Calamity by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The culmination of Brandon Sanderson’s Reckoners, young adult post-apocalyptic supervillain series, Calamity immediately follows the aftermath of Firefight and takes the Reckoners on an suitably ambitious quest as they seek to execute their most daring plan yet to redeem the fallen Epics and destroy the Epic known as Calamity who is the source of the power that makes superheroes evil. But the plan is never more than an idea and the plot suffers from a split focus as the team tries to accomplish a secondary goal and get stuck on step one without coming up with an actual plan on how they were going to pull it off.
In what is apparently a tradition for this series Sanderson takes us to a new set piece city influenced by an Epic super-power. In this case it is a travelling Atlanta, now known as Ildithia, somehow turned to salt and wandering across the continent growing on one end and collapsing on the other. How this occurred is never really explained, it is just the backdrop for the action. The logistical puzzle is interesting, but it seems difficult to imagine that anyone would actually take the trouble to bother living there if they have to move every week.
It was good to see Abraham and Cody back with David and Megan, and throwing in Mizzy from the Babylon Restored Reckoner cell made for an entertaining if somewhat less competent team than in the previous books. The characters were fun and the fights and revelations were exciting, flashy and enjoyable. However, the sense of urgency and danger dissipated as the main characters dodged bullet after bullet without really trying as they were dragged through the plot rather than driving the plot with anything more than intention. The usual cascade of revelations and plot turns was in force as it always is for a Sanderson novel, but for once it felt rushed and disconnected.
“I feel, like a barrel of green ducks at a Fourth of July parade.” David says at one point in the book. The simile doesn’t make any sense at the time and his attempted explanation is humorous. It seems a fitting description for the novel, it leaves you feeling contrived, nonsensical and trapped in the middle of something that should be climactic and exciting, but really just leaves you scratching your head. Worst of all, after working through a tangle of complications and setbacks to the first step of the plan we get most of the way through the novel and come to the final battle that should cap everything off and instead of a satisfying struggle we are basically just told that everything is resolved “Just like that”. And we aren’t just talking about tieing the plot threads together and resolving character goals. No, Calamity takes the defining aspects of the setting and entirely negates it. The world has no interesting problems to resolve.
*Spoilers*
The premise of a world where some people are have super-human abilities but the superpowers inherently make them into selfish arrogant villains incapable of considering the people around them was an excellent concept, showcasing the idea that power corrupts and how easy it is to be selfish and do abhorrent things if you value yourself over others. The absolute nature, that all Epics become evil as they use their powers was part of the fascination of the stories. As the setting was explained in more detail and the origin of the powers (and evil) was revealed to be the bratty terrified god-child Calamity the interesting part was cheapened. Putting the blame on an outside power that was corrupting the ‘inherent good’ in humanity without also having an outside good as well causes the premise to fall apart. Ultimately this means that since David and Megan can stand up to Calamity and own their powers and fears then any of those selfish Epic’s controlled by Calamity’s corruption could have thrown off their corruption if they had only been willing to do the same. David does it so effortlessly. There was amazing possibilities here, but Sanderson blinked and decided to go with the tidy feel-good option that falls apart and fails to satisfy anything.
There are also problems raised by Megan’s power to bridge to alternate realities, however powerful and interesting alternate realities might seem to be, they tend to cheapen the history and narrative structure of the world they are being brought into. Usually Brandon does a very good job of explaining the limitations of a power and the fun comes from working within the limitations to achieve maximum effect or showcasing interactions with other power sets. When you introduce something like being able to travel to alternate realities, logic and limitations start to break down, and trying to add more explanation of how it works and what is possible ends up confusing things even more. It seemed an odd thing to introduce in the third novel in a series, but it made sense why Brandon Sanderson started exploring it more in depth when I saw the announcement about a new series that he is working on set in a reality tangential to the Reckoners series The Apocalypse Guard. Hopefully he can make it work in that series, but I have my doubts based on the very nature of alternate realities.