Myke Cole: The Warrior Wordsmith

I started reading Myke's books because I have a soft spot for veterans, especially those who have served in Iraq/Afghanistan and I have a soft spot for folks in the reserves.(Myke continues to serve his country as a reservist in the US Coast Guard as a search and rescue warrior). 

However that, in and of itself, would not have been enough to keep me turning the pages on his debut series Shadow Ops  or recommending him as an author because, let's face it, there are more than a few veterans who are now writing, and not all of what is being written is worth the death of the tree upon which it is printed. 

No, I kept reading Myke's books because he is a damn good storyteller and writer. 

The Shadow Ops series is classified as Military Fantasy. [Get it? Evil Grin]. For some reason that makes my brain go xxx-rated places but that's the sub-genre so I guess I'll just have to deal with the fact that it's a little more PG than some of the other military fantasies that might be on my TBR pile :p. 

I wasn't sure that I would like the series.   In some weird, uninformed, prejudiced way I had initially thought that the premise seemed a bit RPG. I have no idea why I thought that and, even if it had been, there's anything wrong with RPG - it's just not part of my own personal nerd experience. 

Digression Alert

I will say that I uber loved watching Myke Cole and Saladin Ahmed Co-DM a Keep on the Borderlands D&D game at Epic Confusion in Michigan in 2012.  You can read Myke's blog about RPG's and what they meant to both him and other authors as well as the experience of being Co-DM for a group of RPG'ing epic authors here.

You can watch the 2012 game video  here.

And they did it again in 2013. To view click here.

And I fully endorse Wil Wheaton's definition to a newly birthed nerd girl about why the nerd/geek word and world is awesome. If you haven't seen that video, put everything down and go watch it immediately here, and then tell me if that from-the-heart blessing from Wil does not just break your heart right open!

And finally, Pat Rothfuss hosted an episode of The Story Board focused on video-game storytelling which has started to re-educate my sense of the story in gaming.  You can view that here. The bottom line is that I suck at role-playing and that probably just makes me jealous of those who can throw themselves into it without self-consciousness ... :)  

End Digression Alert

So, to get back to the regularly scheduled review of Myke Cole as author as opposed to Myke as Co-DM.

You can read Michael Jone's book review for Control Point on Tor's site here.

and a review of Fortress Frontier (also on the Tor site) by Stefan Raets here.

The main character in the initial book Control Point is a POC.  It amazes me how unusual this is.  But Oscar Britton is no token POC.  He is not there to make some kind of diversity point.  Oscar is just Oscar and he happens to be a POC. I did wonder, though the book was published prior to the actual event, in a world of Floridas and Travyon Martins, in a world of one percents vs ninety-nine percents - if the reason that Oscar went AWOL after he is captured when his latent magic of Portmancy bursts into uncontrolled life, was in part due to his knowing how he would be treated as a black man.  Guilty until proven innocent, and perhaps, guilty even then.

I loved Oscar Britton as a fully realized, complex dude with a complicated father-son relationship (which for some reason reminded me of the relationship between Ben Meecham and his father, Lt. Col. Wilbur "Bull" Meecham, in Pat Conroy's The Great Santini ... a book that I LOVED when I first read it in high school).   

Bottom Line I:  Great storytelling, great multi-dimensional characters (pun intended), solid world-building, and great dialogue.

Bottom Line II:  Myke Cole's Shadow Ops series is well worth investing in and immersing yourself in.  Currently under production is the third novel, Breach Zone.  Myke has a contract for an additional three novels in the series and the fourth, Gemini Cell is coming out in 2015.

Click here for Myke's site.  You can also find him on FB here and twitter here.

Cover art is by Larry Rostant.

[Editors Note: Apologies for the font size issues - I'll try to get them sorted out but for the moment don't have time to go into the coding to fix ... ]

[Editor's Comment:  August 18, 2013 - It is weird but there are lots of folks out there who have a real hate-on for Oscar.  I get what they are concerned about - that at the first sign of trouble he broke and ran.  That he ended up through certain choices he made with lots of collateral damage all around him but I guess my anti-authoritarian and libertarian streaks saved the character for me as I probably wouldn't have trusted the government further than I could spit into a cross-wind either.]