Why are the Epics, the people with the power, all evil?
So the idea for this story came when I was driving along on the freeway and someone cut me off in traffic, and my immediate instinct was, “You’re lucky I don’t have any superpowers because I’d blow your car up right now.” This is what happens when you’re a fantasy writer, right? You have weird instinctual reactions like that. I was very frightened, though, because I’m like, “Wow, I can’t believe that’s inside of me.” It’s probably a good thing that I don’t have superpowers because I don’t know that I could be trusted not to blow people off of the road when they cut in front of me. And that led me down the natural progression to what would happen if people really have superpowers. Would people be good with them, or would they not? And if my first instinct is to use them in this sort of awful way, what happens if everyone starts abusing these powers?
And that led me down the road to the story of, the idea of, there being no heroes—there being a story about a common man with no powers, trying to assassinate a very powerful superpowered individual. It’s weird talking about this in the terms of superheroes, though, because as I was writing the book, my focus was on sort of an action-adventure feel—definitely using some of the superhero tropes, and the comic book tropes. But I have found that in the fiction I’ve read, it’s better to do kind of a strong adaptation–kind of like movies do. I like how movies have adapted comic books and kind of made them their own, and turned them into their own action-adventure genre. And that was what I was kind of using as a model for this. And so yeah, I wanted to tell the story of this kid—I say kid, he’s eighteen—this young man, who wants to bring down the emperor of Chicago, and doesn’t have any powers himself, but thinks he might know what Steelheart—that character’s—the emperor’s weakness is.
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