It's nice to find another entry into one of my favourite genres, that being "Weird Spies". There's various names for this, and quite a few examples: Laundry Files, Declare (Tim Powers, really impressive), Rebecca Levene's Cold Warriors (read it about three times), The Milkweed Triptych (Ian Tregillis) and The Secret Histories (Simon R. Green). I can heartily recommend all of those.
Nicely, it seems I now have another series to add to those recommendations. This one sits over on the stale beer end of the spectrum.
We find ourselves at the very end of the second World War, and it seems that the magic-obsessed Hitler (he really was the moustache that launched a thousand plots), has arranged for a rather special ritual to be performed, just as the USA is nuking Japan. The end result is the creation of two rifts in spacetime, one in Berlin, one in Japan. The rifts are active, occasionally sending out spikes of energy that, when they interact with a person, give them superpowers.
Since this is set in the early days of the Cold War, the USA get to keep one, while the USSR gets another. Both countries set about building their own team of "Variants", and training them as espionage operatives. This book covers the early days and their first mission.
The book is pleasingly different from others of its type in that there's some nice explorations of racial politics in here. As a Brit, with little experience of those tensions in general, and attitudes of the 40s and 50s in particular, I found this aspect of the characters interesting to read.
Obviously, it's rather impossible at this point to come up with superpowers that Marvel/DC/others (sorry smaller publishers) haven't done before, so I'll avoid any suggestion that they're not original. That's not really important here. The fitting of those powers into the variants' lives and the military structure and then the Cold War is really where this gets gripping. It's written in a tight style, with real punch.
(Just in case it matters, there's a reverse-empath, a life-force manipulator, a matter transformer and someone who can steal the memories of the dying. Okay, that one might be new. Feel free to tell me in the comments how wrong I am.)
But they're all thrown together, from lives which don't really prepare them for the rigours of superhero battles, and find themselves on the front lines of a cold war rapidly getting hotter. (Slightly embarassed to have written that. There's not even a pyrokinetic to justify it.) They all find ways of coping with the new stresses and strains, and they're all believable.
Still, it's an excellent book, and a fine addition to the genre. I fully intend to grab the second in the series. The plot is exciting, the alliances and betrayals suitably byzantine for a spy thriller, and the characters are either likable or sufficiently entertaining that you don't mind the evil.
It also has one of my favourite little tweaks on the form, the "oops, we accidentally included a bit of our secret files in this book" bit. I don't know why I always enjoy these, but I do.
Highly recommended.
Tagged: Book Urban fantasy Weird spies Novel Print