StarDestroyer.Net BBS

How many people on SDN read his books? What do you think of his writing?

I consider him a guilty pleasure. His books are nothing but cheap, pulpy thrillers, yet I still enjoy reading them.

You have to work awfully hard to suspend your disbelief (Civil War re-enactors with live ammo? Horrors!) with him, but yeah, he's buckets o' fun.

Antique cars, planes, trains and ships; it's like non-sexual porno for me. I devour a new Clive Cussler book in a night.

It's great fun, it's pretty over the top to say the least, I mean WWI vintage planes in a dogfight over Central Park with live ammo and everything is stretching things just a bit...

Still, it's hard to put his books down once you get into them, I think I've gone through my library's entire Clive Cussler catalogue.

'Guilty pleasure' pretty much sums it up. Out of the ten or so I've read, 'Treasure' is my favourite. Unfortunately Dale Brown seems to be trying to turn into a cheap & nasty imitation of Clive Cussler these days.

Incidentally if you like insanely over the top action, Matthew Reilly's stuff is very silly but undeniably fun; 'Area 7' in particular reads like three separate techo-thriller novels edited down to novella format (by omitting such irrelevancies as characterisation) and then crammed together into one book. The very best 'over-the-top military techno thriller' I've read is Payne Harrison's 'Storming Intrepid', which has the general feel of 'Firefox' (by Craig Thomas) but much more exciting.

I thought 'Storming Intrepid' was a lot of fun.

Wouldn't make a bad basis for a movie, either.

Better make it while the shuttle fleet is still in service...

Starglider wrote: Incidentally if you like insanely over the top action, Matthew Reilly's stuff is very silly but undeniably fun;

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll have to give his books a look when I get the chance.

Starglider wrote:Incidentally if you like insanely over the top action, Matthew Reilly's stuff is very silly but undeniably fun; 'Area 7' in particular reads like three separate techo-thriller novels edited down to novella format (by omitting such irrelevancies as characterisation) and then crammed together into one book. The very best 'over-the-top military techno thriller' I've read is Payne Harrison's 'Storming Intrepid', which has the general feel of 'Firefox' (by Craig Thomas) but much more exciting.

My god.

I can't believe you did that.

AND HE'S GOING TO DO IT.

You magnificent bastard!

sign me up for another guilty pleasure me 2. yup the bear reads everything.

Cussler? Boring little hack who got lucky enough to start writing during the superspy craze and tapped the popular Titanic vein in one of his books. He pretty much lost me with that one: a not unreadably awful book but enough to see how much of the rest of his writing goes. Not worth my time.

I won't touch a Cussler book with a yardstick. The guy wanks so much I find it exceedingly difficult to suspend disbelief for his books, which is saying a lot -- I could suspend it for that silly Voyager time-traveling episode. What made me forswear his writing was Sahara: it's got a couple of completely irrelevent plot lines, ridiculous Marty Sue wanking, an evil conspiracy, all wrapped up in that sixth-grade writing style. It seems typical enough of his work that now I avoid it like the plague.

I became acquainted with Cussler when I read Atlantis Found back in 2000 or thereabouts and now I've got all the main Dirk Pitt novels. They're fun reads and a guilty pleasure. Also, if you haven't checked them out, I recommend both of his non-fiction Sea Hunters books. Very informative, very interesting, and funny as hell too.

Surlethe wrote:I won't touch a Cussler book with a yardstick. The guy wanks so much I find it exceedingly difficult to suspend disbelief for his books, which is saying a lot -- I could suspend it for that silly Voyager time-traveling episode. What made me forswear his writing was Sahara: it's got a couple of completely irrelevent plot lines, ridiculous Marty Sue wanking, an evil conspiracy, all wrapped up in that sixth-grade writing style. It seems typical enough of his work that now I avoid it like the plague.

There's a whole genre like this: that Matt Riley guy is very similar, and if anything even more retarded and wank-centric.

Yeah, I read Dragon a few years ago and there was a bit where a guy managed to initiate a nuclear weapon with a shotgun or rifle. That was the extent of my Cussler reading. I stopped reading Dale Brown novels after Patrick McLanahan and his brother became street justice vigilantees.

A few of them were more or less entertaining - I read about five of them. After that, though, I really couldn't stand to read anymore of them.

For a while his books were pretty entertaining, then I realized how very beautifully wanked they were; I think the clincher was one of the character's sidearms, which fired .375 MAGNUM, and had apparently been modified to fire half-inch shot. At that I more or less stopped reading entirely. If necessary, I'll read one of his books, but I'd more happily stare out the car window for three hours. Clive Cussler's books may well have their place, but it is not in my library.

Surlethe wrote:I won't touch a Cussler book with a yardstick. The guy wanks so much I find it exceedingly difficult to suspend disbelief for his books, which is saying a lot -- I could suspend it for that silly Voyager time-traveling episode. What made me forswear his writing was Sahara: it's got a couple of completely irrelevent plot lines, ridiculous Marty Sue wanking, an evil conspiracy, all wrapped up in that sixth-grade writing style. It seems typical enough of his work that now I avoid it like the plague.

Say what you will about Breman & Braga, but they've at least never blatantly self-inserted themselves into a Star Trek episode so they can save the day for their main character ala deus ex machinae. Multiple times no less!

General Zod wrote:

Surlethe wrote:I won't touch a Cussler book with a yardstick. The guy wanks so much I find it exceedingly difficult to suspend disbelief for his books, which is saying a lot -- I could suspend it for that silly Voyager time-traveling episode. What made me forswear his writing was Sahara: it's got a couple of completely irrelevent plot lines, ridiculous Marty Sue wanking, an evil conspiracy, all wrapped up in that sixth-grade writing style. It seems typical enough of his work that now I avoid it like the plague.

Say what you will about Breman & Braga, but they've at least never blatantly self-inserted themselves into a Star Trek episode so they can save the day for their main character ala deus ex machinae. Multiple times no less!

Yeah, the last several books he's done aren't nearly as good as his earlier work.
My first Cussler book was Vixen 03, which IMHO was pretty decent for escapist action fiction.

Now if you want to talk about wanked out characters, the Death Merchant and Executioner series from Pinnacle Books back in the 1970's are perfect examples in that their protagonists are unstoppable killing machines on a level with the Punisher*.



*IIRC, Punny's a direct ripoff of Mack Bolan from the Executioner series.

Glocksman wrote: Yeah, the last several books he's done aren't nearly as good as his earlier work.

I'd have to agree with you there. The newer books he has centered around the Oregon are less fantastical and more of a mouthpiece for his political views then his earlier, over-the-top works.

I felt 'Atlantis Found' was very entertaining, and could easily be turned into a movie in the vein of 'Max Steel, ULTRASPY' and other such endeavours.

Don't think about it, and enjoy the madness.

I've always been partial to Night Probe when I first read it back in the late 90's.

Kanastrous wrote:I thought 'Storming Intrepid' was a lot of fun.

Wouldn't make a bad basis for a movie, either.

Better make it while the shuttle fleet is still in service...

That book was hilarious. I have it in my library.

The epitome of Matthew Reiley's action wank (which I admit that I enjoy) occurs in Scarecrow, when one of the characters . . .

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. . . uses a number of grapling guns to traverse from the cockpit to the rear cargo doors of a C-130, mid-flight, after being kicked out into the air stream.

Stark wrote:There's a whole genre like this: that Matt Riley guy is very similar, and if anything even more retarded and wank-centric.

I leafed through one of his books while waiting for my flight at the airport, I think the best way to describe it is a comic book with no pictures. The stuff was straight out of an action hero comic.

I love Clive Cussler and Matt Reilly because they're both so wonderfully over the top, like a James Bond movie. They even have the egomaniacal villains, the crazy gadgets, and the doomsday plots/devices.

Like many others I read Cussler for pure escapist pulp. I generally re-read my collections of his work at least yearly and also whatever of his I can pick up cheap or from the library gets devoured too. He's a goddamn master of fun.