BOOK REVIEW: Soon I Will Be Invincible
Doctor Impossible is a supervillain; Fatale is a superheroine. They fight, and you know who wins. The end.
OK, maybe that’s not enough.
I haven’t been keeping track, but there seem to have been a lot of novels about superpowered folks lately. I mean, besides the usual licensed products. There was Robert Mayer’s influential Superfolks back in the 1970s, the “Wild Cards” series off and on for the last couple of decades, and then Michael Bishop’s Count Geiger’s Blues in the early ‘90s, but, otherwise, there wasn’t a heck of a lot out there for a long time.
But in the last couple of years, there have been books like Tom DeHaven’s It’s Superman (which was officially licensed by DC Comics, but was a very different kind of book than the usual), Minister Faust’s From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, James Maxey’s Nobody Gets the Girl, and others – on top of the increasing numbers of licensed books, it feels like we’re getting a lot of superheroes in prose these days.
Why? Well, the natural Internet pundit’s reaction is to blame everything on 9/11, and it’s a natural in this case – you could argue that readers are obviously looking for safety, values, and security, and who better to provide those than a super-powered protector? I’m not entirely sure that’s the main force behind the superhero novel boom – especially since a lot of the current books (like this one) focus as much on the villain as the hero. (Of course, that could tie into a different 9/11 explanation – that we’re seeking to understand evil by reducing it to a cartoony level that we can easily dismiss.)
Whatever the reason, we’re getting a lot of superhero novels these days. Soon I Will Be Invincible, a first novel by Austin Grossman from the supremely appropriate publisher Pantheon, is the latest. It’s set in an invented but familiar superhero universe, one slightly more DCish than Marvelous, where the great super-team was the Super Squadron, founded in 1946 by Stormcloud (who himself is something like what the ‘80s Red Tornado might have been if he started off human). It’s set in the modern day, and people actually do age in this world, so our heroes are from the second-generation team, the Champions. Given that it’s a good sixty years since the founding of the Super Squadron, I’d have expected a bit more history than that, but Grossman makes it work, and it keeps his backstory from becoming too complicated. (To make the analogy explicit: this is a world with a JSA and a Teen Titans, but not much else.)
The Champions – the new, hip, teenage super-team sensation of 1984 – broke up in 1997, after the death of one of the team in what sounds like a company-spanning crossover. (It’s hard not to translate the events of a superhero novel into standard comic-book publishing plans.) But the team is looking to reform; their strongest member, CoreFire, has mysteriously disappeared. And so young heroine Fatale – a cyborg with great powers and missing memories – is invited to join.
So far, so standard. The Fatale half of the book is pleasant, but not terribly exciting. She’s a reasonably rounded character, but her plot is really just one cliché after another, and I find that reading about people punching each other through buildings is not nearly as much fun as looking at it. We do get a fair bit of superhero history in her chapters, which may be of interest to continuity fans, or the kind of people who will argue about the “real” superhero inspiration for every character in the novel.
But the other half of the book – the odd-numbered chapters – is narrated by Doctor Impossible, our super-villain, and he’s much more entertaining. His voice is exactly what you’d expect: knowingly megalomaniacal, occasionally condescending, completely self-aware, slightly mocking of its own flaws and the standards of the genre. He, of course, wants to conquer the world; he’s been trying, and failing, to do so since the late 1970s. (The novel absolutely does not touch the idea of why he might want to conquer the world – it’s a given, like the fact that the characters breathe air – except to note that he’s a victim of Malign Hypercognition Disorder, the mad scientists’ disease.) He makes the book; you read through the Fatale chapters to find out what happens, but mostly to get back to the next Doctor Impossible chapter.
The plot is what has to be – it begins with Doctor Impossible in an escape-proof federal prison and Fatale having just gotten invited to try out for what becomes the New Champions, and ends just about how you’d expect – so the pleasure is how it all happens along the way. Grossman’s superhero universe is pretty much DC Earth-2 continuity simplified, with all of the serial numbers filed off; he doesn’t ring any particularly impressive changes there. It’s entertaining, but it’s just another superhero universe. Grossman also isn’t interested in the Nietzchean superman – as seen by the fact that CoreFire, our Superman figure, is primarily seen in flashback – so we don’t have that, either (which is, actually, a relief, since I’ve seen too many superheroes taking over the world for its own good in the last decade or so). So what Soon has to live and die by is the quality of its prose, which is fine, and the pleasure of listening to these two super-characters tell their stories. And, as I said, while Fatale may be just the slightest bit boring, Doctor Impossible more than makes up for her.
Grossman has a good eye for clichés – by that, I mean that he knows that they’re clichés, but he’s willing to use them anyway when they’re what he needs. His chapter titles are perfect examples, since they’re all huge clichés, from “Foiled Again” all the way to “No Prison Can Hold Me” with stops at “Maybe We Are Not So Different, You and I,” “Welcome To My Island,” and “And Now for Those Meddling Children” along the way.
So I’d recommend this book; if you read to the end of this review, you’ll probably enjoy reading Soon I Will Be Invincible.
Soon I Will Be Invincible
Austin Grossman
Pantheon Books, 2007, $22.95