Tom Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon is the most recent book I’ve finished. Picked it up in the airport, all 1137 pages of global military events cascade along. Clancy expects that readers know who Jack Ryan — still President Ryan here — is and what’s he done. Various references to events in earlier books abound, and the character is only roughed in a bit… but the book isn’t really about Ryan. It’s about the Chinese deciding to invade Russia to snatch a new gold mine and as-yet-untapped oil fields in Siberia.
However, the real hero, as so often with Clancy, is the hardware, especially an unmanned aerial reconnaissance plane called the Dark Star. The Dark Stars (there are more than one) give unrivaled intelligence to the American forces helping the Russian stave off a Chinese invasion. And for a book initially published in August 2000, there is a period piece, in which this footage is broadcast over the internet to get to the Chinese, around their censorship of other media. The internet as a force of good… is that Pollyanna-ish?
Anyway, I enjoyed it. Pure page-turner. I just wish all the ranks and hardware didn’t add an extra 100 pages to a long novel that really is no surprise to the reader. But if you read Clancy (since Red October) it’s not for the surprise.