Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, I am holding in my hands right now.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
M P. Woodward's new novel in the Tom Clancy Jack.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Ryan Junior series.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
It's called Terminal Velocity came out last Tuesday, and another
great one. And I got to say, I love these characters.
And you know, I read a lot of thrillers. I
really love the characters Jack Ryan Junior character and John
Clark from the campus. If you don't know what I'm
talking about, I just got to start reading these books.
But MP, welcome back to KOA. It's good to have
you here. Hey Ross, it's great to be here.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So we're going to talk a little bit later about
the other book that you've written recently, but I want
to ask you a question that kind.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Of relates to it.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
You are one of the authors who writes your own stuff,
like your own characters, your own with not a continuation
of something somebody else started, while also having the privilege
of being asked to continue a series from one of
the most famous writers of all time. And there's only
(01:01):
a few people who get to continue, you know, Robert
Ludlam and Vince Flynn and you writing Tom Clancy. And
one of the things I wonder about doing that is
is it easy or difficult to keep these things separate
in your head so that you don't make the characters
(01:23):
in your own books feel too much like the Tom
Clancy characters or vice versa. And what about the styles
of writing.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, that's a great question. It's something I've pondered at length.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
I think there is a definite style that you don't
necessarily fall into too much, like you know, poetically or romantically,
because there's a structural difference. In the Clancy books. You
are almost always working with multiple points of view, You're
almost always working with technology, new technology related to defense,
(01:58):
and a geopolitical contact. And so that means you have
you tend to think about story construction for a Clancy
book a little bit differently than I might in one
of my one of my own novels. So right from
the get go, those are different. Then when it comes
to inhabiting characters, I've done enough of these and read
so many of them, you know, kind of really all.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
My adult life, that it's it's not too difficult.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
For me anyway to slip into the character mode that
that was originally created by by Tom.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Clancy and to inherit them.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
That's much different when i'm than when I'm writing my
my own things, where you know, I've really thought through
a biography of a completely different person. So I suppose
it's a little bit like an actor who plays a role,
you know, sometimes one way, and then plays a role
in the next movie that is completely different. It's a
it's a bit like that mindset to where you're just
(02:53):
completely focused in that area while while you are authoring
the book.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Well we're talking with MP Woodward is was Tom clancy
novel is called Terminal Velocity. So one of the things
that really struck me about this book some years ago,
lots and lots of thrillers were about Islamic terrorism, and
then a lot of thriller authors have moved on to
you know, Russia this, or China that, or Iran this
(03:22):
or North Korea that. And in this book, you're in
a way, you're you're reminding us that the Islamic terrorist
groups and the people with that mindset still exist and
we shouldn't forget about it.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Yeah, for this book, I really wanted to focus in
on a number of the people that I interviewed who
were the warriors and what is what they referred to
as the GWOT or the Global War on Terror and
in so many ways. You know, we're out of Afghanistan, now,
we're out of Iraq now.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
It's not something that is in the daily headlines.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
But in this book, I started with a series of
these guys showing up dead, and I was intrigued by
the idea that, well, you know, what if, what if
there was blowback from what they did, and that these
terror organizations haven't necessarily gone away. They've reconstituted themselves, or
they've they've hidden, et cetera. But they still bear quite
(04:18):
a grudge and they've just been trying to to get stronger.
And in doing that, I also wanted to pick up
the thread that was created by Tom Clancy and his
original work called Dead or Alive. And I spent quite
a bit of time researching that book, and you resurrecting
sort of a next generation of villains from from that book,
(04:39):
and I thought it was a way to help deepen
the not only these characters presently, but but remind everyone
of of their of their their previous exploits.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
This book is interesting because it has a lot of
moving parts, a heck of a lot going on, multiple storylines,
at one time un Islamic terrorist group that it's been,
as MP said, sort of in hiding, regrouping, biding their
time while killing American former spec Ops guys in America,
but also planning another terrorist attack somewhere else. There's really
(05:14):
a lot going on, and a lot of several main
characters as well, including of course Jack Ryan Jr. And
who who I still picture as John Krasinski, right or
however you pronounce his last year, and then and then
Jack Ryan Senior, the president who I still pictures Harrison Ford.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Yeah, so do I in the Jack Ryan Junior series.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
What part of my brief is to make sure that
Jack Ryan Senior is really he's really more of a cameo.
He's more of a presence than an active participant. So
he might he might show up in a chapter here,
a chapter there, or in the in the epilogue, but
I want to keep the action focused around Jack Ryan Jr.
(05:59):
As this center of the storm, even if he's not
always the one.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
You know, directly doing the action, right, and you you
do that that that comes through very clearly. I'm also
curious the main bad guy, the guy who's running the
Islamo fascist Islamo terrorist Organization UH is psychologically very interesting
(06:24):
and I wonder where that came from.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Yeah, I in research.
Speaker 4 (06:32):
One of the hardest things to do as a thriller
writer is to create new and novel villains. And you know,
you can't have villains that feel like like cutouts. I
like to think of villains as you might not necessarily
agree with them, you want to root against them, but
you can understand their motives, and their motives are plausible,
(06:52):
and you can understand why they think the way they do.
So in this book, we have, you know, brothers who
are separated at a young age, who are both intensely
damaged by by their by their parents, and it inflicts
one differently than it inflicts the other.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
But we know psychologically what that can do to a person.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
And one of those brothers, and I think that the
character you refer to, you know, has been taught all
his life that he's effectively, you know, the the Mahdi,
the next the next Messiah in the Islamic world, and
has all these reasons to believe that, and so he
effectively becomes a cult leader. And we can imagine what
that would do to someone's psychology who's been told that,
(07:34):
you know, since like age eight.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, a couple other quick things. And and folks, if
you're just joining, we're talking with MP Woodward.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
His new Tom Clancy novel and the Jack Ryan Junior series,
is called Terminal Velocity. It just came out less than
a week ago last Tuesday. Go buy it, go read it.
You'll have a lot of fun with it. I really
enjoyed all the stuff surrounding the the rich people's UH.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Indian wedding.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Indian weddings are unbelievable and I've never been in one,
but I've seen them while I while I was in India,
and there's there's nothing like in Indian wedding and and
and I I love all that conversation. I'm kind of
curious how you researched it. Well.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
So I wanted to set the book UH for the
terrorist Hunt portion up in Kashmir be because it's a
disputed and UH a disputed province between India and Pakistan.
And so I liked the idea of setting setting these characters,
you know, up near there. So I chose Amritsar, which
is a Sikh community, and then UH and then created
(08:40):
this tycoon who seek and the wedding, The Wedding conceptpisode.
I've been to an Indian an Indian wedding. I've been
to India a number of times, and I've worked with
with many Indians, and I find them to be such
It's such a colorful and rich culture that I thought
it would just be very vibrant in a in a
fictional setting. And it also applied because you know of
(09:03):
the whole of the whole India Pakistan tension, right and
before you know, I was writing this book, and shortly
after I sent it in, there actually was a major
terrorist Islamo fascist terrorist and a senate in Kashmir that
was very similar to this and it caused Indian Pakistan
to practically go to blows over it. And that's exactly,
(09:23):
you know, the geopolitical thing that I set up. So
the wedding was really just a way to sort of
exemplify rich Indian culture.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
I loved all that. That was just fantastic.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
All right, I just have a couple of minutes left
and I want to switch gears with you, kind of
going back to where we started. So your Tom Clancy
book came out a week ago, and Red Tide, which
is not in the Clancy series. It's just your stuff
is coming out two weeks from tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
So I don't know whether you were writing them.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
At the same time, or whether the publication, you know,
just sort of made it look like they're coming out
around the same time and you wrote them.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Actually tell me that.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Were you writing two books at the same time, or
did you write one and then the other.
Speaker 4 (10:04):
I tend to Red Tide was the product of a
couple of years effort, and so I took a pause
while I was writing Terminal Velocity and then picked it
up again.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
And then I had because there are two different publishers.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
I really had no control over the dates that they
were coming out. But it comes out on September twenty third.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Right, and the book is called a Red Tide, a
novel of the Next Pacific War.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And obviously I.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Haven't read that yet, but give me a give us
a few seconds on Red Tide.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
This is one of the few times.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Where listeners will hear us say, like, go buy two
books from the same dude that are coming out in
the same month, So tell us a little bit about
Red Tide.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
Red Tide is speculative fiction about a war between the
US and China in the Pacific, and it starts with
again I started this a couple of years ago, but
it actually starts with a trade war and an embargo
of the US does again China over AI chips, which
in the real world we've seen happen with in Nvidia
and has led to all kinds of tension. And so
(11:08):
then then China, because so many semiconductors are manufactured in Taiwan,
China just makes a move to basically grab it, but
not in the way readers would expect. It's not a
classic invasion. It's more it ends up. It ends up
unfolding on the high seas and is somewhat evocative of
I would say the Battle of Midway for World War two.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
All right, folks, So now I've given you two books
from MP Woodward to add to your reading list.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Just go buy them right now.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Terminal Velocity was published last week, so you can order
it and they'll send it right now. Red Tide you
can order it in advance and they'll send it on
publication date, which is two weeks from tomorrow. MP, thanks
so much for joining us as always on KOA. Thanks
as always for entertaining me as well, really enjoy enjoy
(11:57):
your books a lot, love joining Ross, Thank you so much,
all right, thank you
All right, I am holding in my hands right now.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
M P. Woodward's new novel in the Tom Clancy Jack.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Ryan Junior series.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
It's called Terminal Velocity came out last Tuesday, and another
great one. And I got to say, I love these characters.
And you know, I read a lot of thrillers. I
really love the characters Jack Ryan Junior character and John
Clark from the campus. If you don't know what I'm
talking about, I just got to start reading these books.
But MP, welcome back to KOA. It's good to have
you here. Hey Ross, it's great to be here.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So we're going to talk a little bit later about
the other book that you've written recently, but I want
to ask you a question that kind.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Of relates to it.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
You are one of the authors who writes your own stuff,
like your own characters, your own with not a continuation
of something somebody else started, while also having the privilege
of being asked to continue a series from one of
the most famous writers of all time. And there's only
(01:01):
a few people who get to continue, you know, Robert
Ludlam and Vince Flynn and you writing Tom Clancy. And
one of the things I wonder about doing that is
is it easy or difficult to keep these things separate
in your head so that you don't make the characters
(01:23):
in your own books feel too much like the Tom
Clancy characters or vice versa. And what about the styles
of writing.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, that's a great question. It's something I've pondered at length.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
I think there is a definite style that you don't
necessarily fall into too much, like you know, poetically or romantically,
because there's a structural difference. In the Clancy books. You
are almost always working with multiple points of view, You're
almost always working with technology, new technology related to defense,
(01:58):
and a geopolitical contact. And so that means you have
you tend to think about story construction for a Clancy
book a little bit differently than I might in one
of my one of my own novels. So right from
the get go, those are different. Then when it comes
to inhabiting characters, I've done enough of these and read
so many of them, you know, kind of really all.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
My adult life, that it's it's not too difficult.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
For me anyway to slip into the character mode that
that was originally created by by Tom.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Clancy and to inherit them.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
That's much different when i'm than when I'm writing my
my own things, where you know, I've really thought through
a biography of a completely different person. So I suppose
it's a little bit like an actor who plays a role,
you know, sometimes one way, and then plays a role
in the next movie that is completely different. It's a
it's a bit like that mindset to where you're just
(02:53):
completely focused in that area while while you are authoring
the book.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Well we're talking with MP Woodward is was Tom clancy
novel is called Terminal Velocity. So one of the things
that really struck me about this book some years ago,
lots and lots of thrillers were about Islamic terrorism, and
then a lot of thriller authors have moved on to
you know, Russia this, or China that, or Iran this
(03:22):
or North Korea that. And in this book, you're in
a way, you're you're reminding us that the Islamic terrorist
groups and the people with that mindset still exist and
we shouldn't forget about it.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Yeah, for this book, I really wanted to focus in
on a number of the people that I interviewed who
were the warriors and what is what they referred to
as the GWOT or the Global War on Terror and
in so many ways. You know, we're out of Afghanistan, now,
we're out of Iraq now.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
It's not something that is in the daily headlines.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
But in this book, I started with a series of
these guys showing up dead, and I was intrigued by
the idea that, well, you know, what if, what if
there was blowback from what they did, and that these
terror organizations haven't necessarily gone away. They've reconstituted themselves, or
they've they've hidden, et cetera. But they still bear quite
(04:18):
a grudge and they've just been trying to to get stronger.
And in doing that, I also wanted to pick up
the thread that was created by Tom Clancy and his
original work called Dead or Alive. And I spent quite
a bit of time researching that book, and you resurrecting
sort of a next generation of villains from from that book,
(04:39):
and I thought it was a way to help deepen
the not only these characters presently, but but remind everyone
of of their of their their previous exploits.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
This book is interesting because it has a lot of
moving parts, a heck of a lot going on, multiple storylines,
at one time un Islamic terrorist group that it's been,
as MP said, sort of in hiding, regrouping, biding their
time while killing American former spec Ops guys in America,
but also planning another terrorist attack somewhere else. There's really
(05:14):
a lot going on, and a lot of several main
characters as well, including of course Jack Ryan Jr. And
who who I still picture as John Krasinski, right or
however you pronounce his last year, and then and then
Jack Ryan Senior, the president who I still pictures Harrison Ford.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Yeah, so do I in the Jack Ryan Junior series.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
What part of my brief is to make sure that
Jack Ryan Senior is really he's really more of a cameo.
He's more of a presence than an active participant. So
he might he might show up in a chapter here,
a chapter there, or in the in the epilogue, but
I want to keep the action focused around Jack Ryan Jr.
(05:59):
As this center of the storm, even if he's not
always the one.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
You know, directly doing the action, right, and you you
do that that that comes through very clearly. I'm also
curious the main bad guy, the guy who's running the
Islamo fascist Islamo terrorist Organization UH is psychologically very interesting
(06:24):
and I wonder where that came from.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Yeah, I in research.
Speaker 4 (06:32):
One of the hardest things to do as a thriller
writer is to create new and novel villains. And you know,
you can't have villains that feel like like cutouts. I
like to think of villains as you might not necessarily
agree with them, you want to root against them, but
you can understand their motives, and their motives are plausible,
(06:52):
and you can understand why they think the way they do.
So in this book, we have, you know, brothers who
are separated at a young age, who are both intensely
damaged by by their by their parents, and it inflicts
one differently than it inflicts the other.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
But we know psychologically what that can do to a person.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
And one of those brothers, and I think that the
character you refer to, you know, has been taught all
his life that he's effectively, you know, the the Mahdi,
the next the next Messiah in the Islamic world, and
has all these reasons to believe that, and so he
effectively becomes a cult leader. And we can imagine what
that would do to someone's psychology who's been told that,
(07:34):
you know, since like age eight.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, a couple other quick things. And and folks, if
you're just joining, we're talking with MP Woodward.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
His new Tom Clancy novel and the Jack Ryan Junior series,
is called Terminal Velocity. It just came out less than
a week ago last Tuesday. Go buy it, go read it.
You'll have a lot of fun with it. I really
enjoyed all the stuff surrounding the the rich people's UH.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Indian wedding.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Indian weddings are unbelievable and I've never been in one,
but I've seen them while I while I was in India,
and there's there's nothing like in Indian wedding and and
and I I love all that conversation. I'm kind of
curious how you researched it. Well.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
So I wanted to set the book UH for the
terrorist Hunt portion up in Kashmir be because it's a
disputed and UH a disputed province between India and Pakistan.
And so I liked the idea of setting setting these characters,
you know, up near there. So I chose Amritsar, which
is a Sikh community, and then UH and then created
(08:40):
this tycoon who seek and the wedding, The Wedding conceptpisode.
I've been to an Indian an Indian wedding. I've been
to India a number of times, and I've worked with
with many Indians, and I find them to be such
It's such a colorful and rich culture that I thought
it would just be very vibrant in a in a
fictional setting. And it also applied because you know of
(09:03):
the whole of the whole India Pakistan tension, right and
before you know, I was writing this book, and shortly
after I sent it in, there actually was a major
terrorist Islamo fascist terrorist and a senate in Kashmir that
was very similar to this and it caused Indian Pakistan
to practically go to blows over it. And that's exactly,
(09:23):
you know, the geopolitical thing that I set up. So
the wedding was really just a way to sort of
exemplify rich Indian culture.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
I loved all that. That was just fantastic.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
All right, I just have a couple of minutes left
and I want to switch gears with you, kind of
going back to where we started. So your Tom Clancy
book came out a week ago, and Red Tide, which
is not in the Clancy series. It's just your stuff
is coming out two weeks from tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
So I don't know whether you were writing them.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
At the same time, or whether the publication, you know,
just sort of made it look like they're coming out
around the same time and you wrote them.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Actually tell me that.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Were you writing two books at the same time, or
did you write one and then the other.
Speaker 4 (10:04):
I tend to Red Tide was the product of a
couple of years effort, and so I took a pause
while I was writing Terminal Velocity and then picked it
up again.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
And then I had because there are two different publishers.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
I really had no control over the dates that they
were coming out. But it comes out on September twenty third.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Right, and the book is called a Red Tide, a
novel of the Next Pacific War.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And obviously I.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Haven't read that yet, but give me a give us
a few seconds on Red Tide.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
This is one of the few times.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Where listeners will hear us say, like, go buy two
books from the same dude that are coming out in
the same month, So tell us a little bit about
Red Tide.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
Red Tide is speculative fiction about a war between the
US and China in the Pacific, and it starts with
again I started this a couple of years ago, but
it actually starts with a trade war and an embargo
of the US does again China over AI chips, which
in the real world we've seen happen with in Nvidia
and has led to all kinds of tension. And so
(11:08):
then then China, because so many semiconductors are manufactured in Taiwan,
China just makes a move to basically grab it, but
not in the way readers would expect. It's not a
classic invasion. It's more it ends up. It ends up
unfolding on the high seas and is somewhat evocative of
I would say the Battle of Midway for World War two.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
All right, folks, So now I've given you two books
from MP Woodward to add to your reading list.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Just go buy them right now.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Terminal Velocity was published last week, so you can order
it and they'll send it right now. Red Tide you
can order it in advance and they'll send it on
publication date, which is two weeks from tomorrow. MP, thanks
so much for joining us as always on KOA. Thanks
as always for entertaining me as well, really enjoy enjoy
(11:57):
your books a lot, love joining Ross, Thank you so much,
all right, thank you
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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