Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect

Author Essay

Dear Reader,

The late Tom Clancy famously said, “The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.” In researching my novels, I think of this often as I come across examples of the improbable and the impossible in the real world of geopolitical affairs.

When it came time to come up with a plot for the newest book, my editor and I decided North Korea’s attempts to field an intercontinental ballistic missile were a challenge worthy of President Jack Ryan. I dove into the research, and found many aspects of life and politics in the Hermit Kingdom to be both astonishing as well as compelling fodder for a good thriller.

In Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect, North Korea’s paranoid leader is obsessed with obtaining an ICBM that can reach the West Coast of the United States. After one of his test rockets fails, he reaches out to the Chinese for help, because he knows he has something the Chinese desperately want. The world’s largest deposit of rare earth minerals has been found in the mountains of North Korea, and North Korea’s mining minister desperately needs help from China to exploit the find. But the last thing China needs is war in the Korean peninsula, so they refuse to trade missiles for the minerals. When the North Korean leader expels them from his country, the head of North Korea’s foreign spy service is forced to orchestrate a criminal conspiracy to get the technology and expertise into his nation to turn the ore into the hard currency he needs to acquire the missiles.

President of the United States Jack Ryan stands firmly against North Korea’s aims of obtaining an ICBM. By using high-tech-imagery analysis, Ryan determines the North Koreans are on the verge of fielding the nuclear missiles that could reach America’s shore, so he uses diplomacy, a naval blockade, and his clandestine services to thwart the North Koreans. Meanwhile his son, Jack Ryan, Jr., travels the world with his mates at the Campus, an off-the-books intelligence agency, as they attempt to unravel the global conspiracy.

As fanciful as this story might seem at first glance, there is a lot of “real world” threaded into the fiction. North Korea recently did find rare earth mineral deposits in its northern provinces valued in the tens of trillions of dollars, and conflict between the DPRK and China has severely threatened China’s partnership in the mine. And DPRK has been developing its Taepodong-2 missile, which U.S. intelligence estimates might be able to deliver a nuclear warhead to the continental United States.

There are a dozen reasons North Korea is a fascinating country to write about, but perhaps the most interesting part of my research involved discovering that the DPRK—maybe more than any other state actor—is deeply intertwined with the global underworld. They dabble in counterfeiting, drug making and distribution, forgery, kidnapping, and assassination. Showing the reclusive nation’s interconnectedness with various criminal enterprises was a key part of the story.

For more than a generation, Tom Clancy wrote novels that combined the latest technology, fast-paced action, and keen geopolitical insight, and I hope readers enjoy the continuation of the Jack Ryan universe in Full Force and Effect.

-Mark Greany