What you’d expect, If you’ve seen the movie. Very commercial, both in terms of the prose work, character work, and dialogue, as well as the outright propaganda I figured was injected at Hollywood. The Russians, aside from one or two, are basically bumbling fools shackled to a system constantly referenced as terrible without the lens being turned to the west. No wonder it was made into a movie, really.

Plot wise, it’s pretty simple and fairly fun. It’s also really packed full of detail that felt well researched and believable to me. The intricacies and verisimilitude of the military and the various machines in use feel well realized. That feels like the secret sauce. A lot of what is opaque but interesting is gone into, sometimes shoving unbelievable dialogue into the characters to do so. The classic characters telling each other things they already know, things like that.

But it is very consumable. Big as it is, and it’s quite chunky, it goes by very quickly, which is what I’m looking for these days. I’m not actually sure why I started with Red October, having seen the Jack Ryan movies; this is the third in the series, apparently. I think I thought this was the first. Whoops.