Franchise Fiction - Robert Weinberg - The Web of Arachnos (2005)

You may or may not know this, but City of Heroes was a superhero MMORPG that Bryan and I played a lot over the years. I say "was" because while we were in Seattle for PAX we heard from a friend that NCSoft was dissolving Paragon Studios, the developers who were still working on new content for the game. It's still available to play until the end of November, but we are already in mourning for our game.

So, with this new knowledge, I thought it was prudent to read the two City of Heroes novels that Bryan purchased before I got into the game back in '08. After all, very soon they were not going to be relevant anymore.

If you feel the urge to purchase this book, which is essentially the origin story of Statesman, Lord Recluse, and the Nemesis villain group, I feel it is necessary to point out to you that it's not very good. Even for franchise fiction, it's pretty bad.

It's been a few days since I finished it, so I've had some time to gain some distance from it. It hasn't truly tempered my feelings about it. The whole thing just feels like an amateur job, particularly completed by someone who doesn't do a lot of reading himself.

When you describe a person in fiction, do you give their exact heights and weights, and hope that is plenty of explanation? In case you weren't aware, the answer is no. Don't say that a girl is five feet six inches tall and weighs only one hundred three pounds (also, WHAT THE FUCK. That's not a human being. That's a skeleton.), say that she is of slightly above average height and very skinny. Let US, the audience, decide what we imagine from that.

One of the main characters, Stefan Richter, makes a big deal in the first quarter of the book about how he doesn't believe in myths and magic, he believes in logic, science, and technology. That's all well and good. The frequency in which he asserts this belief (OUT LOUD, for fuck's sake) is annoying, but considering the crazy shit they begin to find (the Well of the Furies with curative liquid and stuff), I was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that it meant the character was trying to reassure himself in the face of this cognitive dissonance. But when we get into his head, there isn't any cognitive dissonance. Just stupid crap. And then, (spoiler!) when he turns evil, we are never given any reason why he chose that path. Just a flimsy excuse of "it's the logical way of things" is bullshit, and you know it, Mr. Weinberg.

The other superheroes that are introduced--in the later half of the book, mind you--get almost no screen time to explain their personalities and motives. Their time spent in the book is mostly where they got their powers, and then using them against baddies. Where's the characterization?

It's kind of sad when your most interesting parts are the ones that DON'T include the superpowered beings, and instead the thugs of the Prohibition era.

One last point: this book spent too much effort trying to couch the events in its pages with things that happened in real history. Statesman was not a friend of a friend of Hemingway, just so you can namedrop him. There was no need to make Arachnos part of Mussolini's cadre. Your efforts to shoehorn Mickey Mouse in were disruptive. If you are writing a book that takes place in a point of history and you want to make it relevant, don't do this. If you must associate with something to breathe life in your story, first analyze what's wrong that it needs this shit, and please try to limit it to one. This author went too far, and it did more to anger me and frustrate me as a reader than intrigue me.

3/10

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