Red Storm Rising

"Cole: It was a game-changing book. It came out when I was about 12. I liked how it told the story from so many points of view, it felt like you were experiencing it firsthand. It had great technical information. It wasn’t literature but it was a hell of a good story – it inspired me and showed how you could make explaining real-world military technology a central part of the tale. It was definitely fiction that people in the government could read on Sunday and take to work on Monday. Singer: Tom Clancy was the master and Red Storm Rising was written at the height of his game. The reading experience was addictive – we both remember reading it on our summer vacations. I was reading it on the way to the beach in the back of a station wagon and later on, on a sunny day, I stayed inside to finish the book. You talk to generals now who were junior officers then who had that same experience. We wanted to recreate that for people – that addictive summer beach read. “It was fiction that people in the government could read on Sunday and take to work on Monday.” It’s the definition of a techno-thriller. You feel like you’re learning about things that felt super exciting. He was talking about the stealth fighter two years before the US admitted it had them. We tried to do the same – pulling from DARPA reports, contract announcements–to give insight into what’s coming next. Yet, in Clancy’s book, all the technology, all the weapons work as planned. That was its biggest failing in terms of realism. We wanted to play with that and have fragile technology for Ghost Fleet."