Review: Sixteenth Watch

Sixteenth Watch by Myke Cole
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

[Received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review]

Summary: Set twenty minutes into the future, so to speak, Sixteenth Watch is a solid military fiction book with scifi elements, more so than science fiction book proper, one that attempts to juggle a futuristic plot concept and wrap it around a core of familiarity with the present. The idea of trying to imagine how things in the military could be based on how they are now is intriguing, and the book definitely does its best when deep in the action or in the moments of political tension between the branches. I would like to see where the author could take the setting in the future, and the way the story ends makes me wonder if perhaps he is planning to find out. However, what makes the novel is also in some ways what threatens to damn it. The over-use of acronyms in particular is like to be off-putting for people not familiar with them, and might well dilute whatever enjoyment they can get from the book as having to constantly flip over to the end of the book just to understand what the hell the characters are saying is severely off-putting to say the least.

Prose: There were a few scattered typos, but nothing terribly obnoxious or pervasive. More troublesome than that is the fact I see no reasonable excuse for an epub to not have each instance (or at least the first instance) of every acronym linked to a definition in the glossary. Obviously, people familiar with the terms will not need them, but I'd hazard to say most people who pick up the book wont be familiar with the terms, and in a book so heavy with acronyms, expecting people to go back and forth manually seems like a gross oversight. In general, while I respect what the author was trying to achieve, I feel like overall they work against the story more than for it, but again that might just be because I have little familiarity with the Service. 3/5

Plot: I have mixed feelings about the plot. Or more exactly about the way the plot peters out in the end. On one hand, as mentioned, the overall concept is really appealing, and the execution of the latter parts of the novel in particular kept me well interested. Ironically, it is as the story progresses that it starts to feel more and more like the novel has forgotten its own plot. Like the author is simply meandering from here to there until he finds an arbitrary spot he likes in the regolith. I am fully aware this is an odd complaint, as the latter parts of the book are the more action-packed and generally speaking the ones I liked best, but meandering is ultimately unsatisfying, and the bits of action ultimately don't save the whole from the feeling of... 'what' when you suddenly stumble into an epilogue that feels like the end of a chapter more than a proper cliffhanger. 2/5

Pacing: I found the first 1/3 of the book to be both rather slow and really uninteresting in comparison to the rest of it. It felt like the author wasn't really sure of the best way to start off the story. He definitely didnt know how to end it either, but once pas the introductory bit, at least, things start picking up at a nice enough rate. 3/5

Characterization: I generally enjoyed Jane's character, as well as Ho's. Their dynamic with each other is specially entertaining. The rest of the cast seemed much less developed, sometimes verging dangerously on flat. specially her team. None of them are particularly memorable or interesting, and could in most cases likely be encompassed with one or two words. 3/5

World-building: As mentioned in the summary, the concept itself is one of my favourite parts of the book. I hated the way the acronyms were presented, sure, and the acronyms were there partly to deliver a certain believability to the speech pattern of officers in the military, but thats more of a technical flaw they could easily fix, specially in the electronic version of the book. I also really enjoyed the little snippets we get at the beginning of each chapter, as they really do help to flesh out the peception we have of this slightly more futuristic earth. 4/5

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