"Emperors aren't morally superior. We've never claimed that. We're not above morality either. We're like...we're like the Greek gods, capable of great good and great evil. Some of us are on the side of humanity, some of us aren't. But even when we're on your side, you have to accept us." (p.252)

Reading 'Steel Gods' is like eating a disappointing pomegranate; there's a good idea in there somewhere, but you as the reader have to do more work than the book is to tease that little bit of goodness out.

The idea of a sub-grouping of humans that have telepathy on a sliding scale has interesting political implications that Gronmark tries to work in as the backbone of 'Steel Gods', but since our POV character is a normal person, not an emperor (which is a stupid name for these beings, but ok, that's a personal quibble), we are told, not shown, how emperors have influenced geo-politics throughout history, and how they might influence it in the near future.

He also doesn't seem to have completely worked out the limitations of these telepathic abilities before writing the story, because for most of the book it operates one way: the emperors can functionally erase a person's memory by telling them to forget things, and they can manipulate their actions by putting ideas in their head to do certain things. Depending on how strong the emperor is, the things they can get them to do range from getting a person to choose a particular item off a menu to getting a person to commit suicide or murder.

However, since the climax hinges on the emperors in-fighting, suddenly we're introduced to the idea that they can use this power on each other and also that there's a physical component to it somehow (as in: during the climax, one of them seemingly causes a storm to brew overhead???).

So that's all a bit messy, but could have been forgivable if the plot itself had been interesting. But it's not. It's also kind of all over the place.

We get introduced to our main POV character, David, in a prologue of him meeting our principle 'good guy' emperor, James Lord, while they're both students together in high school, but after James Lord witnessed the assassination of Robert Kennedy, of whom he was a ward (I assume? Why he was hanging out with Robert Kennedy while he was a kid is kind of glossed over and doesn't really end up mattering).

Then we do a huge time jump and suddenly David's in his late-thirties and has a wife and a daughter, Anna. Anna is an emperor. At first, this is only relevant because David has to teach her how to surpress her power so she doesn't just run around manipulating everyone to do what she wants. But then it's revealed that she's actually super important because she's the only female emperor that any of the other emperors know of.

Then the entire plot becomes: James Lord (good emperor) fighting against Mr. Spear (bad emperor) over control of Anna because whoever controls her can marry and have children with her and create an emperor dynasty. This is gross and very ick at the best of times, but Anna is fourteen in this story. And that doesn't seem to really matter to anyone, least of all the author of this novel.

Most of the novel is just us following her father running around trying unsuccessfully to protect her from this entire conflict.

Blah blah blah lots of stuff happens and then there's an emperor showdown blah blah blah.

I didn't even really care by the time we got to the end because I kept getting distracted by filling out my 'things that give me the ick' bingo card such as:

1. Gronmark calling every single person of color 'the black' the very few times they appear in the story (as in 'the black handed him the book off the table')

2. Gronmark describing Anna as hot, which was gross both because she's 14, and also because we get this information from her father since her father is the third person limited POV character.

3. Gronmark inexplicably having David's childhood bully threaten to rape him as the endgame of chasing David into a vacant locker room area. And also him describing the bully as having: "a black, crinkly mop, as close to an Afro s a White could get" (notice how he capitalizes White but not black on top of everything. Like, girl, what is that about?)

4. Gronmark having a hot twenty-two year old fawn over David (who has been described to us as a pretty unimpressive, schlubby middle-aged man who doesn't bother taking care of himself)

5. Whatever this paragraph was trying to insinuate: "The reporters' secretary, Francesca, had managed to get a producer's job after years of trying. She'd also stopped dating neanderthals whose idea of fun was to bounce her around the room like a squash ball, and had got engaged to a meek little civil servant who treated her like a goddess. Inevitably, she was making his life hell." (p.95)

6. An underage girl being drugged, raped, and impregnated by an adult man, and then forced to birth the baby.

Bye!