skygiants

Samit Basu's Turbulence and Resistance are pretty much giant, affectionate meta-superhero fanfics, which could be a bug but for most people, including Basu, is probably more of a feature.

In Turbulence, a bunch of passengers on a transcontinental flight to Delhi develop superpowers. There is no scientific basis for this as far as anyone can tell. The superpowers are based on the personalities-slash-secret desires of the people involved -- so, like, pretty straightforwardly, the upright fighter pilot becomes a flying superman and the housewife who's disappointed by her life choices finds that she can constantly replicate herself so she can have ALL the choices; less obviously, the wildlife conservationist becomes an angry were-tiger, and a teenager finds that his decisions about what to eat control the weather, FOR REASONS UNCLEAR. Bob's motivations never really get all that deeply explored.

Some people are immediately ready to launch into media-friendly patterns of behavior; genre-savvy Aman, who has internet-manipulation superpowers, is like, "WE HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO IMPROVE THE WORLD!" ("but you never wanted to improve the world or go into nonprofit work or anything before having superpowers!" "...well it's DIFFERENT NOW!") while Invincible Military Guy (distinct from Fighter Pilot Superman) immediately goes full Magneto and out the other side ("humans are irrelevant now, so I don't want to rule the world, I really just kind of want to conquer it"). On the other end of the spectrum you have Uzma the magically charismatic aspiring actress, who really, really just wants to make it in Bollywood and couldn't care less about superhero hijinks.

Anyway, despite everyone's best efforts to avoid it, everything ends with an enormous knock-down drag-out landmark-destroying superhero fight; the book is not so much trying to avoid cliches as pointing them out, having people complain about them, and then gleefully embracing them anyway. Using blunt and often deeply unethical superpowered instruments to change the world is probably a really bad idea, but, I mean, eh, we have these superpowers so why not, right? WHY NOT.

According to Basu, if Turbulence is the Superman book, Resistance is the Batman book; it picks up eleven years later, when lots more people have increasingly ridiculous superpowers and knock-down drag-out landmark-destroying superhero fights have become wildly commonplace. Some of the people from Resistance are now famous superheroic figures with TV shows about them, some of them have gone off the grid, and some of them have retreated to secret supervillain islands and are relishing every second of it.

Meanwhile, one brave non-superpowered Japanese playboy with a grudge against superheroes is leading a double life, developing superpowered robot armor, and has a scheme to wildly alter the world as we know it! 

(Meanwhile meanwhile, some dude with monster-making superpowers known as the Kaiju King is hanging out somewhere near Tokyo and sending a new giant monster to attack the city every month or so. This is all he wants in life. You do you, man. You do you.)

I admire a lot of things about Resistance -- mostly how it just kind of embraces the premise of "superpowers will change the world in WILD, OFTEN TERRIBLE ways!" and just GOES for it 110% -- and other things frustrate me, like the fact that a lot of the plot hinges on the fact that the protagonist refuses to tell anyone his plans even when there is really no point in keeping them secret. Also, even in text form, that level of property damage is hard to read about! Also also, in both Turbulence and Resistance, I am offended on behalf of some of the really incredibly underdeveloped characters. I'm sorry, Anima! In a better world, you could have been three-dimensional!

All the same, overall the books were highly enjoyable. I give them:
+ 10 points for the part when the superpowered mad scientist and the teenage weather controller get into a huge argument about whether comic-book superheroes represent the best aspirations of human ambition or the banalities of US capitalism, and then it turns out that neither of them have read any of them
+ 5 points for "Brucing," a hipster phenomenon in which angry young rich kids go train in martial arts in Tibet in an attempt to retain relevance in a superhero world
+ 20 points for the part when Internet Superpowers Guy, in his efforts to change the world for the better, sets all donation links for conservative parties around the world to redirect to rickroll
+ 30 points for Infinitely Replicable Tia, who is terrifying, and dies like 400 times a book, and nonetheless loves her life so much
+ 50 points for the boring romance that suddenly takes an amazing left turn into SUPERPOWERED NEMESES IN LOVE, aka everything I always want in life

On the other hand, I also give them:
- MINUS A BILLION points for the surprise human centipede reference. THERE WAS NO WARNING SIGNAL. I DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS.