A review by raucous
All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault by James Alan Gardner

5.0

This is the first new Gardner book I've seen in over a decade. It’s great to see him back. This book shows the same inventiveness, humor, and character development that I enjoyed in the League of Peoples series except with, well, more explosions. There’s a lot about superheroes (“sparks” here, for legal reasons) that I didn’t understand until I read this book. In particular, this book contains the best justification I've ever seen for why superhero secret identities work. It's also fascinating to me how he wove together our world with the alternate history that forms the basis for this one. Finally it's clear that he spent way too much time at some point hanging around university science research complexes and did a nice job integrating that setting into the book. +1 for including a reference to the CRC Handbook.