Molly Sprayregen
This cover image released by Mira shows We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen. (Mira via AP) February 01, 2021 - 6:21 AM
âWe Could Be Heroes,â by Mike Chen (Mira)
In Mike Chenâs âWe Could Be Heroes,â Jamie and Zoe each wake up alone in an unfamiliar apartment. Neither has any memory of who they are or how they got there. All they know is that they now possess special powers. Jamie can read and erase memories, and Zoe has superhuman strength and speed.
Completely on their own, each must do whatever they can to survive. Taking opposite paths, Jamie turns to a life of crime, and Zoe becomes a vigilante hero. One day, the two meet in a memory loss support group. Their stories are too similar to be coincidental, so together, they embark on a quest to find out what happened to them and rediscover the people they once were.
“They’re friends.”
In so many of our modern stories, saying the above phrase almost feels like an insult. It’s often a dour statement, juxtaposed against how characters will do anything to make romantic relationships work, or how the power of blood family can make evil people return to a path of righteousness.
But friendship? It’s often presented as a lower-tier relationship, something given to a secondary character to help the main character achieve their goal of family connections or romance.
Which is kind of sad, isn’t it?
Friendship, after all, is really one of the cornerstones of our lives, even if we don’t always see it. This has been particularly amplified over the past year given the way COVID-19 has cut us off from physically seeing each other. During this time, people have found ways to support each other virtually, whether through group texts or instant messaging or Zoom calls. For many of us, family may have kept us going, but friendship has kept us sane
Persephone Station, a seemingly backwater planet that has largely been ignored by the United Republic of Worlds becomes the focus for the Serrao-Orlov Corporation as the planet has a few secrets the corporation tenaciously wants to exploit. Rosie owner of Monk’s Bar, in the corporate town of West Brynner, caters to wannabe criminals and rich Earther tourists, of a sort, at the front bar. However, exactly two types of people drank at Monk’s back bar: members of a rather exclusive criminal class and those who sought to employ them. Angel ex-marine and head of a semi-organized band of beneficent criminals, wayward assassins, and washed up mercenaries with a penchant for doing the honorable thing is asked to perform a job for Rosie. What this job reveals will affect Persephone and put Angel and her squad up against an army. Despite the odds, they are rearing for a fight with the Serrao-Orlov Corporation. For Angel, she knows that once honor is lost, there is no regaining it. That doe
Extreme strength. Super speed. Telepathy. These types of powers and more tend conjure up images of superheroes and typically, superheroes are the realm of comics, TV shows, and movies. In books? Not as much. And though my superhero novel
We Could Be Heroes arrives on January 26th, it doesn’t have too many contemporaries featuring traditional tights-and-capes superheroes. However, superpowers do wind up in books much more than you might think. It may come in the form of magic or science-based evolution, but the idea of ordinary humans having extraordinary abilities has shown up in some of the most acclaimed science fiction and fantasy novels of recent years and here are five of them worth checking out.
Photo courtesy of Mike Chen
MIRA at Harlequin Trade Publishing/ HarperCollins is excited to announce two more books from beloved and adored sci-fi author Mike Chen! The first book is
Vampire Weekend a fun vampire novel written with Chen’s signature emotional and fun style expected to publish in Winter 2023, with an as yet untitled book under contract for 2024.
Mike Chen’s upcoming books include
We Could Be Heroes (Jan 2021) and
Second Contact (Jan 2022). Chen was also a contributor to
Star Wars: From A Certain Point Of View The Empire Strikes Back (Del Rey).
In
Vampire Weekend, a lonely immortal woman rediscovers family when her nephew needs her help, and she’ll have to relearn how to connect and possibly save all of vampire-kind in the process.