Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Okay, I'm not talking about adaptations of existing works. 
Something which I have always found to be of somewhat, um, variable quality (to be fair, mostly book ==> movie). |
Moving the goalposts, how very dare you
The Marvel novels were pretty good, either new stories or very loose adaptations of existing storylines.
I'd agree book/movie adaptations aren't normally great.
Finding superhero novels that weren't based on existing comic books is probably tricky due to identifying them. Mel Odom's F.R.E.E.Lancer books were based on a role playing game (Won't see those as ebooks as the rights will have disappeared along with TSR though).
Mostly you have a problem of what you class as a superhero novel though. You can't just use superhuman abilities or the entire Urban Fantasy genre probably gets counted, along with genetically/technologically modified characters. You could easily include Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider and a ton of other material dating back to the 50's. Do they need to have some superhuman abilities - If so explain Batman
.
I'd have to scan my paper books to try and pull out any old ones.
Off the top of my head for new characters you have :-
Larry Correia's Grimnoir series.
Kelly Meding's Metawars Series
Christopher L Bennett's Only Superhuman
Brandon Sanderson's Reckoners Series
Kathy Reichs' Virals (Not read it)
G T Almasi's Shadowstorm Series
Myke Cole's Shadowops
Not sure if these should be classed
Steven Gould's Jumper series
Deborah Christian's Mainline
Peter Clines Ex-Heroes
And err... stuff that should be but isn't
Robert Heinlein's Friday
Jennifer Estep's Bigtime series - Sort of a cross between superheroes and sex in the city, seemed to go on about shoes a lot, never read past the first book - Probably not what you are looking for
.
I'm assuming we can't count Frank Herbert's works but he had a lot of para/super human abilities in most of his books, just dropping this in because classifying this is hard, everything seems to slide off into either SF or Urban Fantasy
What self-pub ones would you recommend BTW