Cloning Tom Clancy
Posted by Jose on Wednesday, 16 of August , 2006 at 12:28 am
As the new Tom Clancy you’re writing a near future anti-terrorism pot boiler. Who are the enemies of freedom and what’s their evil plan?
My pick is rabidly devout environmental fundamentalists and animal rights activists. Segments of the environmental movement have become radicalized by western governments dragging their feet when it comes to controlling their carbon emissions as Global Warming continues to raise its ugly head. They’ve also combined this with a new agey pseudo religion built around the GAIA hypothesis (that part really isn’t even SFnal actually). They decide the real enemy is capitalism, rampant consumerism and the consumption of meat.
They obtain samples of BSE (mad cow disease) and get hired into a few meat packing plants getting the lowest rung jobs, the guys working the hot dog machine. Over a couple of months they can introduce BSE to tens of millions of people. By the time they’re discovered it’ll be too late. They’re hoping that the resulting fear over meat will spur hundreds of millions of people into becoming vegatarians and therefore save the planet as spare the lives of countless farm animals.
Unfortunately one of their leaders is a foxy babe who just happens to have to hots for our hero, a Canadian ex special forces, super peacekeeping guy. She falls for him, he betrays her in classic Kirk fashion and there’s a big explosive showdown in a meat packing plant complete with shotguns and geysers of pressurized liquified pigflesh. The end.
Back in my student days I used to make hot dogs (And in stomach turning irony I had eaten nothing but hotdogs during the preceeding semester). I think I could describe being sprayed by a stream of liquid pig stuff quite vividly if called upon.
Andrew Wheeler
If I am an evil terrorist mastermind, I think I’ll have to go whole hog and be a nihilist bent on world destruction. (Surely I belong to some religious sect that promises a heavenly reward for my actions, so it doesn’t matter if *I* die.) Therefore, I want to foment a nuclear war.
Luckily for my purposes, the former USSR still has a lot of nuclear weapons rolling around, not guarded nearly as well as they could be. I’ll use my crack suicide troops to take over a launching silo — they don’t need to get out alive, just to launch — and fire off missiles at Tel Aviv, Bombay and Paris (targeting the nuclear powers most likely to hit the roof and shoot back immediately), and whatever’s left at opportunistic US targets (just because I’m evil, and I hate freedom).
Meanwhile, I’ll be in my secret underground lair, faking high-level diplomatic messages from China and various Arab states to Russia, and making sure they “leak” out to my targets. The goal is to make sure Israel and/or India retaliate quickly against *someone*, and then just keep the ball rolling long enough to get lots of missiles in the air. It will be tough to make my goal without getting the US involved, so I might also need some deep-cover agents at Cheyenne Mountain.
This is still a work in progress, but I’m confident that, properly executed, a couple of billion deaths would be quite achieveable. I’ll save the details of how to *defeat* this nefarious plot for my upcoming bestseller SILENT RED STORM, BLACK EARLY WARNING: A Dirk Hardpeck Adventure.
Andrew Wheeler is Senior Editor at the (US) Science Fiction Book Club
Claude Lalumière
In my thriller, George Bush, Jr. and his cabal are the bad guys, including his international sycophants/collaborators, such as Stephen Harper and Tony Blair.
Their evil plan: seize all the oil; privatize the whole world, including all life forms; eliminate civil liberties, especially the rights of children, non-whites, and women. Make sure a just society never comes into being, all in the name of a so-called “free” market, that is actually skewed to promote their own economic interests.
Claude Lalumière’s Website
Ian Watson
World domination by American neoconservatives, by the trashing of Iran and other uppity states, is far too obvious, and politically I wouldn’t be a Clancy clone if I chose this. Team America already dealt with North Korea. Wrecking the Beijing Olympics with mutant bird flu is a bit too soon. But the London Olympics of 2012 is far enough away to be a good target. The President for Life of Turkmenistan is completely bananas, with a God complex, and he should still be around by then. Saparmurat Niyazok, jollily known as Turkmenbashi, a good name for a villain. No doubt he offended all Islamists recently by ordering his Book of the Soul to be inscribed alongside the Koran on a $100 million mosque, then banning any more building of mosques. Terrorists just can’t get near him. By 2012 Turkmenbashi should have a team of superhuman athletes ready to demonstrate his supremacy to the world - before his very gaze, in London. (Much oil and gas give him influence.) Think Hitler and the Munich Olympics. Islamist terrorists will try to mini-nuke the games, and for them the collateral damage to London will be fine. No, a mini-nuke is banal. Obsessed, they want Turkenbashi & his athletes to suffer publicly. They’ll aim to release mutated Ebola flesh-eating virus. Fill in the dots. Hmm, I wonder if should quickly trademark this plot.
ps: Curses! A bit of googling shows me that Tom Clancy (whom I never read in my life) actually produced two novels using Ebola virus (as well as printer ink, of course), in one of which the virus is to be released at some Olympic Games! So my idea would seem rather plagiaristic, even plague-aristic. Just as bad, a huge article in NewsCentralAsia protests that Turkmenbashi’s mosque isn’t blasphemous at all, because the quotes from The Book of the Soul are inscribed on the minarets, not on the main mosque. So Islamist terrorists have no reason to be annoyed with Turkmenbashi. And he has no reason to produce super-atheletes just so he can go to the London Olympics to be assassinated. And by the way, a variety of Ebola can make you bleed in a messy way, though most victims don’t. It’s a type of MRSA that eats your flesh to the bone.
The ticking you hear isn’t a bomb; it’s the radioactive decay of a bright idea with a very short half-life.
Ian’s Website
Dave Gerrold
The enemy is always religious fanaticism. During the first half of the twentieth century, it was political ideology raised to the level of religious fanaticism. But that was an aberration, brought on by the sudden impact of mass media (radio and movies); once people learned how to assimilate information from mass media, they immediately began to use it for spreading the religious meme again. If you take the long view of history, almost all fanaticism is rooted in religion. Most evangelical religions (The Church of the Chocolate Bunny is the exception) are about controlling other people’s relationship with the world they live in, so ultimately fanaticism is mind control. If people approached religion as “just another story” they wouldn’t be so eager to fly airplanes into buildings.
Dave’s website
Edward Willett
Aging Cuban communists trying to reanimate the corpse of Castro, with the help of mad scientists from Venezuela, in the hope of overthrowing the new democratic government on the island that sprang from the chaos following his death.
Edward Willett is a Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy and non-fiction author.
David Dyer-Bennet
Definitely religious fundamentalists. It’s a cliche, but it’s the only clearly-identifiable anti-freedom philosophical position with any traction at this point.
For a pot-boiler I definitely connect the jihadists with the crazy religious right in America, and I’d have to research Europe more, and find a way to work in some extremist pagans or something. And Jews, of course. (While I’m suspicious of “fundamentalist” religious positions, not all who hold them are either violent or loons. And there are plenty of “evangelical” or “pentecostal” Christians who aren’t either violent or loons either. I suspect that that’s a case of rising above the philosophical position, rather than a consequence of their philosophical positions, but that’s just a suspicion on my part, and sane people from that part of the spectrum that I’ve discussed it with disagree. Sorry for not slighting the crazies in religions other than Christianity and Islam!)
David’s Website
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2006-08-16 00:56:54
Fanatical postmodernist worshippers of Foucault and Derrida hatch a plot to destroy capitalism by infiltrating the Accountancy departments of British post-polytechnic universities and introduce courses in critical accounting, thereby ensuring that no longer will 2+2=4. They are only stopped by the heroic efforts of a group of dour Scottish accounting students armed with liquid explosive filled haggis’s (haggi???)detonated via their cunningly adapted scientific calculators.
I only say this because I currently have a job constructing reading lists for Universities and Glasgow Caledonian actually do have a course in critical perspectives on accountancy.
The course blurb runs thus:
The module seeks to evaluate current accounting thinking by reference to the literature produced by proponents of critical theory. Following a reassessment of mainstream accounting thinking students re-examine that paradigm from a number of different perspectives. The critical accounting literature is now considerable. In consequence, a number of seminal articles written from the standpoint of each of the alternative perspectives are examined.
Students will study the perspectives of
- A labour process perspective
- Foucault
- Critical theory
- Feminism
You couldn’t make it up…
2006-08-16 16:45:29
Title: DEATH DESIGN
Tagline: They swore “Death to Darwin”…
Plot: Someone is assassinating the scientists of America, one by one, and firebombing the universities. No one is claiming responsibility, but the brain pool of the free world is in peril.
FBI agents Jack White and Susan Black are assigned to protect wheelchair-bound scientist Stephen Doveking, and uncover a plot of Intelligent Design fanatics to stop science — stop it DEAD…
Of course, this is just a pot-boiler. It couldn’t happen for real…
2006-08-16 16:47:45
Communist Islamic Shi’a Terrorists serendipitously discover a secret Nazi biological warfare facility which has remained hidden deep in the mountains of Central Bulgaria since the fall of the Third Reich. They hatch a plan to complete the weaponisation of a virus, unknown to the world security community and use it to simultaneously attack Washington, New York, and other large american cities, as well as Paris. This will be a diversion, part of a plan to overthrow the corrupt governments of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other backsliding islamic states and form an arabian super-state, run according to the priciples of both the Mohammed and Karl Marx. This nightmare can only be prevented from coming to pass by a poor but honest Bulgarian cop, who notices something strange going in the hills, and ignores the instructions of his complacent superiors to continue his investigation. He eventually comes into contact with a middle aged CIA agent, passed over for promotion for political reasons, who has been following a hunch that is now revealed as incorrect. With the evidence from the cop, the CIA man puts the pieces together just in time to convince his superiors and organise a massive global series of commando raids and airstrikes, foiling the evil ones with minutes to spare. Sadly, the mission to save Paris is blocked by stereotypical French intransigence. The terrorist leader dies ironically, victim of his own weapon, the CIA guy is promoted, the French see the error of not trusting the US in all things, etc., etc.
2006-08-16 17:48:16
Charlie,
If you want to sell the movie rights to this best to have Paris destroyed. Hollywood loves destroying Paris in apocalypse porn fashion.
2006-08-16 18:38:22
On the implausible terrorist plot theme, a brilliant little piece about why there’s an odd whiff of bullshit about the recent “scary shampoo bomb” plot…
2006-08-16 20:57:40
I would like to vote for the terrorist plot where so-called the bad guys “privatize the whole world”.
Privitizing [privatizing-ed. Privitizing would presumably involve hedges] means, what again, exactly? Government-owned property being sold off to private individuals? In other words, the evil nasty baddies in this scenario are doing exactly what the US government did during the Nineteenth Century to put the Louisiana Purchase and Northwest Terratories [Territories] into the hands of farmers and settlers. The government shrinks and we individuals end up with ownership and control over our own lives. Sounds more like an Ayn Rand utopia than a terrorist plot. Where do I sign up?
2006-08-17 01:29:13
mm… I’d agree there are some things which should be privatized and some that shouldn’t. The problem with privatization is that it’s usually so incompetently done. The government sells off a valuable bit of infrastructure at below market rates and then commits itself to supporting the supposedly privatised industry thus created while the new owners (usually with close ties to government) asset strip it.
Soon the government is forced to subsidise the new purchasers because they are complete incompetents (or crooks) and eventually ends up paying out just as much in subsidies as it did when it ran the industry directly. Except now somebody is also skimming a profit off the top of an enterprise at the expense of the market, engaging in what an economist would call rent seeking behaviour. Unfortunately the government no longer owns any of the assets that it used to and is committed both politically and economically to allowing the asset strippers to do their worst.
All this tends to come about when you have a government privatising a state owned monopoly and creating a privately owned monopoly (or series of regional monopolies as happened in Britain with the railways, the water companies, the power companies, various health services, prison services etc. etc.). Both are bad for business and the consumer but the state owned monopoly is actually better as though neither organization has any motivation to improve efficiency or deliver a better service at least the straight government owned monopoly plows its money back into the economy instead of paying it out in share dividends.
Also while certain sectors of industry are ripe for privatization because they are profitable, or at least conceivably could be so others simply aren’t (prisons for example. You’re only ever going to have one customer - the government - therefore there’s no competition even if you have multiple providers) while others are conceivably profitable (health services, education, the military, the police etc.[if the police were privatised that would actually make the prisons privatizeable]) yet the social costs of privatizing them arguably outweigh the financial benefits of the act. While it is possible to make an argument for the total privatization of the health or education service (although whether any country ever has done so without subsidisation from government is arguable)it is much harder to make an argument for privatizing the military or the police for example.
Why? Well I’d imagine that most would argue that security is more important than free market ideology and thus to privatize the police or the military would mean laying society open to unacceptable existential risks. Yet privatizing health services and education can conceivably lay a society open to equivalent risks since it is hard to have a functioning society in which the majority of the population is too poor to afford health care or education.
Enough ranting, the point is that privatization has complex effects upon a country and that simply saying government bad, private ownership good is simplistic and visa versa. Some things are better off being controlled by the state and some by private individuals. Now when it comes to the privatization of lifeforms that’s interesting.
Which is worse the state owning the copyright on parts of your genome and holding it in trust for the nation, or a private corporation holding it in trust for their shareholders?
2006-08-17 12:50:32
Hey! You forgot my reply again…now, what was it that Goldfinger said?
Oh, yeah. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
I may have to pull out that death ray if I’m forgotten that all-important third time…
2006-08-17 14:51:04
Mucho apologies to Andrew. I misfiled his original email. And in an extra bit of egg on my face it turns out its “Tom Clancy” not “John Clancy”. I finaly had that pointed out to me now. Although its a bit funny that no one noticed earlier.
2006-08-17 15:32:46
You can tell how many of us actually read Tom Clancy novels…