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Subject: how does Tom Clancy get his info?
kuznet    4/6/2004 9:09:02 PM
how and what makes him so worth interviewing on CNN etc??
 
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eon    RE:how does Tom Clancy get his info?   4/8/2004 8:26:37 AM
According to an interview in "the Tom Clancy Companion" by Martin H. Greenberg, Clancy gets his data from "open sources", the same as evryone else. Plus, he spends much of his time actually talking to the soldiers, airmen, Marines, sailors, etc., who actually use the equipment, tactics and strategies. In Heinlein's SF you often find someone called a "Fair Witness", an impartial observer only interested in the facts (not "truth"- that's the domain of theology). Clancy maintains that he always downgrades the capabilities of combat systems 50% in his stories, which meansd that they tend to be a lot less "magickal" in his fiction (but are often oversold in the budget process, regardless). As to what makes him woirth interviewing, it is that he has a very good batting average on predictions; for instance, he wrote about a suicide attack with an airliner (on the U.S. Capitol) in "Debt Of Honor" in 1996; BTW, Dale R. Brown did the same thing, in the same year, in his novel "Storming Heaven". Clancy makes no secret of being pro-American, and still maintains a realistic view of both geopolitics and military strategy and technology- something numerous politicians and media figures in the U.S. and Europe have yet to acheive.
 
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