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Books: Myke Cole
Mar. 24th, 2012 03:49 pmSo, thanks to a) enjoying his Big Idea post on Scalzi's blog, and b) needing to pick up a book for the airplane ride home from New York, I read Myke Cole's Shadow Ops: Control Point this week. I liked it a lot. I'm really glad I read it, because I've been miserably slogging through a well regarded military sff book by a male writer this month and starting to think, "well, maybe I only like military sff by female writers, maybe all military genrefic by male writers is going to be a wash for me." Because I quite like Bujold's work, and I adore Moon's stuff, but this one book was just... not working for me.
And then I picked up Cole's book, and I didn't have the level of visceral identification with it that I do with some of Moon's stuff, but I liked it a lot, it kept me along for the ride in the bits that weren't my thing, and when it hit me with a bit that was my thing it really sucked me under.
The fact that the protagonist is a black man from Vermont was pretty much going to sell me on it anyway, this is true. But I liked a lot about it. I wasn't sure how much I loved the portrayal of women in some parts, but we did get some women who were villains and women who were able to use their powers in really destructive ways and ambivalent about doing so. And the political consequences of the world building and the scale of changes that they implied worked well for me.
That said, there are certain subsets of friends I'd wholeheartedly recommend it to, and others who I wouldn't at all. I think that this is a book that nails it out of the park for a certain audience, works solidly well enough for a second audience, and wouldn't work at all for a third audience, and that I have friends in all three audiences.
And then I picked up Cole's book, and I didn't have the level of visceral identification with it that I do with some of Moon's stuff, but I liked it a lot, it kept me along for the ride in the bits that weren't my thing, and when it hit me with a bit that was my thing it really sucked me under.
The fact that the protagonist is a black man from Vermont was pretty much going to sell me on it anyway, this is true. But I liked a lot about it. I wasn't sure how much I loved the portrayal of women in some parts, but we did get some women who were villains and women who were able to use their powers in really destructive ways and ambivalent about doing so. And the political consequences of the world building and the scale of changes that they implied worked well for me.
That said, there are certain subsets of friends I'd wholeheartedly recommend it to, and others who I wouldn't at all. I think that this is a book that nails it out of the park for a certain audience, works solidly well enough for a second audience, and wouldn't work at all for a third audience, and that I have friends in all three audiences.
