Velveteen vs The Junior Super Patriots

What could be better on a miserably cold Sunday than Seanan McGuire's set of subversive superhero stories, Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots. All the stories are available for mooching online but they're also available in an ebook anthology for those keen to keep the author from penury and, more importantly, being eaten by her cats.

When Velma Martinez first manifests the ability to animate children's toys with her mind, her deadbeat parents turn out to be disturbingly willing to sell her to Super Patriots Inc. the uber-corporation that controls 97 per cent of the world's superheroes. Under the tutelage of the corporation and its all powerful Marketing arm, Velma becomes Velveteen — the better to appeal to the target audience and to shift more merchandise. With her friends Action Guy and Sparkle Bright — AKA Aaron and Yelena — Velveteen is subjected to a bogus reality TV competition before, inevitably, joining the Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division.

When Velveteen hits eighteen, the Machiavellian manipulations of the corporation become too much for her and she quits. As Velma, she struggles to hold down a series of poorly paid jobs while trying to keep off the radar of Super Patriot Inc. Eventually, becoming fed up with her life in California, she decides to take a road trip to Portland Oregon where, she hopes, the state's attitude to organised superheroes will keep the SPI off her back for long enough for her to establish a permanent career for herself.

The story unfolds through a series of short episodes framed by Velma's journey to Oregon. Some of these, such as the Isley Crayfish Festival and The Coffee Freaks, take place in the present and follow the flow of the road trip. Others, including The Eternal Halloween and, rather obviously, The Flashback Sequence, jump back to cover Velma's early days with the Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division.

As with much of McGuire's fiction, the idea of making a choice to escape a pre-destined path plays a big role. Like Verity in InCryptid or the Masons in Newsflesh, Velma's life appears to be mapped out before her by the corporation that is her surrogate parent before she makes her conscious choice to try and focus on the things she wants to do with her life. Which, in this case, involve staying alive past 35 and not having an evil group of marketing executives manipulate every aspect of her life in order to make themselves more money. As ever, it's not whether the choice actually comes off or not that's important — although it's obviously vital to the characters themselves — but the act of deciding forces the character to focus on what actually matters to them and whether they could continue to live with themselves if they made the wrong choice.

Velma is a likeable lead, as grumpy as might be expected given the amount of time she's spent struggling to achieve something like a half-normal life. She's competent and efficient — in a nice touch she monitors her own internet discussion groups for ways to improve the deployment of her own powers, something she considers fair exchange for the all slash fiction and faked up porn — and, as it gradually becomes clear, not nearly as weak as everyone seems to think.