Silent Hunter

by Charles D. Taylor

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0441369340
• ISBN13: 9780441369348
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Jove Books
• Length: 339 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Great, but subdued Cold-War era sub thriller

This book came out in 1987, so it needn't explain why the Russians and Americans are still duking it out. The book follows form that would be done to death in Dale Brown novels - an American technological breakthrough coincides with some aggressive move by the Soviets.In this case, the Soviets close off the arctic waters off Norway, turning it into a Russians bathtub. The yanks strike back with the "Imperator", a gigantic submarine the size of an aircraft carrier (and I don't think they meant the small fleet carriers of WWII, frequent models for the soviet Typhoon class). Big enough to carry a fairly sized infranty team and their attack helicopter, the Imperator is designed to break through the Russian blockade. The Russians respond by sending in their top submarine skipper, and a wolfpack of their top subs (the inner cover of the paperback ed. had a great picture of a raging sub-sea battle, with the titanic US sub firing torpedoes in every direction, burning the ocean with flaming Soviet submarines). Nevertheless, the Imperator pretty much outclasses anything the Russians throw at it. A revolutionary computer called "Ceasar" can knock Bear bombers out of the sky or pick off incoming torpedoes.This was a great book for its time. The technological aspects of the story are pretty vague (we get little sense of what the sub can do before called upon to do it; it's like the author is making the sub a more powerful ship as the story progresses), and I'm not sure what the point is of sending a mammoth sub to carrya few troops into Norway - how big can the sub be and still carry a meanigful number of troops? The bigger problem of the story is how heavily it relies on its high-tech: the guidance of torpedoes and the nearly foolproof computer that runs Imperator. This is a problem because much of the book's action is driven by weaponry on automatic and thus independent of human control. Torpedoes are launched and track their targets or are spoofed by countermeaures. Ceasar detects a threat and lashed out with a blue-laser or something else. Weapons either do what they're designed to, or they fail. It's almost like the humans (or any characters) don't belong in the book at all.That's actually odd considering how the story appears unusually sympathetic to its characters - American and Russian. The Russian submarine commander is actually the most sympathetic in the book, otherwise bereft of the fiercely dogmatic communists of similar late 1980's books. The characters would be great if Taylor could somehow make them both deep characters and warriors. Instead, the war runs on autopilot, giving the characters really little to do. If "Hunter" excels at anything, it's a reminder that thrillers about submarines should keep their settings in their submarines. Because submarines are scary mostly because you can't just step out of one, an authentic thriller must highlight that sense of being trapped inside. "Hunter" highlights this by keeping its set