I’ve always been drawn to books with characters whose abilities represent a classic double-edged sword, both blessing and curse. Think Incredible Hulk—unbelievably strong, capable of protecting both himself and others, but also out of control, unable to clearly remember who he is or what he’s doing when he’s in that transformed state. When it comes to such powerful characters, the double-edged ability is a great way to explore the dark-side of awesomeness, to render someone who is untouchable painfully relatable. The unfortunate side effects and consequences of special powers also bring balance and tension into a story, where power alone would limit the tale to simple answers and quick resolution.
I love writing this type of character into my books, too. In my urban fantasy novel, Reliquary, along with its prequel comic miniseries, Mayhem and Magic, Asa Ward has the power to sense magic in people and objects, but it comes with nasty side effects—he’s an exposed nerve. Too much of certain types of magic can make him violently ill, too much of others leave him vulnerable to addiction. So, while he has an edge as he steals and deals bits of magic all over the world, it’s an ability that could destroy him. I love that interplay between power and vulnerability, and here are a few of my favorite books and comics that use it to great effect:
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
In the long running and compulsively readable Sookie Stackhouse series, the eponymous heroine simply wants to live a normal life in her little home town of Bon Temps, Louisiana. Only problem—she can hear the thoughts of the people around her. Sounds like a cool power, except it means she’s privy not only to everyone’s secrets, but also their thoughts about her. Worse, she can’t always hide it, and so everyone knows there’s something off about Sookie. Having that endless cacophony in her head is sometimes more than she can take, leading her to seek the company of vampires, whose thoughts she can’t hear. Bloody shenanigans ensue.
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Dead Until Dark
X-Men Comics
So many of the mutants of Marvel’s X-Men have classic blessing-and-curse powers, but the one I think is the most poignant is Rogue, AKA Anna Marie, who absorbs the memories (and powers, if present) of others whenever she touches them. Awesome! Except the person she touches can end up dead, which absolutely sucks for her love life. She discovers this as a teenager when she has her first kiss and leaves the boy in an irreversible coma. There is a short interlude in the comics where she’s drained of her powers and gets a taste of normal life with her boyfriend, Gambit, so that’s something, at least, but still. She is literally untouchable.
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Rogue & Gambit: Ring of Fire
Once Burned by Jeaniene Frost
The female protagonist of the extremely fun Night Prince paranormal romance series is Leila, who after a childhood accident with a downed power line, channels electricity AND has the gift of psychometry, meaning she can see past, present, or future events tied to objects or people when she touches them. Unfortunately, this means she has a tendency to shock others both physically and emotionally, as she often sees a person’s darkest moment the first time she touches them. At the beginning of the series, she’s designed her life around avoiding contact with other people. It’s no fun, but like Sookie, she finds her match in a vampire! Vampires are awesome that way.
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Once Burned
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The main character of this, one of my favorite novels by one of my favorite authors, is Saleem Sinai, who was born at the moment India became independent from Great Britain. His life and health are closely linked with the fate of the country and the other thousand children who were also born at that moment. Saleem is a telepath with a massive, constantly dripping nose that causes him no shortage of annoyance and ridicule. At one point he has a medical procedure that rids him of the telepathy but gives him a hypersensitive sense of smell that also allows him to detect emotions. He’s possibly the least glamorous but most interesting character with powers I’ve ever read about.
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Midnight's Children
The Green Mile by Stephen King
John Coffey is locked up in Cold Mountain State Penitentiary for raping and murdering two little girls, but as guard Paul Edgecombe gets to know him, he realizes John has some pretty unusual gifts. Sensitive and empathic, John somehow has the power to heal others, and it turns out his attempt to use that ability to try to help others led to his imprisonment. This story is a perfect yet brutal example of how a wonderful, positive power can get a good person into serious and tragic hot water. I highly recommend the read—just have a box of tissues at your side.
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The Green Mile
Originally published in June 2016.
Sarah Fine is a clinical psychologist and the author of the Servants of Fate and Guards of the Shadowlands series. She was born on the West Coast, raised in the Midwest, and is now firmly entrenched on the East Coast. Her latest novel, Reliquary, is available now.
I have yet to be disappointed by a Rushdie book (though I know Satanic Verses can be a bit polarizing). MC is much recommended.
Cibopathy from the comic book Chew, in which you get psychic impressions off of everything you eat, except (weirdly enough) beets. Better hope you don’t like burgers, because you definitely won’t after five minutes with this ability.
Currently re-reading Ursula LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, where the protagonist occasionally has dreams that can alter reality. But he has no control over when these “effective” dreams happen, and attempts to use/direct them…do not go well. Overpopulation is cured by a devastating plague. World peace is achieved when aliens attack and unity is our only hope of survival. Etc.
I highly recommend reading The Green Mile before you consider watching the movie. While the movie in its own right, the novel by Stephen King adds so much to John Coffey’s story that it would be a shame to miss it…
Best,
Pierre
Charles Stross’s The Anihilation Score, in which the stars coming right results in people developing superpowers, which varying degrees of horrid consequences.
I am currently in the middle of the Alcatraz series by Brandon Sanderson, and I think the Smedry Talents certainly deserve a spot in this list. Especially until one learns to control them. Yeah, it might be useful to break things (like the wall in a room you cannot get out of) by just a touch or get to faraway places very quickly etc., but if it involves setting your fosterparents’ kitchen in fire and breaking also the things you don’t want to break, or being lost in the fireplace for two weeks, it’s far from being fun.
Also, Brandon’s Reckoners series. After a comet fell, some people developed superpowers. Too bad that everyone having them seemed to have suddenly become evil …
How would you like to know the future?
Now … how would you like to know the future, if all you saw were the bad things, and if there was nothing you could do to change them?
The first time I saw that was in Spider Robinson’s short story “Fivesight” from his Callahan’s series.
I’m reading the excellent novel A Plague of Giants by Kevin Hearne. In that world, many people choose to become “blessed’ with one or another set of magical powers drawing on specific forces of nature, power to do wonderful and terrible things. To get that power, you ritually immerse yourself in a lethal form of that force, which either blesses you or — sometimes far more likely — kills you. If blessed, you’re immune to harm from that force…but actively using the magic will physically age you, sometimes very quickly if you use it intensively, and you’re required to use it in service to your nation. So seeking it is basically a death sentence, whether short or long. But many people take the risk and pay the price, for the chance at living a while with those abilities — to breathe and travel underwater or fly in the wind or live among deadly animals, to gruesomely kill people if need be — or because they believe they have nothing else left to live for. It’s haunting.
Superpowers with horrible side effects is basically the premise of the entire Reckoners series by Brandon Sanderson.
@2: Something very similar occurs in “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake” https://www.amazon.com/Particular-Sadness-Lemon-Cake/dp/0385720963
Much of the Wild Cards series fits the bill. Many of the Jokers have a variety of powers that almost always come with negative effects, mostly in the form of hideous mutations. Even Ace powers come with some downsides, though usually mitigated by not being hideously mutated.
“Soon I Will Be Invincible” by Austin Grossman.
Quote: “There’s a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition.”
@13, Just what I was thinking. :-)
The Reckoners was my first thought. But in general I think it’s always a good story move to add some kind of limitation or cost to power to keep things interesting. As much as I love stuff like Star Wars and Wheel of Time, most of their use of magic is kind of arbitrary in terms of how much a person can use at any given time. There are SOME possibilities of ‘burning out’, etc, but there’s generally not a huge cost.
@15 the cost of magic
Patrick Rothfuss does something like this with his ‘practical’ magic system Sympathy (as opposed to his ‘fantasy’ magic system ‘Naming’). It shows up a little bit in the Name of the Wind but it much more important to the plot of the Wise Man’s Fear.
Students at the university speak of the costs of ‘slippage’ like the student who cooked himself and all the other students laugh until another student who was there tells them the smell stayed in the building for days afterwards. There are similar instances that are more relevant to the main plot as well.
Ack! I meant to post my original comment elsewhere. Since I don’t know how to delete comments….
One of Wally “Flash” West’s fears back when he had just taken over from Barry Allen was that he’d find himself falling from a great height. None of his speed tricks would let him survive the experience, as far as he knew, but his ability to speed up his perceptions might make the experience of falling to his death last subjective years.
(there was a comic where a minor character had super-fast perception without the ability to act quickly. He tried to play hero and got shot. His powers didn’t save him but they did let him experience his looming mortal injury over a very long time from his perspective)