At the urging of his alien partner in crime, Helen
Damnation, Dr. Argon is putting together a supervillain team to pull off the
ultimate crime – the destruction of Helen’s space station to keep it out of the
hands of super heroes.
If they pull it off, the world will be free – if not, the
heroes will have unprecedented power to impose their vision on the world – a vision
garnered from their ivory towers that cares little for the people who are disposed
of out of their view.
This book hit all the right notes for me and it’s
actually taken me a while to try and find the way to explain just how excellent
this book was. I’m struggling because I really don’t know how to truly explain
this book without spoiling it.
While there are certainly many elements of the Superhero
genre that are willing to go dark, to espouse an anti-hero and even flirt with
the ideas of oppression and superheroes being on the wrong side, I don’t think
any book I’ve come across has gone as far, as dark or as brutally critical as
this one
Rather than aiming for typical castings of good and evil,
this book is cruelly scathing on what we ACTUALLY consider good and how that
would reflect on superheroes in our world. So we have superheroes with their
millionaire secret identities (playboy, genius, scientists) and they have vast,
multi-national companies… But vast, multinational companies are responsible for
all kinds of abuses – employee rights, pollution, raiding developing nations,
having vast influence over governments – how much more so would this be if they
were headed by beings with super-powers and the unquestionable support of the
populace.
Historic heroes from the US’s Cold War past are still
around, champions of the American Way – but super hero comics have used heroes
to combat all kinds of real world issues – especially during World War 2 and
the Cold War. What is the actual implication of super-powerful beings being
involved in a lot of proxy cold-wars, regime changes and a myriad of other
actions in the name of fighting communism and/or terrorism? There’s even a
superhero slaughtering undocumented migrants along the US/Mexico border.
And, of course, in a world with actual super-villains
issues like “due process” and “enhanced interrogation” are much more dire – if
“terrorism” has us excusing torture and detention without trial, what would be
our reaction to super-powered villains?
In short, the superheroes, the paragons of law and order
pretty much do exactly what I would cynically expect paragons of “law and
order” to actually do. It’s corrupt, it’s brutal and it’s all the abuses that
the powerful can inflict to maintain that power and the system writ large.
Especially since the most common way of becoming super heroes, the Prisms, are
tightly policed by the superheroes and American government themselves
furthering their power and control by controlling this vital new resource. Many
of these superheroes are obvious excellent parallels with major DC or Marvel
characters
This is the world setting and it’s a truly fascinating
backdrop and backbone to everything else – and puts a whole new slant to us
following the supervillains. And, again, it’s not as simple as just flipping
the switch and making the villains wonderful freedom fighters. We have some villains
– many of whom we see in the prison and some who our protagonists actually
fight alongside are simply pure evil – whether it’s the demonic Baelphagor who
seeks nothing but death and carnage (while also brutally crushing idealism with
his scathing commentary on their chance of actually changing anything) and many
more are, at best, less-than ideal and certainly very self-serving. It’s not a
good vs evil battle by any stretch.
So this is the amazing world setting and from there we go
to our amazing characters – each of which is truly spectacular and I love them
all. There’s Dr. Argon, a Black, Gay man, a genius with his amazing inventions
desperately putting together an impossible plan while at the same time being –
as one would expect from a genius of his calibre, arrogant and with minimal
social skills which he desperately tries to imitate. He clings to hope he
doesn’t really believe in, tries to bring about change he knows is impossible
and is constantly tempted by a normal life with his husband but still driven to
his impossible mission; doing things that he knows are wrong and hating himself
for them – but doing them because he has to.
And there’s Motley, a middle aged Latina woman who knows
she is out of her league. She’s a brilliant thief, snarky, incredibly funny and
from a background of extreme poverty and loss that gives her an intensely
critical lens to cast on the high privileged super heroes. Again, she faces
conflict with her self-interest (and survival) and conscience and becoming a general
well round, excellent, awesome character (her friendship is amazing and I love
that she has an added fascination with history – it’s this random quirk that
makes her such a full character).
Helen Damnation (which is an awesome name) is an alien – with so much history and conflict and unflinching moral code that I can’t even begin to spoil but is, of course, awesome.
Coltan is Japanese-American, young and intensely
idealistic in the university-marxist kind of way. He has both familial sense of
injustice (his grandfather was caught in the World War 2 internment) and his
own well-read social conscience. His idealism takes a lot of hard knocks and
there’s a nice romance plot there for him as well.
That romance plot also opens up some other interesting little
superhero tropes – especially with the superheroines. The genre so commonly
sexualises superheroines with no trousers and boob windows and this is
reflected in the pressures these face – superheroines who are afraid of getting
older, who have to fixate on how they look at least as much as their powers; one
storyline follows a superheroine who is now middle aged and facing pressures
because of that.
After all this I haven’t said a lot about the plot – even
though it was good, exciting, well paced, well balanced and involved all the
characters excellently. The plot was excellent – but so much else was amazing
that I find myself running out of superlative adjectives.
I loved this book. The plot was excellent even that
excellent point was overwhelmed by the diversity, the excellent
characterisations, the brilliant world and the on-the-nose social commentary
all delivered in a way that perfectly married with the plot itself. It was fun,
it was deep, it was snarky, it was diverse, it was complex, it was poignant and
it was epic and horrific and amazing and just damn amazing.
