side.

Nobody asks me to declare my allegiance before turning the page.