Oh, they usually don't do it specifically. But there are a lot of books that feel the need to clear the stage for their heroes by casually killing off billions of people via virus, nuclear holocaust, war, or alien invasion. I live near a major city; I am middle-aged and not specced for post-holocaust survival skills - ergo I would be among the numberless dead.
And, call me crazy! but I resent books that do that to me. I've got children, so I even resent it in books that push their apocalypse out past when I would likely already be dead.
Now, that's not really the issue with the book today. But maybe my grumpiness is spreading, because the underlying world in this James Alan Gardner series is deeply crapsack, in which normal people have no power or agency at all, in anything about how their world is run or even whether they'll manage to survive the day. And that was more disquieting in this second book than in the first, All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault.
They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded is a superhero novel [1], set in the modern world - Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, to be precise, centered on the local University and featuring a brand-new superteam made up of four female roommates who got powers in the first book during the requisite Mad Science-amplified lab accident.
So: in this world both supernatural creatures (vampires, werewolves, etc. - looks to be every folkloric thing ever thought of is actually really real) and superheroes are real. The supernatural folks have been around secretly forever, but burst forth, IPO-like, about a generation ago, selling "the Dark Conversion" to anyone who's able and willing to pay. It's not 100% clear how directed this conversion is, if the rich bastards get to pick exactly what kind of supernatural thingy they become, but the buyers - by this point, everyone in the global 1%, aside from maybe a few holdouts with personal qualms - seem to all get overwhelmingly-positive benefits, including a vampire-esque ability to charm all normal humans all the time to do basically anything. [2]
Superheroes appeared soon afterward, driven by "the Spark" - which seems to be a different supernatural framework, opposed to the Dark in some deep, underlying, but not entirely comprehensible way. "Sparks" have the usual wide range of odd abilities, most of them focused on destruction or otherwise facilitating fighting with each other, and they seem to break down into the usual two camps: protectors of all that is good and pure, and fiends who use their abilities to steal and/or murder.
Sparks also all have the charm ability: the only people who don't, and the only ones who lack any ability to resist this, are normal humans.
You know: NPCs! [3]
So this is a world in which a small percent of the population controls everything all the time. Not only do they continually fight with each other, destroying vast swaths of infrastructure and murdering untold numbers of people, but they also can snap the will of any ordinary person they come in contact with, so they can never and will never be thwarted in anything they ever want, except by the powers of another member of the ruling class.
Gardner doesn't lean into the implications - he wants superhero drama, not deep world-building - but it's pretty clear every single political or business leader anywhere is either Dark, a secret Spark, or the puppet of one of them. There are simply no other options: normal humans are irrelevant in this world, except in as much as their deaths are used to count things. And the Dark are deeply dug into ownership and governance: they run all governments and own probably every global company. The only conflict that matters - the only conflict that is possible - is that among Darklings and Sparks.
And that's what kept me from fully enjoying this book. If I lived in this world, my best hope would be to keep my head down, get lucky enough not to be accidentally killed when Spark assholes threw tanker-trucks at each other randomly, and die quietly of something else. The CEO of my company would be some shark-totemed Aussie Darkling; my political leaders would be various kinds of Jersey Devils, and so on. I hate worlds like that.
Gardner's plan was to have one book from the first-person point of view of each of the four characters, which I think has already foundered on the shoals of publisher expectations: this book is four years old, and a third has not yet appeared or been announced. But, as the first book focused on Kim/Zircon, this one focused on Jools/Ninety-Nine. Look, let me just copy in the paragraph from last time:
University of Waterloo undergrads and housemates Miranda, Jools, Shar and Kim become the superheroes Aria, Ninety-Nine, Dakini and Zircon (respectively), and all seem to be pretty far up the power-spectrum. Aria is a flying, sonic-powered brick. Ninety-Nine is basically the "best at everything" Batman-style hero at maximum human potential, with equivalent levels of instant knowledge and a healing factor only slightly less impressive than Wolverine's. Dakini has some mystical energy powers, like an eastern Dr. Strange. And Zircon, our viewpoint character, turns to a super-hard mineral as she shrinks and also has a kind of super-vision that covers 360 degrees and can be detached from her body.
Gun opens less than two weeks after Explosions, and similarly just covers a few eventful days. Jools is returning from Christmas break, just after New Year's, and gets shanghaied by Darklings posing as government agents - this part is never cleared up, but they might be secret government agents posing as regular government agents - into a scheme involving a superweapon possibly created by the supervillain who created the explosion that gave them their powers in the first place.
(Jools, and the rest, are publicly known to have been at the scene of their superhero origin, though the superhero-origin itself - that it happened at all, to begin with - is secret.)
A mostly-solo Jools novel follows, in which her teammates are mostly elsewhere or incommunicado, while the action circles on that superweapon. It may or may not have been made by the Australian supervillain Diamond, who is intermittently annoyed at the publicity, but doesn't take a major part in the action. An Aussie superteam, his great foes, wander around the edges of a few scenes, but are equally extraneous. More important is the superteam of Robin Hood and his Merrie Band, who rob from the rich (mostly Darklings, in this world) and claim to give to the poor, though the actual mechanism of giving is not public and thus often assumed to be nonexistent.
There are multiple superpowered fight scenes, as there must be, and Jool's super-healing gets a workout repeatedly. She spends much of the novel somewhere between a prisoner and a guest of Robin Hood, a charismatic asshole (no one in the book would call him an asshole, but my theory is that's only because his charisma power is that strong). I would characterize Robin as a serial rapist of the Purple Man type, but his powers overwhelm everyone - even other Sparks - so everybody is rapturously happy before during and after.
These were the scenes when my dislike of the world hardened into hatred, and the rant embedded at the beginning of this post started composing itself in my head. This is the kind of world in which someone needs to develop a foolproof Dark/Spark-killing device, and start eliminating all of them, for the good of the world. I don't care how nice any of them can be some of the time; they all need to die ASAP.
That attitude made it difficult for me to enjoy the ending of this novel, though justice is done as expected and Our Heroine avoids most of the Horrible Fates lurking around her. (I didn't even mention the casual "oh, we'll just wipe your memory" subplot, which also deeply squicked me out.)
Look, Gardner is a fun, energetic writer, and he's particularly good at writing women with strong, distinctive voices. All of his strengths are shown to good effect in Gun. But the more I think about it, the more I can't fucking stand the default superhero universe. Sorry.
[1] Has anyone seriously made the case that all superhero stories are horror for every character without superpowers? Gardner's world is a major supporting point for that argument.
[2] There could be an interesting book in the conflicts between the legacy supernatural creatures and the massive number of rich parvenus, but that is a million miles away from the stories Gardner seems to want to tell.
[3] This series is clearly based on a superhero RPG. You know how, in Quag Keep, the characters can see the dice rolling on their wrists during important moments? The reader can dimly perceive something similar in this book.
No comments:
Post a Comment