The Incorruptibles, John Hornor Jacobs
The Incorruptibles is a bit of a mash up of all sorts of genres: a little steampunk, a little Western, a little horror/supernatural/Supernatural vibe, alternate history with a Roman (sorry, Ruman) feel… and it does work insofar as it’s entertaining, and it’s interesting to figure out how exactly the world goes together — what’s different, what’s the same, what this or that term means. There’s quite a lot of action scenes and there’s always something apparently going on, but pacing-wise, it feels odd. After a certain point, it suddenly gets a lot more serious, with really high stakes, and that isn’t where I was expecting it to go — and that jarred with the rather less consequential stuff going on before.
Also, I’m… really not a fan of the ‘stretchers’; the equivalents of native people who hound the heroes and human settlements, who cannibalise and sacrifice and all kinds of horror. Some of it, especially their tendency to scalp people, is just too reminiscent of racial stereotypes about Native Americans in the Wild West. It feels like the author said, oh, I need to have that threat in the background, but it wouldn’t be politically correct to use actual Native Americans… so instead I’ll create monsters and attribute all the same shit to them!
It’s an interesting set-up for a world, but that aspect honestly grossed me out.
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