The shining metropolis of Seventh City is the birthplace of super powers. The First Wave heroes are jerks, but they have the best gifts: flight, super strength, telepathy, genius, fire. The Third Wavers are stuck with the leftovers: the ability to instantly make someone sober, the power to smell the past, the grace to carry a tray and never drop its contents, the power to produce high-powered excrement blasts, absolute control. over elevators. Bar owner Keepsie Branson is a Third Waver with a power that prevents anything in her possession from being stolen. Keepsie and her friends just aren't powerful enough to make a difference. at least that's what they've always been told. But when the villain Doodad slips Keepsie a mysterious metal sphere, the Third Wavers become caught in the middle of a battle between the egotistical heroes and the manipulative villains. As Seventh City begins to melt down, it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad, and even harder to tell who may become the true heroes.
Playing For Keeps
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More About the Author
Mur Lafferty is a podcaster and writer from Durham, NC. She is producer and host of several popular podcasts, including I Should Be Writing, the award-winning podcast for wanna-be fiction writers, and The Angry Robot Podcast. She is the editor of Escape Pod, the premier SF podcast magazine. She's written for magazines, roleplaying games, and audio and video podcasts. Her newest work is her series of novellas, The Afterlife Series.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
53 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You've Never Read Of Heroes Like These - And You'll Want More!,
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This review is from: Playing For Keeps (Paperback)
PERSPECTIVE: sci-fi, fantasy, and comic book fan
This, Mur Lafferty's first published novel, takes the tropes of comic book-style superheroes and villains, and brilliantly upends them to explore what lies underneath. The world of Playing for Keeps not only contains the previously mentioned costumed characters, but also a group of relatively normal folk - "third wavers" - who have special abilities too esoteric and underpowered to be useful for daring or mischief... or so it seems. What follows is a story that explores the complexities behind what it truly means to be a "hero," even when society has deemed that you are not. Playing for Keeps is at turns epic and human, with everyday, flawed characters that are forced to contend with extraordinary challenges in which there is often no "right answer." Mur's prose is deft and evocative, making this a compelling, engrossing read to the very end. FINAL WORD: A HIGH five of five stars, and a must read not only for fans of genre fiction, but anyone who enjoys an excellent tale. Highest recommendation.
43 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Playing for Cash,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Playing For Keeps (Paperback)
I have to admit - I purchased this book based on the impressive array of highly eloquent five-star reviews. I'm a longtime fan of the superhero novel genre and I'm usually very impressed by the likes of, just as examples, Austin Grossman, who wrote 'Soon I Will Be Invincible', that 'Devil's Cape' book whose author I forget and James Maxey's 'Nobody Gets the Girl'. I'm always looking for new ones and somewhat naively figured that if so many people liked this one I couldn't go wrong.
Unfortunately this book isn't very good. It's so not-good that I was actually moved to write a review about it, so that perhaps other people out there wouldn't waste their money the same way I did mine. The story's premise is serviceable enough: two groups of super-powered individuals, those with powers natural or otherwise deemed suitable for government exploitation become costumed heroes, while those with more modest abilities (such as spraying excrement from one's hands, which in her own way Lafferty does her best to handle with a certain amount of sensitivity) merely attempt to live their lives. The sort-of title character, Keepsie, who has the power to never lose anything, runs a bar for the latter group where they can relate to each other about how it sucks to have superpowers without getting respect or having the great responsibility that the government heroes do. One day, however, due to her powers, Keepsie is entrusted by a super-villain with an object that the superheroes seem at great pains to recover, and determines to get to the bottom of the story herself. These are the broad strokes, anyway. The problem is that this novel is not fun to read. For one thing, Lafferty has no ear for dialogue. In particular the banter between her protagonists sounds like someone earnestly attempting to create a spoken shorthand between longtime friends by someone who understands both friendship and banter on a purely intellectual level, and most of the witticisms seem painfully contrived. For another, the motivations and actions taken by the characters are arbitrary, as if Lafferty had an outline of the novel's story beats in her hand when writing the book which went something like 'these guys at the bar go to point A, and do B, then go to point C, where they discover D, and then do E and then everyone goes back to the bar again, and then Keepsie goes catatonic for some reason', and then couldn't quite figure out how to get them there in a way that didn't seem forced or artificial. In fact, it seems like Lafferty goes to great lengths to make sure that Keepsie's Bar is in the story as often as possible, as if the idea that the novel's gimmick was a 'superhero-story-meets-Cheers' scenario was consciously foremost in her mind, and to sideline or marginalize this bar in the novel's story would have, I don't know, compromised the novel's back-copy. In short, nothing about this novel is remotely organic or feels like it develops naturally. Many of these reviewers talk about how this novel 'takes superhero tropes and puts them on their head' and whatnot, but in my opinion, she cut a bunch of superhero and pop-culture cliches out of a magazine, tried to paste them together, and slapped a $15 price tag on whatever came out. I read an earlier reviewer who claimed that the bulk of the positive reviews are written by people in Lafferty's "New Media" circle, who write glowing reviews of each other's output in order to bolster their sales and credibility. It sounds like a grand conspiracy theory, but quite frankly, considering the quality of this book it is the most likely explanation. For the one or two people who may actually read this review - someday - I'd be happy to sit down, book in my hand, and cite specific examples of the criticisms I've discussed above, and more, and I would do this for no other reason than I am pissed off that these people outright swindled me out of my $15 and I would not wish the same on anyone else. It's not like I can get rid of this book either. I took it to Hastings to trade it and the UPC code doesn't scan, so they wouldn't take it. I'm STUCK with it unless I decide to chuck it in the trash. So I might as well put it to good use to prevent others from wasting their money as well.
33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Prose, powers and protagonists: all play for keeps in this book,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Playing For Keeps (Paperback)
"Playing for Keeps" celebrates the superhero genre with its mighty chisel-chinned heroes and diabolical villains -- and then tosses the most-familiar elements of that setup on its head. The result is a delightful salute (and send up) to comic books; a world in which the good guys aren't as good as their propaganda posters proclaim ... and the villains' mission garners more sympathy than you might expect.
The book's Seventh City setting brims with super-folk, many of whom are like Keepsie, the story's lead protagonist. Sporting a power deemed too "passive" to be useful for official crimefighting by the local hero academy, Keepsie is mostly content to run her pub and scowl at the sycophantic TV reports about the city's caped crusaders. But when Seventh City's villains target her as the linchpin in a new conspiracy, Keepsie finds herself in an ethical quandary: she must either help the heroes who rejected her, or cave to the villains' whims... ...or does she? Keepsie and her pals create a third option, which forces them to stick together, stand against heroes and villains, and scrap for their lives. It's a fun, funny and exciting romp, and author Lafferty executes the story brilliantly, crafting a city and denizens so well-defined, you'd think they were pulled from a top-selling four-color comic. Lafferty also deftly explores the ethics of superheroing, and the interpersonal conflicts that arise when blessed with such powers. Perhaps best of all, "Playing for Keeps" reminds us that we can all be heroes -- a relevant and hopeful message for not just fans of the genre, but any reader. Highly recommended.
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