BMOC
Warren Meyer, entrepreneur and proprietor of Coyote Blog, recently wrote a novel BMOC. After reading about it on his blog, I made a mental note to purchase a copy at some point, but was instead able to wrangle a free review copy.
I had a bit of initial concern when the book emerged from the box – the publisher was listed as one “Yapping Coyote Press”, and the resemblance of the publisher’s name to the blog name made me conclude that the novel was self-published. Obviously, there’s nothing about vertical integration that makes a self published book necessarily worse than a conventionally published book, but one knows that any conventionally published book has cleared the slush pile, so from an asymmetric information perspective, (a) a book that has passed one level of review is presumably of a high quality and (b) an author’s choice to avoid the quality-check suggests that he himself has concerns.
As it turns out, my initial misgivings were irrelevant – the book was enjoyable, and certainly matched or exceeded the average quality of other books in the genre.
BMOC covers one Susan Hunter, Harvard MBA student, who takes a summer internship at BMOC, Inc., a startup run by a hippy capitalist (flip through your back issues of Reason magazine to see the debate between John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, and T.J. Rogers, for a rough idea of the sort). Susan is on the job just a moment before she’s delegated to deal with a situation – one of the high school clients who’s signed up for the real-life social-consulting services offered by BMOC turns up dead, with a suspicious suicide note.
Speaking of genre: one can hardly call BMOC a mystery, as the murderer is introduced on page 1, and orchestrates the crime on page 37 (of the ~290 page novel). The fun comes not from figuring out the crime (as in a mystery), or in seeing the guilty parties brought to justice (not to give away too much, but justice – such as it is – is quite incomplete), but from (a) watching competent people behave competently, and uncover 90% of the mystery, and (b) enjoying Warren Meyer’s authorial voice of libertarian-leaning, pro-business, anti-bullshit (un)common sense. Spades are called spades. People behave rationally. Folks (entrepreneurs, cops, and consultants) muddle through and create value, occasionally by having flashes of insights, but usually by just doing the job. Politicians and conspirators try to make a dishonest buck and cover their butts. In short, the book reads like it’s populated by real people.
Getting back to the genre: I suppose I’d call it one part Neal Stephenson wow-let’s-get-into-the-details, and six parts Elmore Leonard here’s-how-it-happened-look-at-these-idiots. “Detective, fiction”, Amazon informs me it’s called. That sounds reasonable.
As a science fiction fan, my thoughts are that (a) the book was a bit short, (b) the import of the events was pretty minor – no star systems saved, no alien war fleets destroyed, etc. On the bright side, this means that the book is not a three course meal, but a light snack of a couple of crackers and cheese. One can polish it off quickly and spend a few hours amused, without making a long term commitment to read all 14,000 pages of the Epic of Saving { The Free Star Systems / the Ancestral Home of the Elves / whatever }. Like cheese and crackers, the book doesn’t obviate the need for a real meal every now and then, but that doesn’t mean it fails at what it does.
In short, it aims to be entertainment, and it does the job.
All in all, recommended. Four out of five stars. I’d read another book by Warren.
See also the website, with links to various purchasing options (including PDF for $4).
