Science fiction has always been the genre best suited to political argument, because the displacement it offers lets a writer stage the anxieties of the present in a setting far enough removed to disarm the reader's defenses. Comics understood this too, and (despite what bad faith commenters will try to have you believe) the best of them wore their politics openly rather than smuggling them in. Stan Lee spent a career at that intersection, building worlds where the fantastical was never separable from the social, and it is fitting that the last world he developed before his death operates in exactly that tradition. Stan Lee's Alliances: A Trick of Light, co-written with Kat Rosenfield and Luke Lieberman, is a piece of science fiction that takes stances, builds an incredibly interesting world, and then makes a structural decision in its middle stretch that undercuts much of what it has established.
The story follows Cameron, a teenager who is struck by lightning and emerges with the ability to interface directly with computers, effectively becoming a hacker who works with his mind rather than a keyboard. He meets Nia, a young woman with related abilities, and the two of them begin using their powers with the optimism specific to people who have not yet learned what they are actually up against. What they uncover in their quest to make the world better is a company with ties to Cameron's own father, and the discovery pulls them into a conflict considerably larger than the one they set out to fight.
The world underneath that premise is the book's greatest strength. This is a layered setting, populated with criminal organizations, sprawling networks of hacking syndicates whose influence reaches in every direction, and multiple alien races whose presence complicates the human story in interesting ways. There is real ambition in the scope of what the book is building, and the ideas at its foundation are strong enough that the reader wants to spend time in the world being constructed. The premise of a person who can touch the digital infrastructure of a society with his mind is fertile ground, and the book understands the political implications of that ability rather than treating it as a simple superpower.
The problem is in the delivery. Roughly ten chapters in the middle of the book are given over almost entirely to exposition, much of it backstory delivered from one character to another. The structure becomes mechanical: one character sits the other down to explain a piece of the world, the story moves forward slightly, and then another character sits down to explain the next piece. The information being conveyed is not uninteresting, and the world it describes is worth the investment, but the method of conveying it flattens the momentum the opening chapters build. A layered world can be revealed through action and consequence, allowing the reader to assemble the picture as the characters live inside it. Here it is instead handed over in blocks, and the difference between those two approaches is the difference between a world that feels inhabited and one that feels described.
There is an argument that the format is partly responsible. A Trick of Light began as an Audible original before it was released as a physical book, a path that has become common enough to constitute its own small subgenre, and audio-first storytelling carries specific pressures around how information is delivered when a listener cannot flip back to reconstruct a detail. The book could have been longer. It could have given its world the room to breathe rather than compressing its mythology into a mid-book lecture. The choice to front-load so much explanation into so short a span is the single decision that most limits what the book achieves.
That structural imbalance costs the book its most promising relationship. The early chapters establish the connection between Cameron and Nia with real care, and the developing bond between two teenagers discovering both their abilities and each other is the book's most human thread. Then it is set aside for most of the middle, sidelined while the exposition takes over, and only returns near the end. Within the internal logic of the plot the sidelining makes a certain sense, but it registers as a wasted opportunity, an entire character shelved during the stretch of the book that most needed a human anchor to hold the reader through the density.
The book has a central twist, and it is likely that most readers will arrive at it around the same time it is revealed. That is not automatically a flaw, since a well-earned reveal can work even when telegraphed, but here it compounds the sense that the middle of the book is asking for patience it does not fully repay.
For all of that, A Trick of Light is a solid read built on a strong foundation, and it deserves more attention than it appears to have found. Stan Lee's final creative act was the construction of a world with genuine political texture and real imaginative scope, and the people who finished it clearly cared about honoring that. The seams show, but the ambition underneath them is worth engaging with. If you come to it understanding that the middle asks for patience, there is a genuinely interesting piece of science fiction waiting on either side of it.