Really glad you finished Gigaheroes; I was having trouble keeping track of the plot and characters when the chapters came out in serial form, so I waited until the end to get caught up. Looking forward to reading The Domes of Calrathia, when you finish that.
Chapter-by-chapter comments:
Chapter 3:
- The chapter title should be bold.
Chapter 18:
- The descriptions for Cosmic Warrior ("black than night garments") and Iron Shield (I don't know how a metal could *look* more sturdy than the toughest steel) were awkward, and could do with a rewrite.
- The paragraph starting with "So what now?" is missing an open-quote after 'stepping towards them.'
Chapter 19:
- 'soldiers of the like' should probably be 'soldiers or the like'.
- I love the bit where Daniel walks into the power-nullifying room, and suddenly starts feeling fear again. Reminds me of GK Chesterton's Manalive. "I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him - only to bring him to life."
- 'I say capsules because I didn’t know how else to describe them' -> Probably worth emphasizing the word 'capsule' to make the prose a bit cleaner.
- The closing few paragraphs are the strongest closing paragraphs thus far.
Chapter 20:
- Very nice twist that it wasn't Seattle's crew taking the boy. Good use of first-person narration.
Chapter 21:
- "It wasn't like Daniel teleportation." -> "Daniel" should be "Daniel's".
- "All the power in the world, and all you desperately want to do is let the other guy off the hook." Superb line; don't change a thing in this whole sequence.
Chapter 22:
- The shouted exchange is a bit hard to follow with everybody referring to everybody else as "your friend".
- "black uniform" should be capitalized if it's being used as a name in dialogue (same comment applies to the previous and subsequent chapters).
Chapter 24:
- "I had to wait until strength again" should be "I had to wait until I had strength again".
Overall thoughts:
The ending was weak. Granted, it's very much in the nature of superhero stories to end on a sequel hook, but Adam Mason's death would have been a thematically better stopping point, because nothing in 25 or 26 *really* changes what we know about the world or the characters, and Seattle Vance's rescue operation felt shoehorned - as far as we saw, he never knew about the boy's existence before this chapter. If the timeskip had been enough time for Daniel to recover and escape, and for Jayne to have contacted him then instead of having the conversation in the not-an-ambulance, then the rescue operation would have made more sense as an ending. As it was, though, Daniel's the person who's done the *least* to create an independent side of all the narrators, so his closing line of "Making my own side" just doesn't fit.
That leads into probably my biggest issue with the story: the characters all sound the same. In third-person narration (or first-person restricted to one narrator), this wouldn't be a big deal, but the fact that every chapter is an internal monologue unfortunately highlights it. Daniel's a cynical superpowered mercenary who goes rogue in the start of the story, and Seattle's a cynical superpowered mercenary who goes rogue at the end of the story; in the first couple chapters, you could hear the difference (like Seattle's reference to old-time America from his parents' stories), but that petered out until at the end, you wouldn't know who was narrating which chapter without other context clues.
Adam does not sound at all like a man who's been living on the street for years - and if you don't believe me, go to the nearest big city, take the subway, and try talking with the people standing around aimlessly or begging for change on the benches. As best I can tell, there's something similar to road hypnosis that happens when you're on the street, where even if you're not hooked on drugs (and that's rare enough), you stop abstracting, and your world shrinks to your immediate surroundings as you repeat the same actions over and over and over again. Talking with them (the ones lucid enough to talk) is lke talking with a sleepwalker: after a bit, he'll tend to say something which doesn't fit at all with the rest of the conversation, and you realize that you and he barely walk the same Earth. I don't know what to do about this, aside from maybe handwaving the drug as clearing his mind as well as healing his body, but it's worth noting for the future.
All that said: I liked the characters. I liked seeing a horrible world in which people - in defiance of original sin but making Rousseau proud - chose on their own to be good people in spite of everything around them. I've never watched The Boys, so I couldn't say if this story was better or worse than that show. But, having finished Gigaheroes, I'd happily read more stories set in this universe. So the sequel hook I complained about worked after all.
Welp. I just binged the entire book and that was amazing. It was fun, exciting and an absolute blast. You pretty much hit every mark that I look for in fiction and then some. That was S tier fiction Issac. Great job! And as a fellow writer, I was even able to decipher and deconstruct many techniques you incorporated that I don't use. Techniques that really elevated this story to the next level. I've never had this much fun improving my craft. Bravo good sir! Looking forward to the sequel
Congratulations on completing your second book. What I thought was going to be a cheesy superhero satire when I started on the first chapter turned into a solid uplifting story.
Really glad you finished Gigaheroes; I was having trouble keeping track of the plot and characters when the chapters came out in serial form, so I waited until the end to get caught up. Looking forward to reading The Domes of Calrathia, when you finish that.
Chapter-by-chapter comments:
Chapter 3:
- The chapter title should be bold.
Chapter 18:
- The descriptions for Cosmic Warrior ("black than night garments") and Iron Shield (I don't know how a metal could *look* more sturdy than the toughest steel) were awkward, and could do with a rewrite.
- The paragraph starting with "So what now?" is missing an open-quote after 'stepping towards them.'
Chapter 19:
- 'soldiers of the like' should probably be 'soldiers or the like'.
- I love the bit where Daniel walks into the power-nullifying room, and suddenly starts feeling fear again. Reminds me of GK Chesterton's Manalive. "I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him - only to bring him to life."
- 'I say capsules because I didn’t know how else to describe them' -> Probably worth emphasizing the word 'capsule' to make the prose a bit cleaner.
- The closing few paragraphs are the strongest closing paragraphs thus far.
Chapter 20:
- Very nice twist that it wasn't Seattle's crew taking the boy. Good use of first-person narration.
Chapter 21:
- "It wasn't like Daniel teleportation." -> "Daniel" should be "Daniel's".
- "All the power in the world, and all you desperately want to do is let the other guy off the hook." Superb line; don't change a thing in this whole sequence.
Chapter 22:
- The shouted exchange is a bit hard to follow with everybody referring to everybody else as "your friend".
- "black uniform" should be capitalized if it's being used as a name in dialogue (same comment applies to the previous and subsequent chapters).
Chapter 24:
- "I had to wait until strength again" should be "I had to wait until I had strength again".
Overall thoughts:
The ending was weak. Granted, it's very much in the nature of superhero stories to end on a sequel hook, but Adam Mason's death would have been a thematically better stopping point, because nothing in 25 or 26 *really* changes what we know about the world or the characters, and Seattle Vance's rescue operation felt shoehorned - as far as we saw, he never knew about the boy's existence before this chapter. If the timeskip had been enough time for Daniel to recover and escape, and for Jayne to have contacted him then instead of having the conversation in the not-an-ambulance, then the rescue operation would have made more sense as an ending. As it was, though, Daniel's the person who's done the *least* to create an independent side of all the narrators, so his closing line of "Making my own side" just doesn't fit.
That leads into probably my biggest issue with the story: the characters all sound the same. In third-person narration (or first-person restricted to one narrator), this wouldn't be a big deal, but the fact that every chapter is an internal monologue unfortunately highlights it. Daniel's a cynical superpowered mercenary who goes rogue in the start of the story, and Seattle's a cynical superpowered mercenary who goes rogue at the end of the story; in the first couple chapters, you could hear the difference (like Seattle's reference to old-time America from his parents' stories), but that petered out until at the end, you wouldn't know who was narrating which chapter without other context clues.
Adam does not sound at all like a man who's been living on the street for years - and if you don't believe me, go to the nearest big city, take the subway, and try talking with the people standing around aimlessly or begging for change on the benches. As best I can tell, there's something similar to road hypnosis that happens when you're on the street, where even if you're not hooked on drugs (and that's rare enough), you stop abstracting, and your world shrinks to your immediate surroundings as you repeat the same actions over and over and over again. Talking with them (the ones lucid enough to talk) is lke talking with a sleepwalker: after a bit, he'll tend to say something which doesn't fit at all with the rest of the conversation, and you realize that you and he barely walk the same Earth. I don't know what to do about this, aside from maybe handwaving the drug as clearing his mind as well as healing his body, but it's worth noting for the future.
All that said: I liked the characters. I liked seeing a horrible world in which people - in defiance of original sin but making Rousseau proud - chose on their own to be good people in spite of everything around them. I've never watched The Boys, so I couldn't say if this story was better or worse than that show. But, having finished Gigaheroes, I'd happily read more stories set in this universe. So the sequel hook I complained about worked after all.
Thanks for the feedback! I'm going to be doing another revision for the paperback release, so I'll definitely keep these points in mind.
Sounds good - I'm looking forward to the revision, then, and to your next work!
Welp. I just binged the entire book and that was amazing. It was fun, exciting and an absolute blast. You pretty much hit every mark that I look for in fiction and then some. That was S tier fiction Issac. Great job! And as a fellow writer, I was even able to decipher and deconstruct many techniques you incorporated that I don't use. Techniques that really elevated this story to the next level. I've never had this much fun improving my craft. Bravo good sir! Looking forward to the sequel
Can’t wait for a sequel. Keep up the good work!
Congratulations on completing your second book. What I thought was going to be a cheesy superhero satire when I started on the first chapter turned into a solid uplifting story.