Steelheart, by Brandon Sanderson

A fantasty novel (the fantasy is that your dorkiness is super valuable and the hot girl will be into you, though yes there's also magic and superpowers and stuff).

At the time of this writing there is a live, livid controversy over a profile of Sanderson which says he's a bad writer, so I maybe shouldn't get into this at all, but the amazing thing is that Sanderson is both a bad writer and an unbelievably good writer. His prose really is very wooden and incredibly basic; his psychological observations really do seem staggeringly juvenile.

And yet, he's absolutely masterful at propelling you forward through the novel: every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, that leads to another cliffhanger, that keeps you going till the end.

I would even describe it as a pretty "clean" high – I've read books where the cliffhangers didn't get resolved for ages, or (worse) didn't get resolved at all, and where I got the feeling that I wasn't actually enjoying the book anymore, but it had hacked my brain so I couldn't stop. By contrast, Steelheart was enjoyable 100% of the way through. I think part of the secret is that the cliffhangers were generally answered immediately, and satisfactorily, from one chapter to the next – there's some overall plot from the beginning to end of the book, but I suspect that if you analysed it you would see that the structure of this book is more like:

/—\/—\/—\/—\/—\/—\/—\   <– a bunch of small jumps, chapter to chapter

where other books do weird comlicated loops, big jumps and small jumps that overlap in complex ways, and create that "I MUST KNOW WHAT HAPPENS" feeling without rewarding you with regular releases from it.

In a weird way, Sanderson's bad prose actually makes the mystery more effective: when he repeats himself clunkily, or ham-fistedly emphasises some side point or character trait, you really can't tell whether that's a clue to a future reveal or just a bad piece of prose styling.

One of my favourite "ACTUALLY"s about literature is Chekhov's gun: Chekhov wasn't saying "if you have a gun on stage in the first act, you should have someone fire it in the third act"; he was saying that the problem with literature, relative to real life, is that the audience (correctly) presumes that if there's a gun on stage in the first act it will fire in the third, which cuts some of the surprise/suspense. So Sanderson has developed a brilliant solution to this, which is that if he presents a gun in the first act you don't know if it's plot-relevant or if he's just excitedly going on a nerdy tangent about guns.

This reminds me of another key feature of Sanderson's writing: a clever conflation of two very different types of Nerds. In the novel, the hot girl teases the teenage protagonist boy for being "such a nerd" and Not Owning It (before the muscular French-Canadian assassain mentions it's cool to be a nerd, that the evil overlord is Most Scared Of The Nerds, and when the overlord is overthrown it will inevitably be a clever nerd that figures out how to do it).

In my estimation, the book is (cleverly) conflating two very different things. My own preferred meaning of "nerd" is a top-of-the-class swot, someone in the top 1% of their class on academic ability (and usually, but not necessarily, in the bottom 10% for social skills). The last ~15 years of "nerd-core" fashion is absurd appropriation. Wearing dorky glasses doesn't make you a nerd; acing tests because you stared at books so long you need glasses does.

By contrast, the other type of nerds are just people who are 1) really intensely into some esoteric hobby or interest, or 2) moderately intensely into a certain set of aesethetics/interests, like fantasy novels and cosplaying.

Mathematically, there are very few of the top-of-the-class nerds in existence, and ten times as many into-dorky-interests nerds. The book kinda conflates the two so that the interest-nerds can believe that they're destined to save the world, while really just claiming that ability-nerds will save the world.