A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Posterchildren is a rather labored pun based on posthumans (mutants with powers) being called "posters" in this universe. Posterchildren can apply to Maillardet's Academy, which is much like Professor X's School for Gifted Youngsters.

This is what I'd hoped Cute Mutants would be: diverse teenage mutants exploring their powers and their relationships with each other. Posterchildren has 100% less Tumblrspeak, which made it much more enjoyable for me. The characters are very likable and the powers are fun when they're explored, though they aren't always. There's some important characters whose power never even gets mentioned, or if it did it was in one sentence and I blinked and missed it.

This is basically a novel-length New Mutants with original characters fic, focused heavily on just hanging out at school. It's a lot of fun if you go in with that expectation and the knowledge that it basically just stops without resolving any outstanding plot issues. There are a bunch of shorter subsequent stories but they're mostly about the supporting and minor characters.

I read this because it was in the Yuletide tag set, but then no one requested it. I'm glad I read it though. I enjoyed it and if an actual sequel ever gets written (unlikely) I would read that too.

You can get Posterchildren: Origins plus bonus stories at this site.

In which Taylor attends a computer class, makes some new friends, and meets three darling dogs.

This is the discussion post for Arc 2 of Worm, by Wildbow. Any and all comments welcome! Spoilers for events later than this arc must be encoded via rot13.com. Spoilers for this arc should not be encoded.

Want to jump in?

1. Read it online. If this makes your eyes bleed...

2. Email me at Rphoenix2 @ gmail and I'll send you an epub. If you do this, please pay Wildbow something via his PayPal or Patreon. This is not an offer with an expiration date - I'll send it along any time.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

A couple years ago, I spent a very happy month reading this insanely epic webnovel. While on vacation in Europe, I re-read it. All one million words of it. No regrets.

What's Worm about?

It's about Taylor Hebert, a bullied teenage girl who gets the ability to control bugs, in a world where people mysteriously started getting powers thirty years before the book begins. She's a fantastic, memorable character - an antiheroine of the "the end justifies the means" variety - who means well (mostly), is often absolutely terrifying and mostly doesn't notice, is incredibly ingenious at using bugs to do basically anything, and carries an extremely epic story with ease.

The powers appear in moments of intense trauma (trigger events), and relate to that trauma and/or to the person's psychological issues in general. So people with powers have gone through something horrible and may be reminded of it whenever they use their new powers, or may have a power that's an ironic reflection on their problems, or one which would have prevented the trauma if they'd only gotten it in time. For instance, a person who blames themselves for not noticing that a loved one was suicidal might get the power to read people's emotions... when they trigger after the suicide. Unsurprisingly, people with powers (capes) tend to be emotionally damaged.

There's differences in how capes work in different countries, but in the US, capes are classified as heroes, villains, or rogues. Heroes are theoretically the good guys, but actually this means they work for the government and fight villains. Villains are theoretically the bad guys, but actually this means they're criminals or mercenaries who don't work for the government. Rogues are neither cops nor criminals, and there's not many of them; why is spoilery.

Taylor wants to be a hero, but her initial contact with heroes doesn't go well. She ends up going undercover in a group of teenage villains, the Undersiders. Her plan is to gather info on them from the inside, find out who their mysterious boss is, and then turn them in to the heroes. But in the classic problem with undercover work, she starts making friends with the people she plans to betray. Also, she's good at being a villain...

What's good about this book?

1. Taylor (Skitter). I fucking love Taylor. She's an all-time great character. I spent one million words with her, and I could happily spend one million more. She's ruthless, pragmatic, socially awkward, brilliant in certain spheres, angry, distrustful of authority (with good reason!), will go to the wire for people she cares about or wants to protect, and never, ever gives up. She's my favorite iron woobie and I adore her.

2. The characters in general. There's an absolutely enormous cast, and I could reel off twenty or so characters who are absolute favorites.

Without spoilers, I love Lisa (Tattletale), whose official power is information gathering and whose unofficial power is sarcasm; Rachel (Bitch - don't you dare call her Hellhound), whose power is temporarily turning dogs into giant monster dogs, who loves dogs and mostly can't stand people, and who has a character arc that rivals Taylor's; Sabah (Parian), a rogue who can control constructs made of cloth and so rides around on and fights villains with giant stuffed unicorns, teddy bears, etc; Lily (Flechette), a hero whose power of shooting big arrows turns out to have a lot more to it than is initially apparent and keeps hanging out with a certain stuffed animal controlling rogue...

For people who have already read the book, my favorites for whom it's spoilery to even say why I love them include Imp, Dragon, Defiant, Chevalier, Sveta, the Travelers, Faultline's crew, and (in a way) the Simurgh and Bonesaw, a psychopathic mad scientist who never matured past the age she triggered, so she's an adorable little girl who enjoys doing sadistic noncon surgery as an art form.

3. The plot. After a slightly slow start, it's incredibly page-turny, with one jaw-dropping twist after another. I can't say I couldn't put it down because I HAD to put it down, but I spent an entire month fidgeting through the rest of my life, itching to get back to it.

4. The worldbuilding. It's much more solid and well-worked-out than it appears at first, with a lot of things that initially don't seem to make sense worked into a satisfying whole. It also deals a lot with logistics: ( mild spoilers )

5. The powers. The powers are incredibly inventive and clever, and used in inventive and clever ways. They all have drawbacks and limits in addition to unexpected uses. For instance, the teenage hero Clockblocker (who announced his hero name on TV so his boss couldn't make him take it back) can temporarily stop time for anything he touches, but has no idea how long the effect will last other than the maximum time is ten minutes. If he freezes a sheet of paper in time and then lets go of it, that paper acts as a completely impenetrable shield for as long as his power lasts.

6. The majority of the ginormous cast of characters are women and girls. They're evil masterminds, child soldiers, loners, leaders, sociopaths, idealists, friends, lovers, mad scientists, fuckups, bureaucrats, assassins, caregivers, bruisers, artists, monsters, and anything else you can think of.

7. There's a canon FF couple who I really like, Lily/Sabah who have a really hot sexy commander/loyal knight relationship. But apart from them, there's a lot of femslashy relationships. In fact part of why I'd love more people to get into this is I'd like more tropey femslash for my favorite non-canon pairings (Taylor/Rachel and Taylor/Lisa). Taylor is a little black dress who goes excellently with many other characters as well. Plus there's a very unique and awesome canon het relationship (D/D to avoid spoilers) who could do with more fic.

8. So many crowning moments of awesome. SO MANY. It's epic and it feels it.

Why might I NOT want to read this book?

1. One. Million. Words.

2. Some iffy racial issues - not horrendous IMO, more "you can tell a white guy wrote that." However, there's also excellent non-stereotypical characters of color (such as Sabah and Lily, mentioned above.)

3. It's really dark, though leavened by the characters having senses of humor, and sometimes tips into grimdark/overly gruesome or gross.

4. The first couple chapters are noticeably rockier than the rest.

5. The fandom (which is mostly on Reddit, spacebattles, and another forum I forget) is oddly reductionist - I'm not saying Taylor is a precious cinnamon roll covered in ants, but the fandom tends to go way overboard in the direction of "every decision she makes is WRONG" and "she's an unreliable narrator so everything she says about her own motives is WRONG." Most of the fanfic is on two forum-style sites that both make my eyes bleed, and 90% of it is "Taylor has a different power." I don't think the presence of the author and a very influential podcast (We've Got Worm) helps.

What potentially upsetting content does it contain?: EVERYTHING. But particularly bugs, body horror, and bullying. Also, rape (off-page), gore, torture, dead children, dead dogs, child abuse, and multiple fates worse than death.

SOLD! How can I read it?

Waiting for it to come out in print or official ebook format is not going to happen, due to aforesaid weird fandom dynamics leading to the author deciding not to do it. So...

1. Read it online. If this makes your eyes bleed...

2. Email me at Rphoenix2 @ gmail and I'll send you an epub. If you do this, please pay Wildbow something via his PayPal or Patreon. This is not an offer with an expiration date - I'll send it along any time.

Okay, I'm intrigued! But it's too intimidating to dive into all at once.

So, would anyone be interested in doing an arc-by-arc readalong? I could put up weekly discussion posts.

A delightful middle-grade novel about a girl who acquires a flock of chickens with superpowers.

I feel like that’s really all that needs to be said. Either this is something you immediately want to read, or not. But a few more things I liked about it…

- It’s epistolatory, told completely in the form of letters, chicken quizzes and pamphlets, to-do lists, etc.

- There are a lot of completely accurate chicken facts.

- The superpowers are used the way that actual chickens would use superpowers if they had them. They’re not superintelligent chickens, just regular chickens with unusual abilities.

- The heroine, Sophie, is biracial (white father, Mexican-American mother) and while this is relevant to the story, it’s not what the story is about. Are you or do you know a Latina girl who wants a book where someone like them is the heroine and it’s not about Issues? Do they like chickens and/or The X-Men? Then they are the perfect reader for this book.

- Honestly though anyone is the perfect reader for this book. I guess unless they hate and fear chickens.

Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer

I’ll quote the cover copy, so you’ll see why I was interested in this.

"A masterful tale of ambition, jealousy, desire, and superpowers.

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates--brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find--aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge--but who will be left alive at the end?"

The blurbs talked a lot about moral depth, complexity, and ambiguity. Between the blurbs and the plot, I thought I’d get The Secret History with superpowers, starring Professor X and Magneto.

The first fourth or so of Vicious is exactly that. The rest, not so much. I had very mixed feelings about the book as a whole, and not just because the actual book matches the plot but not the implications of the blurb. The first fourth is a stunning work of storytelling. I was absolutely glued to it. The compulsive readability wanes as the book goes on, but maintains reasonably well throughout its length. Throughout, the structure is cool, the prose is good, and many of the ideas are interesting.

Here’s what’s not so good: the characters. The two main guys seem interesting when they’re at school together – morally dark, sure, but Schwab does a great job there of suggesting complexity, hidden depth, potential for great good or great evil, etc. Then they become superheroes, and turn into one-note sociopaths.

Eli, who suddenly becomes a religious maniac serial killer, is more like a half-note. His POV sections are really boring. He’s on a delusional mission from God. He kills people because he’s on a delusional mission from God. That’s literally it. When he thinks of Victor, it’s just as someone he needs to kill because he’s on a delusional mission from God.

Victor either also becomes a sociopath, or was always one; it’s hard to tell. His POV is more interesting because he does think about things other than hurting or using people, but basically, he hates Eli (no complexity there) and wants to kill him, and will torture, kill, and use people without hesitation or qualms to bring Eli down.

I expected a fraught, love-hate relationship between them. Nope! They just want to kill each other. I expected moral ambiguity. Nope! They’re both sociopaths. Pitting one sociopathic murderer against another is not moral ambiguity, nor does it bring up interesting moral questions. “If a bad guy kills a worse bad guy, does that make him a good guy?” is not an interesting question. (Answer: No.)

There are three other POV characters who get much more limited page time. One is also a sociopathic murderer. Another is a collection of potentially interesting traits that don’t cohere into a real-feeling character, but at least is not a sociopath. The last is an actual, believable, three-dimensional, mostly coherent character who is not a sociopath. The book would have been more interesting if it had been entirely about her.

There may or may not be something about the process of becoming a superhero that turns people into sociopaths, or turns certain people into sociopaths. This is discussed but never really explored or resolved. Of the four superheroes who get significant page time, three are sociopaths but it’s unclear if they were before they got powers.

I recommend this if you’re OK with sociopathic POV characters and want to read a cat-and-mouse game between two sociopathic villains. On that level, it’s pretty good. If you’re looking for more human characters, I can’t recommend it. Which is too bad, because if the whole book was more in the vein of the beginning, when it seems like the characters might have actual depth and complexity, it would be stunning.

Vicious

At long last and as promised, I am beginning to write up one of my more guilty pleasures, the 15-book (or so) Wild Card series edited by George R. R. Martin.

The premise: As an experiment, aliens infect a small percentage of the population of Earth with a virus, killing most, hideously transforming most of the ones who don’t die, and giving a few of the survivors superpowers. The ones who die are said to have drawn the black queen, the tormented mutants are jokers, and the lucky superpowered few are aces.

One of the aliens who had opposed the experiment, a red-headed, wussy, whiny, horndog dandy but genius scientist and doctor, who goes by the name of Dr. Tachyon, moves to Earth to try to pick up the pieces. Pretty much everyone on Earth blames him and hates him, natch. He feels incredibly guilty and pities himself. Repeat for sixteen volumes.

The series: It started out as an anthology of short stories set in the universe with some continuing characters, but eventually evolved to include co-written novels, solo novels, long continuing plotlines, and so forth. It also originally started with the concept of exploring what the world would really be like if some people had superpowers. This idea seems to have gotten lost somewhere around volume six, or possibly volume two as that one involves an alien invasion. Anyway, after that, the series became increasingly outlandish and divorced from anything resembling realism.

The reason it’s a pleasure: I love stories about people with powers, especially if they’re the maybe a curse, maybe a blessing, I can help out the neighborhood but not save the world sort. Some of the writers involved were very good and did excellent work, with stand-outs including Walter Jon Williams, George R. R. Martin, and Roger Zelazny.

The reason the pleasure is guilty: Where do I even start? With the half-Japanese, half-black pimp Fortunato, who calls his hookers geisha and gets superpowers via Tantric sex? (I vividly recall reading the gay necrophilia scene under the desk during my high school Spanish class, and thinking that if anyone at school ever actually flipped through the book, it would be all over for me.) With the bit where Dr. Tachyon gets body-switched with a teenage girl, then raped and impregnated by his psychotic grandson and ends up giving birth in a spaceship orbiting his home planet? With the often-obscenely graphic violence, the often-creepy explicit sex, the often-embarrassing portrayal of racial minorities and women, and the often-awful writing?

Nevertheless, the series exerted a strange magnetic pull on me, and I own the entire thing, and re-read bits now and then.

Volume 1: Wild Cards.

Probably the best volume and one of the few which doesn’t take place entirely in modern times, but begins with the release of the virus in the 1940s. My favorite parts are George R. R. Martin’s clever pastiches of real authors from Studs Terkel to Tom Wolfe, Walter Jon Williams HUAC-era tragedy (which was nominated for a Nebula), and Roger Zelazny’s story introducing Croyd Crenson, who gets a new body with new curse/blessing powers every time he sleeps, and consequently becomes a speed addict.

This volume also introduces Lewis Shiner’s Fortunato the pimp, who may or may not be an attempt at a blaxsploitation pastiche, Martin’s Tom Tudbury, an incredibly powerful telekinetic and nice guy who is also the biggest wuss ever, and Stephen Leigh’s evil politician Gregg Hartmann, who is unfortunately a continuing villain. Unfortunately, because his power is to mind-control people, and can do it permanently so that for the rest of their lives they will always act as his minions even when he's not around. This makes him more powerful than anyone else in the entire series, which drains away all the suspense. Also, he is a sadist and any story involving him will feature extreme violence, especially toward women. The volume also introduces Brennan, a white Vietnam vet who is a ninja, and who rescues a sweet, helpless Vietnamese woman. Um, yeah. But I have to say, I liked the ninja. Especially since he has no powers, but can beat up people who do.

Volume 2: Aces High

In which insect-aliens invade Earth. Martin writes some stories about yet another alien who is living perfectly openly on Earth, because everyone who sees him figures he’s just another freaky-looking joker. Walter Jon Williams writes about an android, Modular Man, and Roger Zelazny does a caper story in which Croyd Crenson gets hired to steal a rapidly disintegrating alien corpse. All of these are really fun. Meanwhile, Tom Tudbury continues to be a secret hero, and the most ineffectual person ever in his public identity. This does not change over sixteen volumes, so this will be the last time I will ever mention him.

Volume 3: Jokers Wild

Jokertown celebrates Wild Card Day, all hell breaks loose. The embarrassing ethnic stereotype du jour is Roulette, the black call girl who can kill men during sex. Some super-powerful dude wreaks havoc because he’s the villain of the volume. Oh, and Pat Cadigan has a good story about a girl who can control water. I mock, but this volume is also a lot of fun.

More later, as I feel like it, but I will eventually work my way through the entire series, because the incestuous interstellar MPREG (male pregnancy)-via-bodyswitched rape does not happen till something like volume twelve, and I can’t deprive you of that.