Riding the current wave of enthusiasm for superpowered mutants in film and fiction, Grossman's first novel peeks intimately inside the psyches of both superheroes and supervillains. Alternating first-person narrators recount the intertwining adventures of computer-enhanced female cyborg Fatale and the most intelligent and possibly the most evil man on Earth, Doctor Impossible. After battling criminals undercover for the CIA, Fatale becomes the newest member of the recently reunited superhero team, the Champions. Their latest mission involves locating their missing colleague, CoreFire. Not surprisingly, when CoreFire's nemesis—Doctor Impossible, of course—escapes imprisonment for the twelfth time, he becomes the likeliest suspect in the superhero's disappearance. Yet not only is the evil doctor clueless as to CoreFire's whereabouts, he is now preoccupied with hatching his latest master plan, intended to overthrow the world by means of four utterly mundane objects. With remarkable ingenuity, Grossman assembles an entire menagerie of superheroes and criminal masterminds completely from scratch. Costumed-crime-fighter mavens naturally attracted to this latest rendition of superheroic derring-do may wind up itching to see it on the big screen. Hays, Carl
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Review
"Austin Grossman has a superpower himself—it's called writing. This book is a new, winning, smart and funny way of interpreting our world. It's terrific." —Douglas Coupland, author of JPod and Generation X
"The realm of comic book heroes and villains gets a dose of realism in this whimsical debut from game design consultant Grossman.... However fantastical, the characters (including a 'genetic metahuman' and 'an elite fairy guard') are thoughtfully portrayed.... Grossman dabbles in a host of themes—power, greed, fame, the pitfalls of ego—in this engrossing page-turner, broadening the appeal of an already inviting scenario." —Publishers Weekly
"Distilling the motley spectrum of doomed super-villains from half a century of comics into one impressive anti-hero, Austin Grossman's raucously madcap debut novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, races along like a roller coaster with its lug nuts loosened.... Light and adhesive as Spider-Man's web, Soon I Will Be Invincible is tailored for summer reading like a superhero's (or super-villain's) form-fitting costume." —Thane Tierney, Bookpage
"Riding the current wave of enthusiasm for superpowered mutants in film and fiction, Grossman's first novel peeks intimately inside the psyches of both superheroes and supervillains.... With remarkable ingenuity, [he] assembles an entire menagerie of superheroes and criminal masterminds completely from scratch. Costumed crime-fighter mavens naturally attracted to this latest rendition of superheroic derring-do may wind up itching to see it on the silver screen." —Booklist
"In a world where BlackBerry-carrying superheroes grace the cover of GQ, being a supervillain known as the "angriest dork in the world" isn't easy. A heartbreaking genius of staggering evil, Doctor Impossible avenges lost love, a lonely adolescence, and a plethora of foiled doomsday devices. (That fungus army seemed foolproof!) Every comic-book cliché in this witty, stunning debut is lovingly embraced, then turned inside out." —Steven Leckart, Wired
About the Author
Austin Grossman is a video-game design consultant and a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he specializes in Romantic and Victorian literature. He lives in Berkeley.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: Foiled Again
This morning on planet Earth, there are one thousand, six hundred, and eighty-six enhanced, gifted, or otherwise-superpowered persons. Of these, one hundred and twenty-six are civilians leading normal lives. Thirty-eight are kept in research facilities funded by the Department of Defense, or foreign equivalents. Two hundred and twenty- six are aquatic, confined to the oceans. Twenty-nine are strictly localized—powerful trees and genii loci, the Great Sphinx, and the Pyramid of Giza. Twenty-five are microscopic (including the Infinitesimal Seven). Three are dogs; four are cats; one is a bird. Six are made of gas. One is a mobile electrical effect, more of a weather pattern than a person. Seventy-seven are alien visitors. Thirty-eight are missing. Forty-one are off-continuity, permanent émigrés to Earth's alternate realities and branching timestreams.
Six hundred and seventy-eight use their powers to fight crime, while four hundred and forty-one use their powers to commit them. Forty-four 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.
I don't know why it makes you evil. It's just what you find at the extreme right edge of the bell curve, the one you'd get if six billion minds took an intelligence test and you looked at the dozen highest scores. Picture yourself on that graph, sliding rightward and downslope toward the very brightest, down that gradually gentler hill, out over the top million, the top ten thousand—all far smarter than anyone most people ever meet—out to the top thousand—and now things are getting sparser—the last hundred, and it's not a slope at all now, just a dot every once in a while. Go out to the last few grains of sand, the smartest of the smartest of the smartest, times a thousand. It makes sense that people would be a little odd out here. But you really have to wonder why we all end up in jail.
Wake-up for me is at 6:30 a.m., half an hour earlier than the rest of the inmates. There's no furniture in my cell—I'm stretched out on the painted green rectangle where I'm allowed to sleep. The way my skin is, I hardly feel it anyway. The facility is rated for enhanced offenders, but I'm the only one currently in residence. I am their showpiece, the pride of the system, and a regular feature on the governor's tours for visiting dignitaries. They come and watch the performance, to see the tiger in his cage, and I don't disappoint.
The guard raps on the Plexiglas wall with his nightstick, so I get up slowly and move to the red painted circle, where they run a scan, X ray, radiation, and the rest. Then they let me put on clothes. I get eight minutes while they check the route. You can do a lot of thinking in eight minutes. I think about what I'll do when I get out of here. I think about the past.
If I had writing materials, I might write a guidebook, a source of advice and inspiration for the next generation of masked criminals, bent prodigies, and lonely geniuses, the ones who've been taught to feel different, or the ones who knew it from the start. The ones who are smart enough to do something about it. There are things they should hear. Somebody has to tell them.
I'm not a criminal. I didn't steal a car. I didn't sell heroin, or steal an old lady's purse. I built a quantum fusion reactor in 1978, and an orbital plasma gun in 1979, and a giant laser-eyed robot in 1984. I tried to conquer the world and almost succeeded, twelve times and counting.
When they take me away, it goes to the World Court—technically I'm a sovereign power. You've seen these trials—the Elemental, Rocking Horse, Dr. Stonehenge. They put you in a glass and steel box. I'm still dangerous, you know, even without my devices. People stare at you; they can't believe what you look like. They read out the long list of charges, like a tribute. There isn't really a trial—it's not like you're innocent. But if you're polite, then at the end they'll let you say a few words.
They'll ask questions. They'll want to know why. "Why did you . . . hypnotize the president?" "Why did you . . . take over Chemical Bank?"
I'm the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could with his life.
I stand by the door in a ring of armed men while my cell is checked by three specialists with a caseful of instruments. From the tiers come yells, shouts of encouragement, or catcalls. They want to see a show. Then I march, past their eyes, followed by two men in partial armor with bulky high-tech side arms. They have to wait until I pass before their morning lineup.
There's a lot of prison talk about my powers. Inmates believe my eyes can emit laser beams, that my touch is electrical or poisonous, that I come and go as I please through the walls, that I hear everything. People blame things on me—stolen silverware and doors left unlocked. There is even, I note with pride, a gang named after me now: the Impossibles. Mostly white-collar criminals.
I'm allowed to mingle with the general population at mealtimes and in the recreation yard, but I always have a table to myself. I've fooled them too many times by speed or misdirection. By now they know to serve my food in paper dishes, and when I turn in my tray they count the plastic utensils, twice. One guard watches my hands as I eat; another checks under the table. After I sit down, they make me roll up my sleeves and show my hands, both sides, like a magician.
Look at my hands. The skin's a little cool—about 96.1 degrees F., if you're curious—and a little rigid: a shirt with extra starch. That skin can stop a bullet; it stopped five of them in my latest arrest as I ran up Seventh Avenue in my cape and helmet, sweating through the heavy cloth. The bruises are still there, not quite faded.
I have a few other tricks. I'm strong, much stronger than should be possible for a mammal my size. Given time and inclination, I could overturn a semi, or rip an ATM out of a wall. I'm not a city-wrecker, not on my own. When Lily and I worked together, she handled that part of it. I'm mostly about the science. That's my main claim to life in the Special Containment Wing, where everything down to the showerheads is either titanium or set two inches deep in reinforced concrete. I'm also faster than I should be—something in the nerve pathways changed in the accident.
Every once in a while a new prisoner comes after me, hoping to make his reputation by breaking a prison-made knife against my ribs, a stolen pencil, or a metal spoon folded over and sharpened. It happens at mealtimes, or in the exercise yard. There is a premonitory hush as soon as he steps into the magic circle, the empty space that moves with me. The guards never step in—maybe it's policy, to alienate me from the prison population, or maybe they just enjoy seeing me pull the trick, proof again that they're guarding the fourth-most-infamous man alive. I straighten a little in the metal chair, set my single plastic spoon down on the folding table.
After the whip crack of the punch, there is silence, ringout, the sighing collapse. The heap of laundry is carried away and I'll be left alone again until the next tattooed hopeful makes his play. Inside, I want to keep going, keep fighting until the bullets knock me down, but I never do. I'm smarter than that. There are stupid criminals and there are smart criminals, and then there is me.
This is so you know. I haven't lost any of what I am, my intrinsic menace, just because they took away my devices, my tricks, and my utility belt. I'm still the brilliant, the appalling, the diabolical Doctor Impossible, damn it. And yes, I am invincible.
All superheroes have an origin. They make a big deal of it, the story of how they got their powers and their mission. Bitten by a radioactive bug, they fight crime; visited by wandering cosmic gods, they search for the lost tablets of so-and-so, and avenge their dead families. And villains? We come on the scene, costumed and leering, colorfully working out our inexplicable grudge against the world with an oversized zap gun or cosmic wormhole. But why do we rob banks rather than guard them? Why did I freeze the Supreme Court, impersonate the Pope, hold the Moon hostage?
I happen to know they've got practically nothing in my file. A few old aliases, newspaper clippings, testimony from a couple of old enemies. A transcript from the Peterson School, and of course the accident report. The flash was visible for miles. That's what people talk about when they talk about who I am, a nerd with an attitude and subpar lab skills. But there was another accident, one that nobody saw, a slow disaster that started the morning I arrived there. Nowadays it has a name, Malign Hypercognition Disorder. They're trying to learn about it from me, trying to figure out whose eyes are going to be looking out at them from behind a mask in thirty years.
I have a therapist here, "Steve," a sad-eyed Rogerian I'm taken to see twice a week in a disused classroom. "Do you feel angry?" "What did you really want to steal?" The things I could tell him—secrets of the universe! But he wants to know about my childhood. I try to relax and remind myself of my situation—if I kill him, they'll just send another.
It could be worse—there are stories villains tell one another about the secret facil...
