★★★★☆ Wise women and foolish boys

Marvel: What If...Loki Was Worthy?

Madeleine Roux

I became aware of Marvel's What If... series when an announcement swam past my eyes that the second book (What If... Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker Were Siblings?, due 9-Jul-2024) would be written by one of my favorite authors, Seanan McGuire. Thus, although I had never heard of Madeleine Roux, I grabbed the first book.

If you're familiar with recent works in the Marvel Cinematic/Comic Universe (MCU), you will instantly get the premise of the What If... series. We live in a multiverse, in which there are hundreds and thousands of parallel universes. (As a mathematician and physics nerd these numbers seem small to me -- surely the number of parallel universes should be infinite -- the only real question is whether it is ℵ-0, the infinity of the integers, or C, the infinity of the continuum, or an even larger infinity.) In each of these parallel universes events play out differently.

This is the best author's crutch since red kryptonite. It gives a speculative fiction author an excuse to set a novel in the MCU, tweaked in any way they find pleasing. You don't even need to worry too much about whether your story is canon -- because it's an alternate universe.

That said, Madeleine Roux is clearly very familiar with the canonical MCU -- or at least, more so than I am. If you're familiar with the MCU, you'll understand the code word in the title What If... Loki Was Worthy?: originally only Thor could lift his hammer Mjolnir. His explanation is that only one who is "worthy" can wield it. So the title tells us that Loki is going to become a good guy and is going to wield Mjolnir. He doesn't start out as a good guy, by any means -- he's a real jerk, jealous of his big brother Thor, and he plays a joke on Thor that gets out of hand and kills Thor. I won't say any more about the plot, since the publisher's blurb summarizes it well.

One thing that particularly struck me is that all the women in the story are wise, and all the boys are fools. I use the words "women" and "boys" flexibly. The wise women of the story include a goddess and a nine-year-old girl. Among the foolish boys are several gods who have been around for thousands of years.

The wise women restrain and save the foolish boys. Now I know some of you are saying, "But that's just REALITY..." It is, however, a bit unusual. In most novels that have both male and female characters we get an occasional male who isn't a compleat idiot, however unlike the Real World that may be. The only male character of whom What If... Loki Was Worthy? wholly approves is Thor, who is at one point described as “a lobotomized golden retriever”. This is the ideal man of What If... Loki Was Worthy?.

Well, it was a good, exciting story -- lots of fun. I enjoyed it.

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