24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Absolute Tripe, February 5, 2005
REALLY RATES ONLY ABOUT 0.25 STARS. Like many of the previous reviewers, I started this book with not quite high expectations, but certainly expected a diverting read. Boy was I wrong! It is so bad, it actually antagonized me. Full disclosure: I'm a retired USN person, and have some familiarity with the milieu. First the good stuff: the probability of the Las Palmas earthslide is almost 100%, according to much of what I've seen and read independently: it's only a question of when it will happen. Now the bad stuff: as others have noted, the naval terminology is egregiously wrong (Ensign junior grade? How junior can one be?); full Captains commanding an FFG (and oh by the way, in 2009, these ships will be about 40 years old and most are decommissioned now); ships and aircraft going the wrong way (course 270 is due west, not east), and so on. The characters need a lot of development to be even two-dimensional; the military coup is absurd; loooong spells of space-filling data describing volcanos, which is then repeated at least twice more; naval tactics allowing a known hostile to transit vast ocean areas with NO attempt at surveillance (lots of mention of SOSUS, but no discussion of what it is, how it works, or any explanation or rationalization as to why it didn't detect the BARRACUDA); no mention of any effort to find the source of the boat or its support, even though NSA determined that Chinese satellites were being used for communications, which is a VERY hostile act; using Antisubmarine Rockets (ASROC) to shoot down a cruise missile is ludicrous, since ASROC is a rocket-assisted torpedo, designed for ASW. One of the most unintetnionally funny parts was the starry-eyed characterization of Senator Teddy Kennedy as a staunch supporter of the military! Very bad book: if you must read it to keep your Patrick Robinson string alove, get it from the library: don't waste a dime purchasing it.
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42 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Should be 1/2 star., September 17, 2004
As a life-long Republican, I was amazed and insulted by this book. Only the Republicans can do anything, the Democrats are totally inept. This is the main premise of the presidential "crisis" that is pivotal to the book. Where was the Secret Service while this was happening? The idea is idiotic to say the least.
The story itself is an interesting idea, which is unfortunately so poorly executed as to be almost unreadable. The main idea is that a volcano in the Canary Islands will erupt and cause a "mega-tsunami" which will effectively destroy the east coast of the USA and the coast of Europe.
Unfortunately, Mr. Robinson can't even keep his technical details straight even when he is making them up himself. At one point, describing how the tsunami will form, he says it will start at 1 kilometer in height and then increase to 150 feet when it hits the east coast. Sounds like a decrease to me, but I never was good at math. In addition, what a tsunami is was explained at least three times in the book, to people allegedly intelligent, who you would think had heard of the concept.
Poor editing there.
As to the other technical details, they don't border on the ridiculous, they leap-frog right past it. F-15s being flown by the Navy, US Air Force squadrons embarked on a carrier, a Harpoon missile being used as an anti-air weapon! Did Robinson simply pick the names and nomenclatures of weapons out of a copy of Jane's All the World's Weapons Systems at random?
His cruise missiles use "sonar" altimeters to keep their altitude. The Patriots are either flying at "near the speed of light" or else possibly not capable of doing the intercept job. Which is it? The list goes on.
A pivotal plot point involves bringing an aircraft carrier out to search for the rogue submarine, the carrier being loaded with Seahawk sub-hunter helicopters. Pages are devoted to the transfer of these helicopters from this carrier, to another carrier already in the area. The danger and complexity involved in transferring the fixed wing aircraft from the already resident carrier to the helicopter carrier (also a Nuke class CVN) and the helicopters to the first had me wondering, why not just fly off the carrier that brought them? Needless nonsense that makes no sense whatsoever.
As to the sub hunt itself, it was idiotic from the start. We have the US Navy command searching for a submarine that they know they can't hear with passive sonar, and just using radar in the hope they will run across a periscope above water. Well, if you're searching for a sub you know is going to launch nuclear missiles, just use active sonar, right? Maybe not the same range, but effective nonetheless.
I could go on, but I'll leave it with this thought. Techno-thrillers, unless they are science fiction, must, and I repeat must, be plausible. They have to "follow the rules" as it were. Otherwise it's just bad, and I mean very bad fiction.
Love or hate Tom Clancy, but he always has his facts straight. In fact, if he read this book, he's probably laughing himself to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that Robinson poses no threat to Clancy in the techno-thriller genre.
Don't buy it, don't even borrow a copy. You'll waste your money, which is bad enough. But above all, you'll waste your time on a piece of idiotic drivel.
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