Red Storm Rising
Tom Clancy, 1986
★ 4.21 from 86.3k ratings on Goodreads
A Soviet refinery burns, and the world slides toward a war nobody planned—told through the engineers, analysts and soldiers who see it coming. Dread builds steadily through cool, procedural prose, with technical detail and shifting viewpoints that make the war feel planned, large and close.
Feels like dread, awe and unease. About memory, art and time.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy military strategy, researched hardware, and a global war scenario told through many viewpoints. Be ready for a long book with dense technical detail and thin characters, and note that some readers see a pro-Western slant.
Why read it
Its ground-level view of how a conventional war might start and spread gives you strategy, logistics and action through the people caught in it.
A page from the book
A city built on oil, lit by the fires of its own waste.
Central Control was a modern three-story building fittingly in the center of the complex. For at least five kilometers in all directions stretched the cracking towers, storage tanks, catalytic chambers, and above all the thousands of kilometers of large-diameter pipe which made Nizhnevartovsk one of the world’s largest refining complexes. The sky was lit at uneven intervals by waste-gas fires, and the air was foul with the stink of petroleum distillates: aviation kerosene, gasoline, diesel fuel, benzine, nitrogen tetroxide for intercontinental missiles, lubricating oils of various grades, and complex petrochemicals identified only by their alphanumeric prefixes. What readers say
Many readers find the war scenario suspenseful and admire its researched strategy and action; others are frustrated by its length, dense technical detail, and thin characters. Some also question its political balance, seeing a pro-Western slant.
Tom Clancy.Clancy was an insurance broker with no military service; he built Red Storm Rising from interviews with soldiers, sailors and Pentagon contacts.
Books that feel like this
More by Tom Clancy
The Bear and the Dragon
Tom Clancy, 1991
A look inside the high-stakes world of post-Soviet intelligence, where political legacy crashes headlong into brutal, modern violence.
The Cardinal of the Kremlin
Tom Clancy, 1988
Two intelligence services hunt the same mole, while a secret laser site in the mountains may decide which empire blinks first.
The Hunt for Red October
Tom Clancy, 1984
A Cold War thriller built from sonar, bureaucracy and nerve: a Soviet submarine commander takes his newest boat to sea, and no one knows what he intends.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Red Storm Rising for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy military strategy, researched hardware, and a global war scenario told through many viewpoints. Be ready for a long book with dense technical detail and thin characters, and note that some readers see a pro-Western slant.
- What is Red Storm Rising like?
- Dread builds steadily through cool, procedural prose, with technical detail and shifting viewpoints that make the war feel planned, large and close. Feels like dread, awe and unease. About memory, art and time.
- What should I read after Red Storm Rising?
- If you liked Red Storm Rising, try The Matarese Circle (Robert Ludlum), Seven Days in May (Fletcher Knebel) and The Passage (Justin Cronin).
A taste of the feed
The invisible knot that ties gratitude to obedience.
But the major would never offer the slightest objection about anything where the general was concerned. “Mad Anthony” Blackburn had carried a broken young lieutenant out of a North Vietnamese prison camp, away from torture and starvation, and brought him through the jungles back to American lines. That was years ago; the lieutenant was a major now, the senior aide to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The Matarese Circle · Robert Ludlum
A handful of men can stop the government from falling off a monument.
All you’ve got to know is this: right now the government of the United States is sitting on top of the Washington Monument, right on the very point, tilting right and left and ready to fall off and break up on the pavement. There are just a handful of men that can prevent it. And you’re one of them.
Seven Days in May · Fletcher Knebel
What it feels like to wait for a whole planet to appear.
What Gaal was waiting for after the disappointment of the Jump was that first sight of Trantor. He haunted the View-room. The steel shutter-lids were rolled back at announced times and he was always there, watching the hard brilliance of the stars, enjoying the incredible hazy swarm of a star cluster, like a giant conglomeration of fireflies caught in mid-motion and stilled forever. At one time there was the cold, blue-white smoke of a gaseous nebula within five light years of the ship, spreading over the window like distant milk, filling the room with an icy tinge, and disappearing out of sight two hours later, after another Jump.
Foundation · Isaac Asimov
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