Soon I Will Be Invincible: A Novel

published	2007 by Pantheon
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0375424865 (isbn13: 9780375424861)
pages	288
description	Doctor Impossible--evil genius, diabolical scientist, wannabe world dominator--languishes in a federal detention facility. He's lost his freedom, his...more [close] Doctor Impossible--evil genius, diabolical scientist, wannabe world dominator--languishes in a federal detention facility. He's lost his freedom, his girlfriend, and his hidden island fortress. Over the years he's tried to take over the world in every way imaginable: doomsday devices of all varieties (nuclear, thermonuclear, nanotechnological) and mass mind control. He's traveled backwards in time to change history, forward in time to escape it. He's commanded robot armies, insect armies, and dinosaur armies. Fungus army. Army of fish. Of rodents. Alien invasions. All failures. But not this time. This time it's going to be different... Fatale is a rookie superhero on her first day with the Champions, the world's most famous superteam. She's a patchwork woman of skin and chrome, a gleaming technological marvel built to be the next generation of warfare. Filling the void left by a slain former member, we watch as Fatale joins a team struggling with a damaged past, having to come together in the face of unthinkable evil. Soon I Will Be Invincible is a thrilling first novel; a fantastical adventure that gives new meaning to the notions of power, glory, responsibility, and (of course) good and evil.
date added	04-15-07 edit book

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First, it was the cover that caught my interest..	1	08/23/2007 05:13AM

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Ben rated it:

01/21/08

Read in May, 2007

I bought this book based on a strong review, and was quite disappointed. Any reviewer who praises this book's imagination clearly hasn't read a comic book within the last 5-10 years. The settings, characters, and powers all seem to have been lifted wholesale out of Marvel's least inspired 80s B-list comics.

I will grant that there is some amusement to be found in Dr. Impossible's story. His wry, matter-of fact viewpoint is often entertaining, and the telling of a comic book tale from the vill...more I bought this book based on a strong review, and was quite disappointed. Any reviewer who praises this book's imagination clearly hasn't read a comic book within the last 5-10 years. The settings, characters, and powers all seem to have been lifted wholesale out of Marvel's least inspired 80s B-list comics.

I will grant that there is some amusement to be found in Dr. Impossible's story. His wry, matter-of fact viewpoint is often entertaining, and the telling of a comic book tale from the villain's side is at least a bit unusual, if not unheard of (see Astro City: The Tarnished Angel, for one particularly fine example). Unfortunately, Dr. Impossible's side of things only occupies half the book. The rest of it is told from Fatale's perspective, and she's an absolute bore. A cyborg with a lost past, she doesn't seem to be terribly passionate about anything. The most she ever manages is some uninspired teenage-esque angst that her character seems much too old for.

In fact, the Dr. Impossible/Fatale contrast is indicative of a larger problem with the book. Grossman has some fun poking into the psychologies and histories of his villains, people with frightening powers living with the perpetual cognitive dissonance that exists between their world-conquering ambitions and inevitable humiliating defeats. He has no such insight, however, into the minds of his heroes. None of them spend any time pondering why they chose to put on tights and fight crime. Dr. Impossible wonders why he didn't choose to become a hero instead, but none of the heroes ever ponder why they didn't choose to just go rob a bank and retire to a tropical island. None of them appear to get any particular enjoyment from fighting crime, or derive any pleasure from helping others, so why do they do it? This book has no answers, so it does its best to dodge the question. Worse, Grossman attempts to substitute angst and bickering amongst his heroes in place of psychological depth. The New Champions, the super team that Fatale joins, bicker and sulk like a car full of high school students reluctantly dragged on a field trip, rarely displaying a single likable trait between the seven of them.

Worse still, this book reads more like a first draft than a published work. The writing is sloppy and inconsistent, and the whole thing seems to have been untouched by an editor. Descriptions are few and far between; it reads more like a comic book script than a novel, still waiting for an imaginative artist to draw in the undefined settings, faces, and costumes. Characters repeat observations several time throughout the book, each time as if they're new. The book is riddled with inconsistencies and dangling plot threads. Dr. Impossible sometimes talks as if he loathes magic and does his best to avoid it, and sometimes comfortably mentions incorporating it into past and future plans. Fatale observes that a hammer weighs a couple hundred pounds, then, several paragraphs later, picks it up and finds it "surprisingly heavy." Conflicts are set up, but never pay off. Other conflicts seem to appear out of nowhere. A scene in which Fatale accuses a mystical teammate of not being a real fairy comes entirely out of left field; one scene later, the conflict is completely forgotten, and is never mentioned again.

Character voices are also wildly inconsistent. Everyone sounds the same in conversation, and no one sounds particularly interesting. Dr. Impossible, an evil genius, comes the closest to having a unique voice, but even he bounces unpredictably between occasionally inspired bits and inexplicably juvenile lines such as, "Whatever. Just don't think you can stop me." Most dismayingly, the two narrators sound remarkably similar for most of the book, with the only distinct difference being that Fatale's utterly flat sections lack the occasional moments of inspiration that sparingly pepper Dr. Impossible's narrative.

This book is an "adult" take on superheroes only when compared to the simplistic comics of the 30s-50s. The story and dialog ibook don't hold a candle to the clever and insightful works of such modern-day comics writers as Kurt Busiek, Brian Michael Bendis, and Neil Gaiman. The novel format tries to sell this as a more adult and literary take on comic books, but it's ultimately just a pale and surprisingly shallow imitation of the real thing....less

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Jason rated it:

06/22/07

Read in June, 2007

(Full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

"This morning on planet Earth, there are 1,686 enhanced, gifted, or otherwise superpowered persons. 678 use their powers to fight crime, while 441 use their powers to commit them. 44 are currently confined in Special Containment Facilities for enhanced criminals. Of these last, it is interesting to note that an unusually high proportion have IQs of 300 or more -- eighteen to be exact. Inclu...more (Full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

"This morning on planet Earth, there are 1,686 enhanced, gifted, or otherwise superpowered persons. 678 use their powers to fight crime, while 441 use their powers to commit them. 44 are currently confined in Special Containment Facilities for enhanced criminals. Of these last, it is interesting to note that an unusually high proportion have IQs of 300 or more -- eighteen to be exact. Including me. You really have to wonder why we all end up in jail."

Well, when a novel starts like this, how in a million years could I possibly pass it up? And indeed, just about everything at first about Bay-area author Austin Grossman's debut novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, seemingly screams out "I am for you" to the random overeducated comics-loving geek who comes across it; the Chip Kidd cover, Grossman's nerdy credentials as a videogame consultant and PhD candidate in Victorian literature, Invincible's storyline concerning weary postmodern superheroes. But there's a big problem regarding reviewing this novel, in that there are two very different interpretations one can have as to what Grossman's point is, and that my feelings regarding the book change profoundly depending on which interpretation you adopt: of whether this is a light deconstructionist comedy about freaks in tights and what makes them do what they do; or maybe if this is instead an unironic gritty "Dark Age" drama about superheroism itself.

What to do, what to do? So I'm trying something unusual today; I'm writing two mini-reviews of Invincible instead, tackling my thoughts when it comes to each of these interpretations, since it's almost impossible to know which one Grossman meant for us to have unless directly asking him. If you end up reading the novel yourself, I'll be interested to see which of the two takes you adopt, and encourage you to leave a comment at the end sharing your own thoughts on the matter.

A. Soon I Will Be Invincible as deconstructionist superhero comedy. For those who don't know, there's a rising subgenre of superhero stories out there now for those who enjoy such things, which is the ironic self-aware superhero story; where the heroes and villains in question understand just how ridiculous their entire situation is, and end up winking at the audience the entire time they're performing their heroic or villainous stunts. Think of the most well-known example of the subgenre, the 1999 Ben Stiller comedy Mystery Men -- how the superheroes in that movie live and die by their corporate sponsorships and celebrity endorsements, how most of the superheroes in question turn out to be nerdy losers once the masks come off.

And indeed, there's a lot of the same kind of humor going on in Invincible, and it's undeniable that Grossman has a natural talent for these kinds of observational jokes, such as when the main villain (a Lex Luthor stand-in) starts ranting about the flying abilities of his superhero nemesis (clearly a blonde Superman): "He didn't even have the decency to work for it, to flap a pair of wings or at least glow a little. He seemed to do it purely out of a sense of entitlement." But there's a weakness that comes with this part of the book as well, or should I say two symbiotic weaknesses: that a lot of the novelty concerning this kind of humor has worn off by now, ten years after it first started becoming popular, and that Grossman ends up directly ripping off the concepts and jokes of a whole lot of other projects that have come before his, projects that are frankly better and funnier than his.

Perhaps he......less

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