Customer Reviews

Cybernation (Tom Clancy's Net Force, No. 6)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Tom Clancy's name is splattered all over the cover of the sixth in the Net Force series. If his only motivation is to let the publisher use his name for the money, I hope he's getting very little. This book is, in a word, terrible.

Speculative, science, and techno-thriller fiction are some of my favorite books; this book isn't convincing on any front. Sure, language has changed with the advent of the Web, but the egregious overuse of made-up jargon, describing concepts that are probably not close-in enough to spawn the casual, nickname-ish use prevalent in this book's narrative.

Gratuitous jargon, gratuitous sex, and labored narrative just don't cut it. I pity the poor guy that picks this thing up in an airport newsstand and gets stuck with it for hours.

I have read about half of Tom Clancy's other books and they were phenomenal for the most part. I am an attorney and a pretty good writer. Cybernation was one of the worst books I have ever read. I read the entire book so that I would truly give it a chance to get better; it didn't! I am part of the force designed to protect the nation's infrastructure and this book was childish at best. I am sorry to be so harsh, but if you let someone put your good name on a book, you should read it first. Not to worry, every page has its own cliche. The end of the book, not to ruin it for you, "Yep. And they lived happily ever after." Great ending!

First, let me tell you a little about the book. This series follows Net Force, a division of the FBI set up to deal with net crimes in 2010. CyberNation deals with a group trying to form a nation based completely on the net. Their main goal throughout the book is to get more people to sign up with them, so that they have the numbers to get the attention of current nations. To get people to join, they disrupt the internet, in a not very legeal way, and so Net Force is called in. The rest of the book is Net Force trying to catch the hackers doing the disruptions.

In general this series has a very well thought out discription of what needs to be done to protect and police the net. Having said that, I have noticed that the Net Force books have been going down hill, and this one continues that trend. A lot of time is spent on character development, but no development actually comes out of it. For example, we see Jay Gridley question his upcoming marrage. But in the end, the final decision has nothing to do with the pages of inner questioning that he goes through. Then there is the introduction of new 'toys' for the military, that never show up again. Add to that the fact that every other scene leads to sex, and that there is almost no technology discription, this book is only a shadow of Clancy's work.

IMHO this series has become a soap opera, with most of the time spent on generic character development and sex, and very little time spent on the action and discriptions that brought me to Clancy in the first place.

I had thought, in the beginning, that CyberNation would be pretty good because Tom Clancy wrote a ton of really good books and many great video games are created based on his stories. However, as I read along, there was hardly anything to enjoy. Obviously, I had not read any of the other reviews, so I had no idea what trap I was falling into. The storyline of this book is devoid meaning and completely boring, the complete opposite of what Tom Clancy would normally write.
The "storyline" about Gridley, Howard, Michaels, Santos, Chance, and Keller is completely disjointed. One of the few reasons why this story is connected is that they are fighting against each other in the internet world, and using the VR, or "Virtual Reality", to track things down or to mess things up. In fact, the whole story is covered up with sex, crime, and violence that there is hardly any connection shown. Of course, if I had not been able to follow the storyline, I would not be able to write this, but it was still quite confusing.
So I ask, again, why did Steve Perry write this? He has no sense of what Mr Clancy writes, nor of his style, elegance, and flair. One cannot imitate a type of writing without being the type of person, obviously, so why did Mr Perry try to do so? Mr Clancy truly should write more of his own books, even if he thinks he is too important and too proud to do the writing. Mr Clancy and Mr Perry must have decided to play a prank on loyal fans of Mr Clancy (not that I am one) because this has disappointed many enthusiastic readers. Of course, these questions I am not really able to answer, but I would not be surprised if Mr Clancy's name was written in huge, bold letters on the book for the profit.

The language used in the book is full of slangs.
But I do not think that the book is so bad as the reviewers say.
May be a good read for teenagers but not recommended for adults.

I can't believe that something like this would be published under the name of such a respected author (Tom Clancy)... who, by the way, is not even listed the writer for the novel.

I had admittedly high expectations when reading the book jacket, since the premise seemed quite interesting. After all, with more and more people 'living' online, it doesn't seem far fetched that the distinctions between online and offline communities (and their resultant challenges) would become increasingly blurred.

However, this book utterly failed to deliver. While I kept expecting some inventive plot twist or thoughtful character development, what I got instead was embarrassingly adolescent writing and complete predictability.

I can't even label this book as a guilty pleasure, since there was no pleasure in reading it, and the only guilt I feel is that I didn't recycle it after the 2nd or 3rd chapter.

Clancy's name is used to sell this book, but it's not written as well as other books he's been involved with. Mercifully, I abandoned this book before the halfway point. There wasn't anything about it to pull me in and give me a reason to keep going. The dialogue seemed stilted and the diction was hackneyed.

The characters are superficial, the story line (what little there is)is disjointed. There is a samness in all of the serie now, and this particular one reads like a tired, out of wind and out of ideas rerun: It's time to quit!!

I wrote my review about 40 pages from the end of the book. I must now revise it and remove all points. This has got to be about the worst book I have ever read!!!

I picked this book up because it was sitting there, I was out of reading material, and it had Tom Clancy's name on it. I was skeptical when Clancy hadn't written the book, but I thought that if he put his name on it, he believed in it.

There is no story here. Nothing happened. Nothing! ... A few disconnected scenes of people practicing martial arts, some guy drinking beer in virtual reality bars looking for clues (ridiculously stupid angle), and a conclusion that must have been written in one afternoon because the author was bored. The problem is, as is customary, I read to the end of the book to find that out.

... There were some parts that held some promise, but there is no coherency, and the conclusion is so bad that I wanted to destroy the book and any credibility it has. ...

On the plus side, the book was interesting enough that I finished it. However, when I bought the book I failed to read the small print and assumed the book was written by Tom Clancy. I think it is a somewhat sleazy trick to print Clancy's name so prominently on the cover. The writing is poor, and at times laughable. Even though I finished the book, I would not recommend it.