Superheroes / superhero fiction are perhaps the most popular things in popular culture today that don’t involve a boy wizard or are set in a galaxy far, far away. Look no further than the money-making machine that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for example. In prose fiction, superheroes have been present in speculative fiction for a great while, but more books are lining the shelves these days, with the resurgence of George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards mosaic novels, Brandon Sanderson’s Steelheart/Reckoners trilogy, as well as any number of novels featuring either the licensed heroes of Marvel and DC Comics. Enter April Daniels and her debut novel Dreadnought, which captures the essence of a great superhero origin story, while naturally infusing themes of gender identity and identity as a whole into the story. The publisher blurb follows the cover.
Danny Tozer has a problem: she just inherited the powers of Dreadnought, the world’s greatest superhero. Until Dreadnought fell out of the sky and died right in front of her, Danny was trying to keep people from finding out she’s transgender. But before he expired, Dreadnought passed his mantle to her, and those secondhand superpowers transformed Danny’s body into what she’s always thought it should be. Now there’s no hiding that she’s a girl.
It should be the happiest time of her life, but Danny’s first weeks finally living in a body that fits her are more difficult and complicated than she could have imagined. Between her father’s dangerous obsession with “curing” her girlhood, her best friend suddenly acting like he’s entitled to date her, and her fellow superheroes arguing over her place in their ranks, Danny feels like she’s in over her head.
She doesn’t have time to adjust. Dreadnought’s murderer—a cyborg named Utopia—still haunts the streets of New Port City, threatening destruction. If Danny can’t sort through the confusion of coming out, master her powers, and stop Utopia in time, humanity faces extinction
What impressed me straight off is how Daniels thrusts the themes and issues of the story front and center at the beginning of the novel. Almost as a warning, “This is what my novel is about, buckle in or get out.” Danny Tozer, a young transgendered girl, witnesses a battle between a new, unknown supervillain and Dreadnought, basically, Superman/Captain Marvel pastiche, when Dreadnought is killed and literally passes his mantle and power matrix to her. The matrix bestows its bearer with their most ideal physical form, as well as powers of flight, strength, and limited invulnerability among other powers. With Danny always feeling like a female inside the body of a male, her external body transforms to match who she is inside. It is what she dreamed of for years. In a sense, the Dreadnought “mantle” is quite a bit like the power-set of DC’s Captain Marvel (now known as SHAZAM!), except that unlike Billy Batson (Captain Marvel’s alter-ego), Danny does not have to transform back to a young boy with or without uttering the magic word “SHAZAM!”
This of course, complicates her personal life. Danny’s parents seek to “cure” this transformation and her best friend no longer acts the way a best friend should. Legion Pacifica (an Avengers/Justice League analogue) tries to mentor her, treating her with kid gloves, understandably. Danny tries to balance the joy of her physical body matching her mental/identity along with the weight of bearing the mantle of the world’s greatest superhero. Danny also finds an ally in Calamity, a young heroine working solo.
I’ve been a comic book reader, specifically superhero comics, for the majority of my life. There are certain tropes and expectations when one reads a story. Daniels hits a lot of those story beats here in Dreadnought, the first of a series. With a great balance between details and hints, Daniels lays the foundation for a world where superheroes have been active for years. In other words, Danny’s world feels lived in, with a history, and a depth that could allow for more stories.
One of the more overlooked tropes of superheroes are the concepts of sidekick and legacy. Dick Grayson spent time under the hood as Batman in a great storyline from a few years back written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quietly. For years, one of the strongest elements of the DC Universe was the legacy hero, like the aforementioned Robin assuming the mantle of Batman, or perhaps my favorite when former sidekick Wally West took over the mantle of the Flash from his fallen mentor Barry Allen. Here, Daniels, plays with that idea of legacy, but there is no chance the former Dreadnought will reclaim his mantle, Danny *IS* Dreadnought, which is as it should be.
Outside of the powers beyond those of mortal people, the secret identity is probably the most identifiable superhero trope. Just as the X-Men and their outcast status as mutants can be seen as allegory for any number of societal groups viewed with disdain by the majority, Daniels’ novel takes the “outcast” to an even greater degree in a natural intertwining of “secret identity” and “gender identity.” Daniels packs the challenges Danny faces with her gender, achieving the physical form she wished to achieve, and the abusive degradations she suffers at home into the story in remarkably powerful and empathetic, skilled fashion. What Daniels does so well throughout is to make Danny a character you have no choice for which to root.
If it isn’t clear by now that I enjoyed this book, I’ll flat out say it: Dreadnought is a wonderful novel, mixing great story with powerful themes/Important Ideas where one feeds into the other without forsaking any quality of either. Daniels’ Nemesis saga is off to a great start, as is her novel-writing career.
Highly recommended
© 2017 Rob H. Bedford
January 2017 | Diversion Books
Trade Paperback | 280 Pages
http://www.aprildaniels.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Diversion Books
