Will it all end, as eighty years of superhero fiction suggest, in a meaningless, explosive slugfest?

Yes. Yes it will.

I like the idea of this book; a non-US-centric take on the superhero myth, challenging the way the world is set up to work, etc. And for the first couple of chapters, I hold out hope that it'll be a fun mashup of, say, Heroes and The Satanic Verses. In the end, though, despite a few hints at interesting ideas, I find myself bored with it by the halfway mark. The characters are flat and fickle, Basu's prose reads like an excited fan's retelling of any action-laden MCU movie, and the only thing that makes me finish the book is that I'd forgotten to bring another one.