Superhero Fiction (not comics)

Two thumbs up for Soon I Will Be Invincible or are we only doing fiction of existing comic book lines?

Found this during my daily perusal of the site:
Publishers that specialize in superhero short stories


been meaning to check this out but keep forgetting to.

Article on Archvillain

Damn forum logging-out bug. I'll see if I can recreate this post.

...


Anyway, I was at the bookstore today (because I haven't been since yesterday) and I saw they've re-released the first Wild Cards story collection. It has 3 new stories and a cool new cover. You read most of it here at Google books.

Quantum Prophecy #1: The Awakening by Michael Carroll is a YA book, which I didn't know when I ordered it from the library. Once I got it, I was a bit trepidatious that it might be a little too emo or overly "teenage" in a bad way... you now, a Twilight sort of way. My relief was great when I found that's not the case. Yes, the two main characters are teenage boys, both about 13, but they're smart and capable and not at all annoying.

The book opens with a humdinger of an action scene: the world's biggest bad guy, Ragnarok, has built a gigantic battle tank that's headed for New York City. He's gathered a small army of supervillains to assist him, drawing in most of the world's superheroes for a titanic fight. You pretty much don't get more widescreen epic than that, and the book moves right along. That's just the opener, however, because the climax of the fight results in a gigantic explosion... and all the superpowered people in the world disappear, except for three siblings, who have no idea why they were spared.

Cut to 10 years later and our two heroes, Irish schoolboys, are given an assignment to write about their favorite hero on the anniversary of "Mystery Day." Except the mystery is even bigger than they imagine, because suddenly one of them exhibits uncontrollable superspeed and the other is being hunted by black helicopters. Carroll ties it all together so it doesn't sound as random as that.

I give it a solid 4 stars for being engaging, fun and full of characters who do smart things rather than being dumb for the plot's sake. I've already ordered the 2nd in the trilogy from the library. The picture on the left is the original cover. Apparently Carroll has written a number of other books in this same universe (according to his website it's 5 novels and short story collection), so they're reissuing them with consistent covers like the one on the right. I saw the latest, Superhumans, at the bookstore today and paged through it. It looks like it's a flashback tale to when the adult heroes of this book's opener were just starting out, so I figured I'd wait to finish the first trilogy before going on.

Anyway, it's quite good, so check it out.

Found two new books to add to the list I am going to read at some point in the near future:

Hero By Mike Lupica

Super Human by Michael Carroll

I would heartily disrecommend (anti-recommend?) It's Superman by Tom De Haven.

Its about Clark Kent's early years but it completely changes the classic mythology around. It basically makes all the characters unlikable. And the worst sin in my opinion is the writing style. It's first person present so it reads like a transcript from a roleplaying session. "Clark opens his hand slowly and looks at the flattened bullet. Lois steps back startled and raises her hand to her face." That's not an actual excerpt by the way, just an example of the writing style for those who are unfamiliar with it.

The author also seems to have a vendetta against anti smoking types. He reverses the cliche that you see in much heroic fiction in making the bad guys smokers. Instead everybody in the book seems to smoke except for Lex Luthor who fanatically hates the habit and forbids his lackeys to engage in it. Lois and even Clark are smokers in this book.

All in all this book bears about as much similarity to Superman as the movie Starship Troopers did to the Heinlein book but it's far less entertaining.

The second book in Michael Carroll's "New Heroes" trilogy keeps up the momentum of the first book. It also maintains the "Young Adult fiction in name only" theme by tackling tough choices and not flinching from the logical progression of the characters he's set up. There's nothing graphic about the violence, but it's there in spades. It does suffer a bit from "middle chapter syndrome" as many second installments to trilogies do, but it sets up the conflict for the final conflict quite well, with battle lines clearly drawn. Unfortunately for the New Heroes, despite a few wins all the cards are held by the bad guys. I did have kind of a hard time believing some of these characters were only 13- to 16-years old since they acted like little adults sometimes, but that's a minor quibble for me.

Overall 3.5 stars.

The third book in the Quantum Prophecy series completely fizzled on me. It's a very lame ending to the series. There are a couple of decent set pieces, but the overall feeling I had at the end was one of being let down.

To call Dull Boy by Sarah Cross a "dull book" is too easy a target. Plus it's not completely true -- it's more clumsy than anything else. This is very much a Young Adult novel in that the characters don't quite feel real and the dialogue and behavior of the teenagers doesn't come across as realistic. It's almost as if Cross doesn't remember what it was like to be a teenager herself, since the scenes among the teens feel so painfully forced in a "beginner writer" sort of way.

There are so many references to the X-Men (including one scene where the titular character says to the Wolverine-esque girl-with-an-attitude that they should do a "fastball special." If the book were more interesting, I'd be tempted to map the characters on their X-Men analogues because they're all there, including Emma Frost. There's so much angst that it weighs down the story tremendously. By the time they get to the big action scene, it's too little too late, and not really all that impressive.

1.5 stars.

Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis is astonishingly well written. This really is a very literary book. It's also excruciatingly slow. This is an alternate WW II story about Nazi Ubermenschen facing off against British warlocks. Great idea, really evocative set-up, and then... nothing. Well, almost nothing. The action scenes are few and far between. Tregillis' point is obviously that war is hell. In this instance it's literal, as the warlocks make deals with demons. Superior prose, inferior plot.

Apparently this is the first of a proposed trilogy. If the ratio of content to words continues, at some point someone could cut out all the plodding bits and cut together a snappy story. Won't be me, though - I'm out of this series.

Okay, that's three bad books in a row. I'm done seeking out superhero fiction until Peter Clines finishes the sequel to Ex-Heroes. (Seriously read that book!)

So let's turn back time to good superhero fiction. I'll start with John Ridley, comic book writer, author and screenwriter.



The set-up for this story is that a supervillain blew up San Francisco, leading to the outlawing of all metanormal humans. So the supers who don't leave or get deported are hunted down and killed by cops specifically assigned for that job. Not an original premise, but this story is so kinetic and relentless that it doesn't matter. This is not great literature -- it's a modern superhero pulp book that a geek like me considers a beach read. If there's a moral to the story at all, it's that fanaticism is bad. Also, not revelatory, but the conflicted heroine at the heart of the book is equal parts crazy and bad-***, which keeps it interesting. I'm not sure this is meant to be examined deeply; it's more like a Mike Hammer book with super-mutants.



At first, this sequel wasn't doing it for me. The writing felt lazier, almost stream-of-consciousness, with half-finished thoughts. But it was an easy enough read so I stuck with it for a while longer. I was just about to put it down when Ridley upped the ante in the extreme and really turned up the heat. I literally said out loud, "No you did NOT." But he had. Read it to find out what that was. He also doubles your fun by adding yet another bad-*** hot chick, who just so happens to have a bit of a conflict going with the existing bad-*** hot chick from the first book. As if the mutants and bureaucracy weren't enough, now they have to compete against each other.

I don't care if people think these are slight books, nothing more than souped-up crime fiction: I like 'em.

Stumbled on After the Golden Age, recently. A good read through the first quarter of it.

Two more posted in other threads should be added here.


Secret World Chronicles
Book One: Invasion by Mercedes Lackey, Steve Libbey, Dennis Lee, & Cody Martin

Website Description:

Both of the above books have CoH connections. "Invasion" is a Wild Cards-style book by CoH players with characters based on Paragon City denizens while the "Senor 105" story collection in Obverse features the lead-off story written by our very own Rubberlad, Joe "You're Glue" Curren.

I haven't gotten a copy of the Obverse one yet, but I have Invasion as well as After the Golden Age on my to-read pile.

I'm about halfway through Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle. So far, it is a pretty interesting read. Some interesting characters. The mysterious Nazi villain seems a little bit cheap as a bad guy -- everybody hates the Nazis. But it is good enough to have me keep reading -- the writing style has to be enjoyable enough for me to keep going, and this one is well enough written.

It also comes with a CD with a bunch of stuff on it, including the podcasts and several other Mercedes Lackey books in electronic form.

With regard to After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn, here's my personal mini-review of it:

This is an excellent, just-released tale of the daughter of the world's most prominent superheroes, Celia West, who has been trying to get out of her parents' shadow since her teenage years (at one point, even joining their nemesis for a couple months). Now, years later, she's a forensic accountant (like the real people who brought down Capone) charged with tracking down the finances of that very same villain while dodging kidnapping attempts and uncovering a mysterious plot to put the city's heroes into disrepute. It's a fun, respectful romp written by someone who quite clearly has a love for Golden and Silver Age comics. Ms. Vaughn's characters and story put me in mind of the comics I read in my teenage years before The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen ushered in the Dark Age of Comics. I very much hope that, at some point in the future, she will return to this universe and tell us more stories about the heroes (powered and otherwise) who inhabit it.

From New Babel Books

Upcoming from Cliffhanger Books: Gods of Justice