Journalist Avi Hirsch is our way in to this story: An adrenaline junkie who’s done his best to settle down for his wife and kid, Avi is pursuing two seemingly unrelated stories, a bombing at a mall and another at a local black church. He learns that the man responsible has special powers, that there are more like him (though, mostly, not evil), and scariest of all, that Avi’s own daughter is one of them. The Nobody People spans the years after Avi’s discovery, as American society begins to learn of the existence of these so-called Resonants, and decides how they will respond. Along the way, Avi moves onto the sidelines of the story while other characters move to the front, notably a queer Muslim science genius Resonant, Fahima, and a graduate of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters the Bishop School called Carrie, whose ability is to turn invisible-ish.

The Nobody People is very much X-Men for a post-Trump era. Its turns to dystopia are hideously plausible, in part because they happen gradually. We open on a scene of violence in Appalachia, a family murdered because one of their sons used his power to open up a blockage in the mine. After Avi starts writing about the Resonant community for major publications, the backlash begins, spurred on by conservative talk show hosts and the existence of Resonants like the one who bombed the mall and the Baptist Church.

After that, the book is set up with small time jumps between sections (a year or two), which lets you discover the ways Resonants and humans alike have adjusted to their new normal. Early on, the only people clamoring for something to be done about the Resonants are cracks and conspiracy theorists. After a jump, the kids from the Bishop School have graduated and are living independently, forming Resonant conclaves within cities and walking among the normies (whom they call Damps) — though they remain fearful of government or vigilante interference in their lives, and there are whispers of Resonants being disappeared by men in white vans. Again and again, the characters and country adjust to a new normal, always hoping for / fearing the permanence of the status quo.

Even scarier than the country’s slide into exactly the kind of dystopia you’d expect is the fact that the characters don’t fail to see the dark futures they’re heading for. On the contrary, many of them can see it all too clearly, and they are working desperately to avert it. Only, in the Oedipus way that you’d expect, many of the steps they take to avert the grimmest futures only put them one step closer to disaster. Proehl does this very cleverly and (mostly) without editorializing, which highlights the impressive ambition and scale of this book.

All that said, and apart from a few pieces of white-guy-author-nonsense (lynching is a word with a really specific meaning and history! never ever ever ever ever have a narrator we’re supposed to like use the phrase young bucks to refer to young men!), I probably admired The Nobody People more than I loved it. This may just have been a function of its darkness; it’s hard in this darkest of timelines to read books in which nothing anybody does, no matter how good their intentions, no matter how awesome their brainpower, can save the day, or even come anywhere close to saving the day.

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There also feature analogues of Gail Simone and Ed Brubaker and Alan Moore and a range of other comics lights, which if you know comics you may successfully puzzle out and if you do not then you are probably fine to read the book anyway, although you may wonder why we are spending so much time with this Gail character away from the primary mother-son relationship we care about.

A Hundred Thousand Worlds is wonderful in many ways, chief amongst them being its affectionate, clear-eyed depiction of fan cultures and the many worlds of geekery. It’s trying to be a lot of things, and it succeeds better at some than others: Interstitial chapters reveal the “origin stories” of real, fictional, and semi-fictional characters within the world of the book, which gets old quickly. On the other hand, Val’s bedtime ritual of telling Alex a (lightly or heavily edited) synopsis of various episodes of Anomaly works brilliantly as a means of building their relationship, the world Val comes from, and Proehl’s vision of raising a geeky kid. It made me want to tell my own nephew stories from my favorite television shows when he gets a little older.

How right you are, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

BUT. While Proehl takes exceptional care in depicting the worlds of geekery, the same cannot be said of his depiction of mental illness. Halfway through the book (spoilers), you learn that when Alex was a toddler, a deranged fan (who also happened to be sleeping with Andrew) shot and killed the Anomaly showrunner’s wife. The book refers to her only as The Woman until the very end, when a reporter shouts out the news that she has killed herself. The few bits of dialogue we get from her are all like this:

You’re her. But you’re older. Are you from the future? Are we in the future now? I’ve wanted so much to talk to you. To tell you how sorry I am. Or I was. Has it happened yet? I think it’s happened for me already and you were younger then. It all feels present. . . . I’m here and I’m talking to you but also right now I’m shooting her. Because if you can’t tell if it’s future or past, then it’s right now. It all happens at once, all the time.

In other words, crazy-person dialogue written by someone who’s never spoken to (or been) a crazy person, in the mouth of a character who receives no interiority or even the courtesy of a name (until she completes suicide). If an author wants to portray a violent mentally ill person, then fine, proceed with caution; but Proehl appears to have taken absolutely no care with this character, and so of course her portrayal reinforces toxic stereotypes about mental illness and violence.

Also, the book mixes up metonymy and synecdoche. Try harder next time.

ETA 21 June 2017: Hi everyone, I have an update! Author Bob Proehl found this post and emailed me to say that I was totally right about the ableism, it was obvious now that someone pointed it out, and he is really sorry and will try to do better next time. It made me come over all warm and fuzzy.

He also made a joke about metonymy and synecdoche that made me feel awful for being snotty about that. I was displacing my annoyance over the portrayal of the mentally ill lady onto this metonymy thing, and that’s mean. Metonymy and synecdoche are really hard to keep straight. Nobody should feel bad about getting them confused.

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