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  1. Review: “Shadow Ops: Control Point” by Myke Cole

    March 29, 2012 by Colleen

    Shadow Ops: Control Point by Myke Cole

    Published: January 31, 2012, Ace

     

    The Great Reawakening is upon us, and ordinary people are starting to manifest magical powers. While this sounds like the stuff of fairy tales, one can only imagine the kind of headache this would cause for everyone from local law enforcement to national security agencies. Magic would need to be monitored, controlled, made to work for us rather than against us. Power is dangerous. Unless we’re the ones wielding it.

    This is the world in which Myke Cole’s Control Point takes place. It’s a world in which someone whose powers manifest has two choices: join up or die. Those who manifest, and don’t turn themselves in, are referred to as Selfers. They are usually tracked down and killed. And it’s in this environment that Lieutenant Oscar Britton manifests his power: Portamancy (the ability to open gates between one place and another) — a Prohibited class of magic. And he runs.

    Britton is captured, and  finds that Probes (those who manifest in a Prohibited class of magic) are not always killed, as everyone believes. Instead, they are taken to a secret base and trained. They form an elite corp of government contractors, deadly and trained to use their magic in service of the United States government.

    The story is as much about Britton’s inner turmoil, about his desire to stay alive versus his desire to do what’s right (unfortunately, the two are not compatible throughout most of the book), and, ultimately, about his fight to gain his freedom, as it is about magical military battles. When I first started reading Control Point, I honestly wasn’t sure I would like it. I haven’t read a lot of military fiction (though I am a fan of Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series and of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and its sequels) and felt out of my element among the military-speak and situations that feel completely foreign to me. But very quickly, you get to see more of who Oscar Britton really is: someone who thinks. Someone who wants to do right, and who dares to challenge authority.

    Needless to say, by the end of the book he is the government’s worst nightmare come true.

    Much of the book (between battles against Selfers and the Goblins that are indigenous to the area in which the secret military base where Britton trains is located) is about Britton’s own battle to figure out where he belongs, what he should be doing. He feels that much of what he’s doing at the behest of the government is wrong. He doesn’t have a lot of choice (a bomb in his heart, implanted to keep him from running, forces him to stay and follow orders) but, bit by bit, he frees himself. He refuses to become the deadly, mindless and obedient tool the government wants him to be.  He will get out and do what he can to help those who need it. Or he’ll die trying.

    Thoughts

    I have zero experience with the military other than what most Americans have: what we read in books and what’s depicted on television and in the movies. I do remember listening to my uncle, who served in the Army in Vietnam, talking about his experiences. And I remember him saying some version of “you just follow orders, and don’t think about it. You make yourself do as you’re told and believe that the people in charge know what they’re doing and that we’re the good guys.”

    Britton is forced to face the fact that, at least where magic is concerned, the government is not doing right by its people. He can ignore it, follow orders, and stay alive. But he can’t just stand by and be part of the problem. He has to stand up for what’s right, and try to make it better. He’s a likable protagonist in an impossible situation, which always makes for engrossing reading. I read a few reviews on Amazon in which people talked about how dumb Britton was or how he made huge mistakes and what the hell is wrong with him? Seriously? If he’d been perfect, if he’d made the right, safest decision every time, I would have hated this book. Britton screws up, big time. And he’s going to have to live with the repercussions of those screw-ups. It’s not easy, it’s not pretty, and there are many things he could have handled better. But he strikes me as a character who is doing the best he can in a world in which everything has been turned upside down.

    Overall, Control Point was fast-paced, full of action, and loaded with turmoil, both physical and emotional. Definitely recommended.

     

     

     

     

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  2. On Giving Up

    March 26, 2012 by Colleen

    I had what amounted to a writing-related panic attack over the weekend, in which I questioned everything from who I was to what exactly I thought I was doing. I decided to quit working on the novel. I decided that I have no idea what I’m doing, and that I’m wasting time, and that, even if the impossible happened and this book were to get published, there’s no way in hell I’d be able to do it again.

    “I’m a garden writer. I should just write about gardening.”

    It’s safe. It’s what I know, and I’ve had a certain level of success. At this point in my life, it’s what adds to our family’s income.

    I slept in yesterday. And I slept in today. No 4 AM wake-up. No tapping away at my keyboard while the rest of the world, including the birds outside my window, still slept.

    So easy to just let it go. So many reasons to just stop, and go back to what I know. I’ve struggled with the whole process of working on a book. It feels selfish, in many ways. This was time I was taking away from my family, from working on projects that would actually result in money for my family. To do what? Sit and write stories about someone who only exists in m y head?

    Self-absorbed, selfish bullshit.

    I must be selfish. I must be self-absorbed. Because I’ve found, after two days of not writing, that I HATE not working on the novel. I need these people in my head. I missed them. When I finally did sit down at my computer again this morning, I automatically opened the file I’ve been working away at all this time, as if my body knew even if my brain didn’t. I need this.

    I don’t know what I’m doing. It takes a lot of mental energy that could probably more usefully be put to work elsewhere. It may never lead to anything other than one more unpublished manuscript sitting in a file somewhere.

    So be it. I’ll be dead someday, whether I worked on writing fiction or not. I’d rather go, knowing I did what I knew I needed to do. Which sounds really kind of stupid and melodramatic, but it’s true. I may go with a closet full of unpublished, unreadable crap. But at least it will be mine, something I did because I respected myself enough to pay attention and do what my heart told me to do.

    Soundtrack to this post:

    Category Writing | Tags: , , | 4 Comments

  3. On What Makes a Hero Worth Reading

    March 25, 2012 by Colleen

    johnnyberg, stockxchng

    I’ve been thinking lately about what makes a good hero, in fiction (and elsewhere), and I came to an interesting realization. In the book I’m working on, my hero tells my heroine “I believe in you” nearly as much as he tells her “I love you.”

    And the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that I’d write this particular hero. When I think about the books in my genre that I most enjoy reading, the leading men tend to have this unwavering belief in their leading ladies.

    Take Grant Cooperon, from Marjorie M. Liu’s fantastic Hunter Kiss series. Maxine Kiss is the ultimate badass. She fights demons. She shares her body with five demons, for crying out loud. It doesn’t get more badass than that. Grant is a power in his own right. Even scarier than Maxine, according to most of the characters.  And he would go through hell and back, he would set his own life aside if he could, to keep her safe.

    But if all the Hunter Kiss series was was yet another “rescue the princess” (even if she’s a badass princess) storyline, it wouldn’t hold my attention. Because the thing I love about the character of Grant is ultimately his belief in Maxine, his respect for who she is and what she does.

    Does he hate it when she goes out and faces evil on her own? Yeah. Does he sometimes tell her not to? Sure. But when it comes down to it, he knows that those things about Maxine that scare him to death are also the things that make him love her, that her strength, her power, her need to make things right make her who she is.

    He respects, ultimately, that she knows what she’s doing, that she knows how to handle herself and the situations around her. He knows she faces some vile shit when she leaves his side, but he also knows (because Maxine has proven it over, and over, and over again) that when it’s all done, when she’s done what she needs to do, she’ll be back.

    And while Grant may or may not realize it, that belief in her, that endless respect for who she is, is what keeps Maxine coming back. Yeah, he may be hot, and he may be powerful, but there are plenty of good-looking, powerful men out there. What makes this one worthy of Maxine’s love is how deeply he respects her.

    Liu does a great job at writing these kinds of heroes. Eddie in Within the Flames, Hari in Tiger Eye, and Charlie in A Dream of Stone and Shadow all have this absolute belief/respect thing going on for the heroines in their respective books, and they make for addictive reading.

     

    Heroes That Fall Short

    And then there are those heroes that frustrate. I’ve been reading Christina Henry’s Madeline Black books. Her hero, Gabriel Angeloscuro, comes to mind. I like Gabriel a lot. He loves Maddie. He protects her when he can, and he makes it clear that he wants to be with her. But when it’s said and done, you don’t really (at least through the first two books – I’ll be reading book 3 soon) get that sense that he believes in her. She does the things she does for a reason. She does the best she can with the new powers and new life she finds herself in. Gabriel doesn’t always understand what she’s doing, and I get the sense that, if he could, he’d just handle everything himself. And this, at least for now, keeps Gabriel out of the swoon-worthy category for me.

    We can go back further. Rochester in Jane Eyre, with his belief that it was better to lie to Jane, to “protect” her from the truth (while getting what he wants, incidentally) may redeem himself with his love for Jane, but he’s not the kind of hero that has me saying “yeah, that’s a MAN.”

    And let’s not get into Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff. Sure, he loves Cathy. He’s also a narcissistic, controlling, manipulative, passive-aggressive ass. No, thank you.

    A hero who loves the heroine, who sweeps her off her feet, protects her, cares for her when she needs it – all of this is wonderful, admirable, definitely appreciated. But one who, above all, shows belief in and respect for the woman he loves? That kind of hero will keep me reading long past the time I should have turned the lights out.

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