I love a good superhero story. I especially love the ones that break from the norm. The superhero genre is one of those places where it’s easy to go the established route. Guy (or gal) puts on tights and fights crime. Plug a little wiggle room into and you wind up someone in tights violently fighting crime. Maybe you get an anti-hero or two who are almost as bad – or worse – than the criminals they’re fighting. Toss in a supervillain to give the hero or heroine a need for their skillset and powers and do your best to keep making the stories crazier and crazier while avoiding calling it what it is: Gods fighting gods while the rest of us look on and wonder whether or not our insurance will cover the damage to our car when some asshole drops another car on it. Probably not. Act of god and all that.
D.W. Hitz, in his book Gods Are Born, does away with both the notions of tights and crime fighting and gives us some human character with very human flaws who had power foisted on them. Rather than immediately head out to make things right by punching evil in its sniveling little face, most of them are simply trying to survive like normal people. At some recent point in the past there was a devastating war between some of the gods that left the world a complete train wreck. Imagine an entire planet run by Texas and you’ll get the idea.
All the characters – gods, as Hitz calls them – have very normal human traits. Some want to rule over everything and have zero qualms crushing anyone in their way, others use their power to make a quick buck, while others use their powers to remain hidden away from the world. In other words, these are all people with all of the usual quirks and failings people tend to have. They’re not perfect and they don’t have some internal quest to fulfill. Most of them just want to be left alone. And that is a pleasant change from stories about people with a mad quest to save the world from itself.
Of course, this is a story, so almost no one gets their wishes fulfilled. In fact, a goodly number of them see their dreams crushed, often violently. Which bring us to the 400lb gorilla in the room. While officially marketed as superhero fiction and first contact sci-fi (there are aliens in the book, BTW, but they’re less interesting than the gods), the cover almost shrieks YA. Not that there’s anything wrong with YA, but Gods Are Born doesn’t feel YA to me. The cover isn’t necessarily bad, it just doesn’t fit with the book in my opinion. This is a mature read covering some dense turf and handling it well. So, ignore the cover and listen to the story: This is about people with godlike powers trying to figure out what to do. And not a single one of them has chosen to fight crime. It’s YA in the same way The Dark Knight Returns was YA. In other words, not really YA at all. Not that a younger audience wouldn’t be able to read it or appreciate it, mind you, it’s just written for an older, wiser reader. A serious story on serious Earth, if we were to look back at the bat again.
So, where does that leave us? Honestly in a good place. Ignore the cover art and focus on the story. There’s a good deal of exposition – mostly the bits about the preceding war – that is fertile soil for a novel unto itself. (Yes, D.K., I am asking for a prequel). More to the point, we’ve got fully realized characters striving to just make it in a world gone pretty bonkers. Superheroes, but not the goody two shoes kind we’re used to.
Definitely a good read and worthy of a prequel.
This is not the world you know.
When aliens crashed on Earth, everything changed. Humanity has been decimated by predators and plague. Electromagnetic waves render most technology useless. The survivors are afflicted by strange mutations—some troubling, others amazing.
Kaysa simply desires to live her life. When forced to use her powers, someone always gets hurt.
Tony loves being a hitman. The pay is good, and with his abilities, most jobs are a cakewalk.
The bloodthirsty King of the Republic is unsatisfied. A power greater than his own beckons to him from the beyond.
And to realize his destiny, he must bring the others to it.
Gods are Born follows the paths of seven extraordinary beings as they struggle to survive, to find peace within themselves, and ultimately to defeat the King…
…and something far worse than they can imagine.
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