Empire State by Adam Christopher

Published by Angry Robot on December 27, 2011

Start by combining a depression-era gangster story with a comic book saga of superheroes wearing rocket boots, mix in a private detective, toss in a rogue robot, add an alternate history in which a parallel version of New York City is isolated and at war with an enemy that surrounds it, top it off with transdimensional travel and time confusion and you’ve got Empire State.  Sounds like a mess, doesn’t it?  Empire State is such a strange novel that, despite being unimpressed with Adam Christopher’s prose and unenthused about the storyline, I kept reading just to find out what would happen next.  I suppose that’s a recommendation of sorts.

The two superheroes who once protected New York City -- the Skyguard and the Science Pirate -- have taken a holiday from crime fighting so they can battle each other, leaving the depression-era city at the mercy of bootleggers and mobsters, predators and corrupt officials.  One defeats the other and a gangster named Rex Braybury seems to defeat the winner.

Years later, a private detective in Empire State named Rad Bradley (who bears an uncanny resemblance to New York’s Rex) is hired to find a missing woman. The woman’s corpse turns up before Rad has a chance to conduct a serious search.  The evidence suggests that the woman was murdered by a robot but in this novel things aren’t always as they appear.  Besides, robots are generally found only on the ironclad ships that sail off to war in defense of the Empire State, never to return -- except, that is, for the ironclad that recently came home and is now quarantined at a safe distance from the port.  Could a killer robot have come from the ship?  Rad, his reporter friend Kane, and a strange character named Captain Carson resolve to find out.  Rad soon uncovers secrets about the war and the robots that are concealed from the Empire State populace.  Later he learns an even bigger secret about the nature of the Empire State itself.

Adam Christopher’s writing style is ordinary, at best -- not awful, but this isn’t a novel you’ll read for the beauty of its prose.  The convoluted plot just barely holds together.  In the end I thought this was a novel in search of an identity; it doesn’t know quite what it wants to be.  It doesn’t work as a crime or detective story, despite the presence of a detective and mobster, nor does it succeed as an action/adventure story.  Empire State is more tongue-in-cheek sci-fi than serious speculative fiction (I wouldn’t even regard it as serious comic book fiction; I’m not sure why superheroes are part of the plot) but it often reads as if it were meant to be taken seriously.  Still, if you ignore the absence of any reasonable explanation for nearly anything of consequence that happens as the story unfolds, Empire State does have some limited entertainment value.

Part of the fun of Empire State is picking out all the in-jokes.  In the Empire State, Seduction of the Innocent isn’t Fredric Wertham’s infamous diatribe against comic books but a quasi-religious “moral code” written by The Pastor of Lost Souls.  (Of course, a character named Frederick turns up in the novel.)  From a street named Soma to a theater production called Boneshaker, the novel is filled with thinly veiled references to the history of science fiction and comic books -- the character Kane, for instance, brings to mind Bob Kane, who created The Batman.  Mix together Bradley and Braybury (the twinned characters from the parallel worlds) and you get Bradbury.

Based solely on its audacity, I am tempted to recommend Empire State, but I can do so only with the warning that its many flaws nearly outweigh the fun factor that might motivate a reader to give it a try.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS