He didn’t burn them, of course, although he did destroy them. This mythic heightening of the less grandiose reality mirrors the slight exaggeration of facts in Clancy’s “realistic” thrillers. The Red October is a logistical McGuffin, with its theoretically plausible but currently unrealized “caterpillar” drive, and its nail-biting depiction of wish fulfillment in high-ranking Soviet defection. But it is in this defense of the old myths that it becomes the vehicle for all new ones: the novel (1984) remains one of the first fictional (and one of the best selling) publications put out by the U.S. Naval Institute Press.
[Via @immanenceftw.]