- Clancy, Tom and Steve Pieczenik.
Net Force.
New York: Berkley, 1999.
ISBN 978-0-425-16172-2.
-
One of the riskiest of marketing strategies is that of “brand
expansion”: you have a hugely successful product whose brand
name is near-universally known and conveys an image of quality,
customer satisfaction, and market leadership. But there's a
problem—the very success of the brand has led to its
saturating the market, either by commanding a dominant market
share or inability to produce additional volume. A vendor in
such a position may opt to try to “expand” the brand,
leveraging its name recognition by applying it to other products,
for example a budget line aimed at less well-heeled customers,
a line of products related to the original (Watermelon-Mango
Coke), or a completely unrelated product (Volvo dog food). This
sometimes works, and works well, but more often it fails at a
great cost not only to the new product (but then a large majority
of all new products fail, including those of the largest
companies with the most extensive market research capabilities), but
also to the value of the original brand. If a brand which has become
almost synonymous with its project category (Coke, Xerox, Band-Aid)
becomes seen as a marketing gimmick cynically applied to induce consumers
to buy products which have not earned and are not worthy of the reputation
of the original brand, both the value of that brand and the estimation
of its owner fall in eyes of potential customers.
Tom Clancy, who in the 1980s and 1990s was the undisputed master
of the techno/political/military thriller embarked upon his own
program of brand expansion, lending his name to several series
of books and video games written by others and marketed under his
name, leading the naïve reader to believe they were Clancy's
work or at least done under his supervision and comparable to
the standard of his own fiction. For example, the present book,
first in the “Net Force” series, bears the
complete title Tom Clancy's
Net Force, an above-the-title blurb, “From the #1
New York Times Bestselling Author”, and the
byline, “Created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik”.
“Created”, eh…but who actually, you know,
wrote the book? Well, that would be a gentleman named
Steve Perry, whose name appears in the Acknowledgments in the
sentence, “We'd like to thank Steve Perry for his creative
ideas and his invaluable contributions to the preparation of the
manuscript.”. Well yes, I suppose writing it is,
indeed, an invaluable contribution to the preparation of a
manuscript!
Regardless of how a novel is branded, marketed, or produced,
however, the measure of its merit is what's between the covers.
So how does this book measure up to the standard of Clancy's own
work? I bought this book when it first came out in 1999 as an
“airplane book”, but never got around to reading it.
I was aware of the nature of this book at the time, having
read one of the similarly-produced “Op-Center”
novels, so my expectations were not high, but then neither is
the level of cognition I expect to devote to a book read on an
airplane, even in the pre-2001 era when air travel was not
the Hell of torture, extortion, and humiliation it has become
today. Anyway, I read something else on that
long-forgotten trip, and the present book sat on my shelf
slowly yellowing around the edges until I was about to depart
on a trip in June 2009. Whilst looking for an airplane book for
this trip, I happened across it and, noting that it had been
published almost exactly ten years before, was set in the year
2010, and focused upon the evolution of the Internet and
human-computer interaction, I thought it would be amusing to
compare the vision of Clancy et alii
for the next decade to the actual world in which we're living.
Well, I read it—the whole thing, in fact, on the outbound
leg of what was supposed to be a short trip—you know
you're having a really bad airline experience when due to
thunderstorms and fog you end up in a different country
than one on the ticket. My reaction? From the perspective of
the present day, this is a very silly, stupid, and poorly
written novel. But the greater problem is that from the
perspective of 1999 this is a very silly, stupid, and poorly
written novel. The technology of the 2010 in the story is not
only grossly different from what we have at present, it
doesn't make any sense at all to anybody with the most
rudimentary knowledge of how computers, the Internet, or for
that matter human beings behave. It's as if the author(s) had
some kind of half-baked idea of “cyberspace” as
conceived by William Gibson and mixed it up with a too-literal
interpretation of the phrase “information
superhighway”, ending up with car and motorcycle chases
where virtual vehicles are careening down the fibrebahn dodging
lumbering 18-wheeled packets of bulk data. I'm not making this
up—the author(s) are (p. 247), and asking you to
believe it!
The need for suspension of disbelief is not suspended from the
first page to the last, and the price seems to ratchet up
with every chapter. At the outset, we are asked to believe that
by “gearing up” with a holographic VR (virtual
reality) visor, an individual not only sees three dimensional
real time imagery with the full fidelity of human vision, but
also experiences touch, temperature, humidity, smell, and
acceleration. Now how precisely does that work,
particularly the last which appears to be at variance with
some work by Professor Einstein? Oh, and this VR gear
is available at an affordable price to all computer users, including
high school kids in their bedrooms, and individuals can easily
create their own virtual reality environments with some
simple programming.
There is techno-babble
enough here for another dozen seasons of
“24”.
On p. 349, in the 38th of 40 chapters, and completely
unrelated to the plot, we learn “The systems were also
ugly-looking—lean-mean-GI-green—but when it came
to this kind of hardware, pretty was as pretty did. These were
state-of-the-art 900 MHz machines, with the new FireEye bioneuro
chips, massive amounts of fiberlight memory, and fourteen hours
of active battery power if the local plugs didn't work.”
900 Mhz—imagine! (There are many even more egregious
examples, but I'll leave it at this in the interest of brevity and
so as not to induce nausea.)
But that's not all! Teenage super-hackers, naturally,
speak in their own dialect, like (p. 140):
“Hey, Jimmy Joe. How's the flow?”
“Dee eff eff, Tyrone.” This stood for
DFF—data flowin' fine.
“Listen, I talked to Jay Gee. He needs our
help.”
“Nopraw,” Tyrone said. “Somebody is
poppin' strands.”
“Tell me somethin' I don't compro, bro. Somebody
is always poppin' strands.”
“Yeah, affirm, but this is different. There's a
C-1 grammer [sic] looking to
rass the whole web.”
“Nofeek?”
“Nofeek.”
If you want to warm up your suspension of disbelief to take on
this twaddle, imagine Tom Clancy voluntarily lending his name
and reputation to it. And, hey, if you like this kind of stuff, there
are nine more books
in the series
to read!
June 2009 