Rating: WORTHY!
Curiously, this novel isn't copyrighted to Brandon Sanderson, but to Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC. What's up with that?!
This is the first in The Reckoners series: Steelheart, Mitosis, Firefight (due in late 2014 to be followed by Calamity). There's a huge prologue to this novel (which I naturally refused to read) that apparently details how the main protagonist's father died. In my book(!), if it’s worth telling, it’s worth labeling it 'chapter one'. Otherwise, fugeddaboudit! This review contains some big spoilers.
I’d looked at Steelheart several times on the library shelf before I decided to check it out. My problem with it was first of all, that it’s a first-person PoV novel. Nine-out-of-ten 1PoVs are detestable in my experience. The other problem was less easily definable: I just couldn’t get inspired by the idea of it, but then I decided, since I'd already read and liked The Rithmatist by this same author, what's to lose? That's the advantage of the public library: you're not out anything but a bit of time if you don’t like it, and you can always go buy the novel later if you really do like it. I had some minor issues with the story as I began reading it, but I found myself starting to become engrossed pretty quickly, which was a welcome surprise.
But be advised that this represents two negatives with which I came into this: that I was really ambivalent to begin with about this novel, and that this is a super-hero story. This may affect my take on it! This is not a comic book, but it has that graphic novel aura about it because of its subject matter. I used to like comics when I was a kid, but I grew out of them, so I never became a part of that culture. I've reviewed several comics in this blog, and actually enjoyed them for the most part, but I'm not an aficionado, and although I've been to a few comic-cons, I was neither part of, nor impressed by, the fanboi/girl culture; in fact, I'm turned off by it. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good super-hero movie as my movie reviews page proves.
Sanderson tries to remain faithful to the comic book style, but I'm not sure this was the best way to go with a novel written entirely in words. I can see where he's coming from, but comic book fandom is most akin to a fanatical religion, and writing a novel entirely in words and putting it out there for comic fans seems to me to be rather like being a heretic. OTOH, you cannot possibly write a graphic novel and include in it as much as is included in a regular novel. Not in one volume! To me, this is a severe and debilitating limitation of comics. It's why I grew out of them. They couldn’t continue to offer me enough as I grew up.
So the story is set in a future Chicago - clunkily re-named "Newcago" - which is run by a cadre of super-villains, the leader of whom is Steelheart. Steel heart could also refer to the main protagonist, and can also refer to "Newcago" itself - the entire city was turned to steel - walls, streets, furniture, windows, doors, and so on by Steelheart. I guess he's just that kind of a guy. How the city even stayed above ground with that extremely dense tonnage of metal being tugged down by gravity remains unexplained. Society fortunately had new mobile phone technology by then, so the massive preponderance of metal conveniently doesn’t affect people's ability to communicate or navigate.
A decade before, the bad stuff happened. A weird comet or light of some kind appeared in the sky and bad people developed super powers - or more likely, ordinary people got them and became bad. These people are called Epics, and they come in various rankings, dependent upon their influence and power. Steelheart is the leader in this city and has a close group of slightly lesser super-villains who work with him. Why they do this isn’t explained. Why any super-villain would even want to be the reigning monarch over a city is also unexplained, especially given that Steelheart quite literally does nothing save eat and sleep, and occasionally display his power to keep people afraid of him.
One of these sub-villains is Nightwielder, who can be incorporeal, and who casts the city into permanent darkness for reasons unexplained. The only thing which shines through is the light in the sky, now named Calamity. No one knows what it is or how any of this came about. Nor does anyone know how people manage to find things to eat when there's nothing capable of growing under the darkened sky. The rest of the country is similarly under martial law from super-villains and suffering devastation.
A small group of anonymous people, known as The Reckoners, is trying to kill Epics. This group seems almost super-human itself in its ability to get into and out of places, and to assassinate many of the lesser Epics. David Charleston, whose father was killed in the prologue by Steelheart, has recently got out of the child-labor munitions factory which supplies weapons to Steelheart's fifty squads of enforcers.
When he became eighteen he was forced to quit and make his own way in the world, but he has savings: enough money to get his own apartment and to live independently while he plans how to exact revenge upon Steelheart for his father's death. He has a hand-written library of notes on a huge number of super-villains, and a plan to take-out Steelheart. Why hand-written is unexplained. The first step of this plan is to distract Steelheart by making him think that there's a new villain in town - Limelight - who is planning on challenging Steelheart's despotism.
One night David hears a rumor that The Reckoners are in town, and he figures that they will go after Fortuity - a villain who has precognition and consequently is extremely hard to assassinate. David ends up joining The Reckoners and seems to be accepted by them all except for his peer, Megan, who for some unexplained reason resents him, so you know they will become an item. Can you say "cliché"? David's only thoughts of her center around her physical attributes and appearance. He exhibits no apparent desire to know her mind.
The Reckoners group consists of 'The Prof' - who is so suspicious that I began thinking he was an Epic himself - along with Tia, a researcher who digs up data in an attempt to find ways to bring down the Epics, Cody, a sniper, Abraham, a weapons expert, and the aforesaid Megan, who's special talent appears to be that she's eye-candy. Sanderson has given each character an oddball quirk or two, but none of this worked for me, and in the end, simply became irritating.
The group begins planning how to bring down Steelheart, and thereby really make a statement. No one has ever taken down a prime level Epic. The goal is to get Steelheart, but in order to do that, they need to get to one of his minions, and the one they choose is the one in charge of the security forces - he apparently uses his own super-generated power to augment his paramilitary teams, and to supply the city with energy to make up a deficit. If he was taken out, it would really put a dent in Steelheart's power structure in more ways than one.
This brings me to another issue! Many villains are named and some are even associated with a power or two, but we see very little of them or what they do. Those parts are a bit like reading a phone book or a who's who. We want to get to the wikipedia entry on them (well, maybe not quite that much detail!), but we are denied.
I continued to like the novel as I quickly read through it. Indeed, I found myself wishing I had more free time so I could simply read it through without stopping, which is a good sign, and a vote for wanting to read the sequels, assuming this one didn’t go belly-up in the last half (it didn't). As a reader, we have to hope for the best while coping with the worst, and I can see how people can become addicted to a series even if it’s less than ideal. It’s not that any given series is necessarily so great, it's that it can be so hard to give that up in the hope of finding something better, and once you've read volume one, you have an investment in things which can be hard to let go. In economics, it’s known as 'commitment bias', or simply the 'sunk cost fallacy'.
Personally, I've never understood how people can dislike volume one of a series and rate it two stars or whatever, and then look forward to volume two! I guess it’s an addiction from which I'm thankfully free. In many ways a series is like having a good friend to hang out with, a partner, a spouse, or even children or a pet. As big of a pain in the ass as they can be from time to time, you really miss them when they're not around. That's why some people stay in miserable relationships which they should have long ago abandoned. It can be miserable to be alone, at least initially, but I don’t agree that this means that we should encourage bad writing by voting with our pocketbook for these pock-marked books!
The series problem is that they’re so easily written in many regards. The first novel is the hardest, of course: you have to create the characters, the world, and the plot and make it work intelligently together and bring it to a satisfying conclusion, but a series demands rebellion against this paradigm by insisting that not only the initial, but each succeeding story is actually never finished. This is unsatisfying by its very nature.
Once that first volume is out of the way, subsequent volumes are far easier because the world and the characters are already there. If the first volume was a success, you already have a fan base and can afford to relax somewhat, and even to take some liberties with your readership. This may account for the bottoming-out of so many second volumes: the author isn’t motivated to try (not like they were in volume one). This doesn’t mean that there's no work to be done, or no effort to be made in volume two and later (obviously there needs to be a new plot which ideally is at least as good as volume one), but you can take a lot of short-cuts because the world and its population is already established. I think this privilege and freedom, and even the shortcuts are all-too-often abused.
One problem I had with this story is one which I've had with far too many other stories: the relationship between the girl and the guy. The authors' preponderant need to have one male and one female, both preferably white, and to have them meet and fall in love no matter what, is a bit sad to say nothing of tiresome. David and Megan don’t have a relationship. They're thrown together artificially, and it's completely nonsensical since they're the two most junior members of the team.
As far as their relationship goes, there isn’t one. Nothing happens or develops. David's entire investment in Megan is sexual - based entirely on superficiality. Later, much later, we get a hint that there may be something more in development, but in general it’s so juvenile, and in the end it's too little too late. At least Sanderson gives a somewhat rational explanation for her hot and cold treatment of David, although even that seemed uncomfortably artificial, especially in that it was directed towards David and no one else on the team - like he was the sole offender.
I liked this novel mostly, and by that I mean that I'm ready to read a sequel to it, but I was disappointed by some of the really clunky parts. The biggest problem I had, I think, was how completely incompetent the Reckoners proved themselves to be. In the beginning, we were asked to accept that they were smart, seasoned, Epic assassins, who plan meticulously, have great success, and who leave no trail back to them. Initially, they didn’t even want David on board because he was so young and amateurish. The reality, as depicted in the novel that we get to read, is that they're idiots who couldn’t build Panama if they had a man, a plan, a canal inside out and backwards.
The first problem was David, the main character and narrator. He was a bad character and was actually at the root of many of the clunkers which irritated me. I don’t expect a perfect character. Indeed, that would be awful, but I do expect one to make sense within his framework. His deliberately lousy metaphors weren't remotely amusing and became tedious very quickly. His really weird obsession with stating, long and loud to anyone who would listen, that handguns were poor and inaccurate and his rifle was infinitely better, sounded like he was quoting the villain from the Clint Eastwood movie A Fistful of Dollars. This was clearly intended to telegraph that this was going somewhere, but it never did!
The next problem was that the two newest members of the team were consistently partnered on missions. This made no sense, and was clearly done for no reason other than to clumsily keep the two together so that romance could blossom, but even if I wanted to swallow down that sorry lump of indigestible gristle, there was no romance! All we were given was adolescent David lusting after Megan's "hot" body. Badly written. Sanderson did this in exemplary fashion in The Rithmatist so why did he perform so poorly here? I dunno.
One crucial issue, which unusually was not tied to David, was that these so-called professionals failed to change their coded frequency after Megan's cell phone was lost. That's all I'm going to say about that, but it made me wonder how people this clueless had managed to even survive, let alone have the success they'd supposedly had in the past.
The most egregious example though, was the incompetence and stupidity exhibited by the team when they tried to take out Conflux, a supposedly a key Epic who controls the security forces. Yes, their information about him is poor, but it’s solid about the route his car takes when traveling through the city. Note that at this point they have the flux gun which can vaporize a target, and they have a power cell which can power it for some twelve shots. All they had to do was wait in concealment on the route and blast Conflux's limo with the gun. They didn’t even have to know if any Epic was in the car. It didn’t matter if they failed on this occasion because they could get away and try later. They failed to do this. They had a gun in place, but it was not the flux gun.
Even when they screwed this up, David could still have salvaged something. He had the flux gun and he had a UV light which he knew would solidify Nightwielder, yet he failed to take him out when a golden opportunity presented itself! They exposed themselves when they didn’t have to and this made no sense.
So this is all I'm going to write about this volume. Let's just say that the ending wasn't god-awful and held a surprise or two, and I'll be looking for the sequels - the next one at least. After that I'll decide whether to go another step! For now I rate this particular volume a worthy read - just don't expect miracles!
