Operation Rainbow - tildebooks

888 pages

German language

Published Feb. 1, 1999 by Heyne Verlag.

ISBN:: 978-3-453-15289-2

(1 review)

Rainbow Six is a techno-thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on August 3, 1998. It is the second book to primarily focus on John Clark, one of the recurring characters in the Ryanverse, after Without Remorse (1993); it also features his son-in-law Domingo "Ding" Chavez. Rainbow Six follows Rainbow, a secret international counterterrorist organization headed by Clark (whose codename is "Rainbow Six"), and the complex apocalyptic conspiracy they unravel after handling multiple seemingly random terrorist attacks. The book debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and has since been adapted into a series of video games.

7 editions

aolfreetrial reviewed Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy

Rainbow Six has not aged well...

2 stars

Content warning High-level plot spoilers

...or maybe it was never great to begin with. I'm trying to identify when Tom Clancy jumped the shark, and it's clear that Rainbow Six is post-shark-jump Clancy - too many pages of "look at how good and handsome the good guys with good guns are" and copious amounts of references to previous Clancy books sprinkled in there for flavor. Perhaps The Hunt for Red October was lightning in a bottle - whatever the magic was has since been lost.

This is a pre-9/11 book about terrorism fighters who, as the book reminds you over and over again, are fantastically talented and athletic and smart and love kids and have loyal wives and fly around the world making bad guys' heads explode. And the bad guys are the evil commies and socialists and especially the environmentalists who manufacture an epidemic and produce a fake vaccine to kill off humani... yuck, this book really hasn't aged well has it?

Maybe reading this book in 1998 merely signaled poor taste. Now, reading it makes you feel like a QAnon believer. Clancy could have left this book up to his ghostwriters and it wouldn't have come up any worse.