I really like Ringo's writing style. I really like his plotting style. Both were present in this. However.

I don't think I've seen anyone attempt to shag Kipling's The White Man's Burden into the sunset before, and it's decidedly not a pretty thing. The solid writing was there. The solid plotting was there. It just kept - repeatedly - licking the notion that cultures not American were lesser, and doing so in ways that crossed some pretty hard lines.

I would like to think that this got fixed beyond the Advanced Reader's Copy that I ended up with, but that was some pretty seriously baked in racist crap.