Heroes Die

Heroes Die
First edition
Author	Matthew Stover
Cover artist	Doug Beekman
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Fantasy, science fiction
Publisher	Del Rey (US)
Publication date	21 July 1998 (US)
Media type	Print (Trade Paperback & Mass Market Paperback)
Pages	563 (US 1st edition)
ISBN	0-345-42104-3 (US trade paperback edition), ISBN 0-345-42145-0 (US mass market paperback edition)
OCLC	38055983
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 21
LC Class	PS3569.T6743 C35 1998
Followed by	Blade of Tyshalle

Heroes Die is a science fantasy novel by American writer Matthew Stover, the first of a series of novels featuring the protagonist Caine.

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Transcription

I can't abandon what I've started here. I need to keep going, you know? Maybe I should just get a normal 9 to 5 job. You've always got something on, Dad. Why can't you spend time with us this weekend? Just a little bit? Just an hour? No problems, Daddy will be back soon, okay? Can you pass me back to Mom? Hello. -How are you, sir? I'm good. 80% of the mosquitoes flying around the house at night enter in the tubes. So we're killing massive numbers. The population is going up to nine billion people in the next couple of decades. It's a lot of mouths to feed. So you need high-protein healthy foods, and we need to scale-up production. Wherever there are people there are generally large forms of methane gas. And it's a huge environmental problem. Our technology can produce biodegradable plastics from methane gas. In order to do this, we need your help. It's very inspiring, but obviously this is not going to work for us. There are five million people around the world in wheelchairs who can be helped by this. This has become an obsession, Dad. You don't even know if this is going to work. People like you are the reason our planet is going to hell. I don't think this can be the solution. The flood situation in Thailand has gone from bad to worse. Our site is under two meters of water right now. It's all gone. They keep on asking us for more data. This has been going on for more than 20 years. There is no reason for anybody in this country to die of malaria today. We are using our wealth and our money, our harvests to treat malaria. Start again. You can't let one setback make you throw away your entire dream. I dived off a surfboard without my hands out and I broke my neck. So all of the independence that I had is completely gone. So this is not about research. This is about lives of real people. So you need to show the world that what you've created is something revolutionary ... ... is something that can change the world and benefit everybody. It just felt like I got to reclaim a bit of me that's been lost. It's really going to happen, dad. I think we've finally made it. I think this is going to work.

Plot

The novels are set in a future dystopia Earth where a parallel world called Overworld reminiscent of the worlds featured in post-Tolkien secondary world fantasy has been discovered. The corporations that run Earth send actors into Overworld in order to provide the masses of an overcrowded world with virtual-reality entertainment.

Hari Michaelson is a famous Actor and son of a now-mentally ill libertarian professor. On Overworld, he is the assassin Caine, while his estranged wife Shanna is another Actor, playing the mage Pallas Ril. Actors who travel to Overworld through advanced technology and assume an alternate persona which they then use to carry out 'adventures'. Pallas is captured by Ma'elKoth, the Emperor of Overworld's human kingdom of Ankhana, on one of her adventures. Ma'elKoth's plan to rule Ankhana by wiping out a final resistance group is blocked by a spell that causes others to forget the existence of the resistance group's members. The remainder of the book plays out the conflict between Ma'elKoth, Caine and the resistance. Hari finds himself manipulated by both the powers on Overworld and the Studio on Earth, and must defeat them both in order to save himself and Pallas Ril from death.

Major themes

Heroes Die contains moral questions the author does not believe typically arise in fantasy.^[1] In a 1999 interview regarding the novel, Stover describes it as follows:

"It's a piece of violent entertainment that's a meditation on violent entertainment- as a concept in itself, as a cultural obsession. It's a love story: romantic love, paternal love, repressed homoerotic love, love of money, of power, of country, love betrayed and employed as both carrot and stick. It's about all different kinds of heroes and all the different ways they die."

Violence

Earth is overcrowded and oppressed, with a caste-based dystopian government; the masses turning to the adventures of the Actors such as Caine for entertainment and distraction. The violence within the Acts of Caine is often portrayed in graphic detail because that is what the viewers on Earth are seeking. Michaelson, in the character of Caine, exhibits willingness to sacrifice the citizens of Ankhana and even his friends in order to save his wife. Hari's father is a former libertarian academic who provides a counterpoint to the violence and despair of Earth.

Style

As with its sequel, Heroes Die utilizes multiple point of view; a number of characters including Hari, Shanna, and Berne are used as third-person narrators for various parts of the story. However, for the scenes from Hari's perspective when he is on Overworld as Caine, the sections are portrayed from a first-person viewpoint and are meant to be Caine's interior soliloquies he runs for the benefit of the audiences on Earth; toward the end of the novel he addresses the audience directly. These segments tend to be more in plain speech, more peppered with profanity, shorter paragraphs, and tangents that follow Caine's train of thought.