Heroes Die / Matthew Woodring Stover

 

Heroes Die by Matthew Woodring Stover
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I started reading this book in a cranky mood. I'm an introvert and this Covid-19 pandemic is the apocalypse that I've been training for, but even I am beginning to feel the strain of lack of in-person human contact. So I read the first half of the book while grumpy, then went for a massage (while still able to do so) and returned to the task with a happier outlook. Maybe the second half of the book was better, maybe I was just in a better frame of mind to enjoy it.

Hari Michaelson is an actor. But not in our sense of that word. He gets transferred into another world that shares interdimensional space with his (which I assume is a future Earth), where he becomes Caine, an extraordinary fighter, who changes the course of history in Overworld. Kind of the ultimate in reality TV. Meanwhile, in his home world, grey, faceless multinationals run everything while maintaining a crippling caste system. There, Hari must bow and scrape to his Administrator, something he hates but can't change if he wants to work. It's the wealthy Leisure class who plug in to the Actors' feeds, like wealthy Romans at the gladiatorial games, vicariously savouring the violence and blood.

It is when he is Caine that Hari feels alive. He “thinks with his fists" and can channel all of the aggression that builds up inside him. Not realizing this, his fellow actor Shanna marries him, only to find out that he does more acting in “real" life than when at work. This isn't what she signed up for and they separate. Nevertheless, when one of Shanna's roles goes pear shaped, Hari is determined to go rescue her.

So, this is gladiatorial combat with a fantasy overlay. The whole story seems to exist simply for Caine to pound on his adversaries. His wife is set up as the altruistic one of the two, but blind to how her projects are also manipulating the course of events in Overworld. Hari just wants to prevent her death and get her home, a kind of extreme possessiveness. It seems like a grittier, more X rated version of R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt series, which is also all about the fights, but has a more good guy main character. Caine has his own code, kind of a murky one. His morality is much less absolute, more situational, than most fantasy main characters. Perhaps he's good to have on your side, but don't get too comfortable because he is always on his own side first and foremost. In the second half of the book, events get a lot more convoluted and back-stabby, which was more interesting.

The novel got me thinking about morality—intervening in another world's politics and history seems so intrusive, and yet how often has that happened with Western countries messing about in Latin America or the Middle East? And to do so for the sake of entertaining the rich on another world seemed gratuitously insulting. Plus, the gross unfairness of the caste system in Hari's timeline, which could be a possible outgrowth of the extreme wealth gap, seemed to have a tone of warning for current society.

Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut had it right in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, when he had Eliot Rosewater praise science fiction writers for dealing with the big, contentious problems of society.

Book number 384 of my Science Fiction & Fantasy Reading Project.


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