Greed II

Phrases like "...a visitor from another planet..." and "His spaceship crash-landed..." are blurb, not text. Using them to introduce a character in a novel is an unacceptable short cut, trading on the reader's over-familiaity with terms like "spaceship" from much other already published fiction. See Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld, Smallville: Greed (New York, 2003), p. 7.

Every new writer of Clark Kent needs to convey as if for the first time the mystery of an interstellar journey by someone who looks but is not human - unless maybe cliched phrases are less inappropriate in this kind of writing? These once-published series novels are more like magazine articles - although they are also well written, readable and enjoyable.

For the purposes of this novel, it would have been sufficient to present Clark as a super-powered teenager without having to refer directly to his extraterrestrial origin, although there is one hint that certainly deserves to be in the text. While succumbing to green meteor radiation at the bottom of a lake, Clark sees, beyond a white light, two people in strange clothes...

The novel also refers to the prophecy made in a TV episode that Clark would endure into an indefinite future, surviving everyone he had known. Thus, Clark's entire career as Superman is skipped over as we contemplate both a mysterious origin and a very strange further future.