What A Hack

I have a hard time calling this guy a hack. He has written some good books. Since then he has written some stinkers. Since then he has put his name on any piece of written material that fit the suspense genre and looked like it would sell; "Tom Clancy presents:" I thought it was sad, since one would think he has a mountain of money already. Now he has pissed me off.

I was roaming the bookstore the other day and saw the latest book by Larry Niven. Larry Niven doesn't have a franchise of Jack Ryan books made into movies, but if every 'comet hitting the Earth' book and movie ever made appropriately credited Lucifer's Hammer Niven would have a mountain of money to match Clancy's. I say 'ever made' instead of 'since Lucifer's Hammer' because I can't say there was any 'comet hitting the Earth' story before that. Name one Tom Clancy book that wasn't 'sort of like Robert Ludlum, Leon Uris, et al. Lucifer's Hammer was a masterpiece when I was in high school, which is incidentally long before Tom Clancy sold word one.

So yeah, I was pissed off to see that some punk at the publisher saw fit to put an endorsement from Tom Clancy on the cover of Larry Niven's latest book. No doubt this added a nice chunk to the Tom Clancy retirement fund, but I liken it to seeing "the writer of Arvil Bren's Journal says this is a great read" on the cover of Lord of the Rings.