Tom Clancy's Power Plays

About the Tom Clancy's Power Plays series

Power Plays swaps the government agencies of Clancy's other franchises for the private sector: Roger Gordian is the founder and CEO of UpLink International, a Silicon Valley satellite-and-telecommunications giant whose reach into the developing world makes him a de facto player in geopolitics whether he wants to be or not. When UpLink's people, technology or interests come under threat -- corporate sabotage, bioweapons, an African warlord, a cyberattack targeting the world's financial infrastructure -- Gordian turns to Sword, an in-house crisis-response team built from former intelligence and special-operations veterans who operate with the resources of a nation-state but answer to a corporate boardroom rather than the White House.

Created by Tom Clancy and prolific anthologist-packager Martin H. Greenberg, every entry was written by Jerome Preisler, who kept the series' focus squarely on the collision between global business and global security -- industrial espionage, satellite warfare, bioterrorism aimed at agriculture, financial-system attacks -- during a period (1997-2004) when techno-thrillers were reckoning with the internet's arrival as a genuine battlefield. The result reads like Clancy's own work scaled down to boardroom stakes and private muscle: still geopolitically engaged, but narrower in cast and briskly paced across eight novels that never outstayed a five-hundred-page welcome.