Published August 30th by Tachyon Publications first published January 1st To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Super Stories of Heroes and Villains , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about Super Stories of Heroes and Villains. Lists with This Book. Mar 05, Cathy rated it liked it Shelves: This is a weird book. Most anthologies have the purpose of convincing the reader to buy the included authors' other books and stories. They're supposed to introduce you to authors you haven't read before by including a handful of high profile authors who's stories readers feel they just must read.
But this book is all reprints of previously published stories, most of which were already printed in other anthologies. So it's an anthology that's trying to get me to buy other anthologies? It's like This is a weird book. It's like reality TV, especially shows like The Soup.
Why create something new if we can just remix what's already been done and just add a few intros to make it seem new? Cheap production at it's finest. Which wouldn't necessarily be a problem, I didn't know about that when I picked the book up from the library shelf. But fans of the sub genre might know, if they're reading the same handful of books and magazines that he is. I don't really know, I'm not an expert. It just seems odd. My bigger issue was that I didn't enjoy the editing. This should have been a fun book. The cover design sure billed it as a fun book. Usually I strongly prefer to have the information about the writer of each story before the story and not at the end of the chapter or the end of the book.
I like to have a sense of who they are before I read a story.
But this time it didn't work out so well. The editor introduced each author with a few comments about their story or style of writing that should have been interesting and informative. But his comments and tone frequently just rubbed me wrong.
Super Stories of Heroes and Villains
It's fine to point out the literary themes in a story, but he sounded condescending to me, like that know-it-all kid in lit class in college. It didn't sound like he had any fun editing the book or reading any of the stories. And I didn't love any of the stories. I kept slogging through because I was trying to get to those authors that I 'd heard of, and hoping to discover a couple of new ones that I'd enjoy.
Anyway, I don't expect anyone to read the detailed review, I just wrote it all so I'd remember my thoughts about the authors in the future when I read their books.
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A hero to some is a villain to others. Intellectual not action, it's all a conversation between two old enemies. Chris Roberson - A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows - Although it wasn't actually that long, it felt long, more like a novella. I think it was because it wasn't dumbed down because it was a short story, it was still filled with a lot of detail.
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It definitely felt like a part of a bigger world. The Wraithe seems to be based on The Shadow but I don't know those stories well enough to say if there were a lot of clever allusions or not, other than the obvious things like him being a writer and the mask, and the fun noir tone. It was fun pulp fiction with a dry wit. A good sci-fi story, and I always like reading stories set internationally and especially in Africa. But I don't really see that it fits the theme. It seems odd that it was re-printed from a previous superhero anthology.
Just fighting back one time doesn't make someone a superhero. He didn't try to take on an identity, he didn't have any intention that I saw of continuing to fight. The intro says it explores the mythic archetypes of the genre. He was oppressed, he fought back, he had an older teacher, I see the archetypes I guess, but not the hero. He was just a screwed up kid. The heart of the story was the teacher, that was the part that interested me, and the country. It did make me want to bump the Due books on my to-read list farther up toward the top.
Leah Bobet - They Fight Crime! Robert Lennon - The Rememberer - Haunting to see this woman with such a terrible memory problem, considering my slight memory issues. It's a blessing and a curse, but I sure wouldn't want it her way. A Hellboy Story - Well it definitely met the villain criteria. But it was a waste of Hellboy. I was looking forward to reading my first story about him, but be was just a witness, it could have been him or anyone else in the world in his shoes and it wouldn't have mattered at all.
I'm already a fan of both of authors, but this didn't do much to convince me to get into Hellboy on it's own, other than getting me to read the Wikipedia article on him and finding that interesting. Dellamonica - Faces of Gemini - A cute action story about sisters sharing their powers and their roller coaster of emotions, more what I expected when I got the book.
A kind of typical superhero story. The editor reads a lot into this one, I don't see any link at all between Superman and Dorothy, the guy is speculating on on a whole list of characters, Dorothy is just one and the location is a joke. I don't know about that. It's a sexy story but it isn't positive. These Free Women tortured Julia. Pressing the tips of her breasts into champagne glasses filled with tiny sharp emeralds, among other things. I don't particularly want a story about Wonder Woman that has sexual or sexualized violence as a part of it.
I'm not saying that this wasn't a decent story in some ways, but it isn't what I want for a series or movie for sure, whether or not it's true to what Amazons were supposed to have been. I'd like to see strong women who got that way without being tortured and who's loyalty and sisterhood is coerced. And the story wasn't even about the Free Women or Julia, it was about about the other character and her sexual adventures, which had nothing to do with heroes or villains and didn't fit the book at all.
Pollack just shoehorned two totally separate stories together. Each has it's positive and negatives as stories, but together they make no sense to me. I liked it all except the last line. Ernest Hogan - Novaheads - The woman is addicted to nova and the guy she's with burns up at the beginning. She calls the wrestler for help.
It was a good story, but I think I might have liked it better without the editor's intro again. I did find it interesting to learn that lucha noir is a genre, or a sub-genre I guess. It fits the story that Joe Lansdale wrote in Dangerous Women more than this one, this wasn't a hardboiled noir story, it was kind of funny. Well, not funny, but definitely not hardboiled. I guess it was cyberpunk, as the editor claimed, in the end, in the evil multinational corporation sense, though not in the way I usually think of cyberpunk, but that's cool. Usually I really prefer to have the editor's comments and author info before stories and not after, but in this book I'm not so sure, this guy intellectualizes so much that I'm finding it very distracting.
Life in the Big City is already on my high-priority to-read list. Just as an aside, the story in this book is from How old, or young, do you have to be to not know who Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing are without looking it up? As for the story, I'm not sure what I think about Demonica. On the one hand, evil. On the other hand, she did create those werewolf things that ate Donald Trump.
It was all an advertising campaign. When comic book and superhero fans get a little older they start asking tough questions like, how does she pay her rent and pay for all of the clothes and furniture she keeps destroying. On Buffy, she got a job at a fast food joint that made her wear really ugly uniforms. On a larger scale it's when parts of cities get destroyed instead, like in The Incredibles , with even more serious repercussions for the heroes. This story was definitely in line with the kind of thoughts many of us wonder during moments before and after we suspend our disbelief and just enjoy a good tale.
Plus he was nice to his Jewish mama. Carol Emshwiller - Grandma - Good story about generations of women, expectations and pressures from all sides, love, connection, loss. Jack Pendarvis - Sex Devil - Story pitch, short and silly, yet telling. Benjamin Rosenbaum - The Death of Dr.
Nefario - About a therapist to the heroes, short and fun. But the story was too short to explore the idea. He meets his nemesis and then it's over. It wasn't a story, it was just sketch about an idea about a cool super power. There was barely a character there. The editor loves it, it's one of three stories that he culled from another anthology about superheroes. Paul Di Filippo - The Jackdaw's Last Case - I like historical fiction and alternate history, it can be really fun to look up the subjects and try to figure out what's real and what isn't and just to learn something new.
So that aspect was fun. He took Kafka back to when it was nineteen and branched him off from there, so most of his adult history was made up. I found the style of the story to be very wordy and full of way too many flourishes. I think some of that may have been an attempt to copy Kafka's style but I'm just guessing from the tiny bit that I read about Kafka looking into him for this story, I haven't read his stories or Di Filippo's.
On the other hand, the reviews of Di Filippo indicate that it might be his style, too, so who knows. But the style, and subject, reminds me to some degree of The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack and I did enjoy this story for many of the same reasons. I didn't like the Brod stuff, changing their meeting from university into a high school bully thing. The age change bothered me, it changed real history too much. It felt like it pushed it from an alternate history too far into a total fantasy that had those characters in it. I don't know the "rule" of the sub-genre of imagining historical celebrities as detectives, but it seems to me that it should be grounded in their actual lives, too many changes negates who they actually were entirely.
And it was just way to busy and crowded a story, with too much being thrown at me. The sort of steampunk Talmudic tattoo torture device at the end was just a bit much for this Jew, put it over the top, it was a melodramatic mess. So it had good elements, things I enjoyed, but needed to be edited back a bit and would have been better if t was more consistent with history somehow.
And that's that for a review longer than those I write for many books. James Patrick Kelly - The Biggest - The editor tells me that the author, used "his scholarly sciencefictional gaze on the dawn of the superheroic era, the Great Depression" to write this story. It was still a good story about what a regular guy hero with not so hot powers might have gone through in the Golden Age of heroes. A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke - A fun article that did what anthologies are supposed to do, introduced me to an author's books. Farmer's Wold Newton family line for Tarzan was so extensive that it created a whole new writing space for fictional biography that is still being added to today.
It was fun to learn a bit about how this started and grew and it definitely made me want to learn more about it, and fictional biographies in general. Jess Nevins - The Zeppelin Pulps - This is an interesting article about the popularity and fall of the Zeppelin pulps. Really, it's a well-researched and presented article, I enjoyed it, it's a nice, short, interesting article about a small part of the history of the industry. But I still don't get the editor. I'd hardly call it an ingenious piece, as he did. Martin - Wild Cards: Funny, the most recent was in the book he just edited, Dangerous Women , now that I think about it.
Although sometimes I've thought it was odd that the editor included older stories, in this case, I think it's cool to show that the series is still going strong after all of these years. I really should finally check it out. I ended up making a list of the books that are available anywhere in my library's consortium of 44 library systems across 12 counties. I'm still only able to get 14 of the currently 21 books in the series. But it looks like the older books are being re-released.
But the Jetboy character did confuse me, I kept getting mixed up with Top 10, Vol. Not a complaint, just a comment. Especially since this was written first. I really liked Top Ten by Alan Moore, by the way, wish there had been more of it. Gene Ha's art was brilliant too. Anyway, having read a couple of Wild Cards stories already, it's nice to know now how it happened now, Or some of how it happened, there's always more to it with these guys, Carrie Vaughn - Wild Cards: Just Cause - Including another Wild Cards story was a great idea, chalk one of for the editor.
The series has been going on for twenty-six years, it really showed the time frame and longevity. I'm just not a big fan of Vaughn's short fiction. Mostly it was a good story that focused on the emotional and interpersonal elements and used the characters' powers as a framework for the storytelling, which seems to be the Wild Card way, from my vast experience of now having read four stories.
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But I initially wrote a few things about why it was either confusing or unsatisfying and then I realized that it was because this was a chapter of one of the Wild Cards books and not a story that was meant to stand alone, so Vaughn wasn't supposed to have to explain what Kate's power was, or what the TV show that they'd all been on was, it was surely something that happened earlier in the book.
And I wrote that the end wasn't satisfying for a stand alone story, it felt like the close of a chapter in a book; that was what made me look at the copyright page and realize what the problem was. The story was out of it's original context in this book and the Vaughn didn't build in certain information or story elements because she didn't have to for what she was writing it for. So I apologize to Vaughn, she wrote a good story for the context it was intended for, as far as I can tell.
And I take back my good call to the editor and call bad editing on this. He wanted a big name author and didn't care if the story worked for the readers. There are other Wild Card stories in anthologies that could have worked. I read two recently. I doubt they are the only ones in existence.
A Rangergirl Yarn - A well-balanced story with a lot of good elements. I bet the book its based on 's good. Another one the editor got from the other superhero anthology. Another real-life, what happens to the not-so-super heroes and their offspring story, Camille Alexa - Pinktastic and the End of the World - Very comic book-like in its angst, and showed some nice levels to what a semi-realisitic picture of heroes and villains living in the real world would look like. It worked well in balance with the rest of the stories.
Gene Wolfe - The Detective of Dreams - This was supposed to be a classic story from to anchor the end of book. It was supposed to be cool but it was just hard to read. And Christian symbolism is beyond me, I'm sure it was much more fascinating and revelatory to other people. I think the editor just couldn't resist using the exit line for the book of, "Dear people, dream on. Jul 03, Laura rated it it was ok Shelves: Way more of a slog than an anthology about superheroes and super villains should have been. Oct 29, Mike rated it liked it Shelves: I enjoy superhero prose.
More accurately, I enjoy some superhero prose, and a few of these stories are the kind I enjoy. The usual unevenness of any multi-author anthology applies, both in how much I enjoyed the stories and how well they are edited, and some of the stories only fit within the theme by stretching the definition a long way also common for anthologies. This particular anthology suffers from another issue, too: For me, this detracts from the story rather than adding to it. The main problem, though, is one that means I always have to pick my superhero prose carefully: A lot of the stories are well done, but I didn't often like what they were doing.
The three stars reflects my personal taste, not the writing quality. There is an odd quirk in the layout: Well done, though it does have a couple of homonym errors "principle" for "principal", "lead" for "led". Can Camille Alexa's Pinktastic prevent the end of the world? Will Jonathan Lethem's Dystopianist cause the end of the world?
In these pages, you'll find the exploits, machinations, and epic melees of these superpowered aliens, undead crusaders, costumed crime fighters, unholy cabals, Amazon warriors, demon hunters, cyberpunk luchadores, nefarious megalomaniacs, daredevil sidekicks, atavistic avatars, adventuring aviators, gunslinging outlaws, love-struck adversaries, and supernatural detectives.
In these twenty-eight astounding Super Stories, join larger-than-life heroes and villains in the never-ending battle of good versus evil! The Best Books of Check out the top books of the year on our page Best Books of Product details Format Paperback pages Dimensions Looking for beautiful books? Visit our Beautiful Books page and find lovely books for kids, photography lovers and more.
Other books in this series. Table of contents Introduction: Robert Lennon "The Nuckelavee: Review quote "Editor Lalumiere has put together an impressive best-of anthology for modern superhero fiction, with works from SF royalty like George R. The satisfying and varied stories range from J.
Super Stories of Heroes & Villains | Superhero Novels
Robert Lennon's deeply sad "The Rememberer," about a super-powered storyteller. Nefario," in which a familiar crime-fighter calls his therapist from a routine death trap. Also of note are Paul Di Filippo's "The Jackdaw's Last Case," starring Franz Kafka as a superhero, and Busiek's hilariously cynical "Clash of Titans A New York Romance ," about a marketing man encouraging the rivalry between a superhero and his villainous ex-girlfriend to increase tourism.