Review: "Soon I Will Be Invincible"

[megwrites]

Title: Soon I Will Be Invincible
Author: Austin Grossman (AustinGrossman's Blog)
Genre: Science Fiction/Literary
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon




Basic Plotline: After CoreFire, one of the world's greatest superheroes, goes missing, Doctor Impossible - his nemesis - is interviewed as a suspect. During the interview, he escapes and begins his plot to take over the world. CoreFire's old team - the Champions - must reunite, with a new member, the half-cyborg rookie, Fatale, to find CoreFire and stop Doctor Impossible before it's too late.

The Positives: The lone positive about this novel is the prose. Grossman does have a somewhat poetic touch in the way he describes things. I appreciated the touches of lyricism.

That is about all I enjoyed or found positive.


The Negatives: I did not enjoy this novel, for a lot of reasons.

There are some books that take something, like comic book heroes, that are colorful and absurd and humanize them so that the absurdity becomes a mirror of ourselves, of the readers and says powerful things about human nature and power and identity. Soon I Will Be Invincible is NOT that book, but it tries very hard to convince the reader that it is.

The plot in and of itself was not spectacular or even that coherent or interesting. There were moments where it hearkened back to Watchmen without ever approaching that level of greatness. About fifty pages worth of plot happened. Unfortunately, those fifty pages were interrupted by about two hundred pages of characters becoming unbelievably angsty and wistful about their powers, their origins, and their lives.

Notably, a scene where the Champions go to investigate one of Doctor Impossible's abandoned bases should have taken a brief paragraph. But it is extended to five pages because it is prolonged by the incessant navel-gazing that plagues this novel.

The novel is told from two first person points of view: Fatale and Doctor Impossible. Their narration sounds so alike in places, despite them being completely different characters, that sometimes I had to check to see who's chapter I was reading.

Each and every section ends with some pithy line meant to sound ironic or meaningful - but comes across as prentious and silly.

The novel's greatest failure are it's characters. While I enjoyed Fatale's plotline and might have liked a story that centered on her, her integration into the team, and cut down on the introspection by about 85% - I didn't particularly care about her. Whether she lived or died didn't make a big difference to me.

Doctor Impossible's narration became tedious after a while, and there were only glimpses of a more sympathetic storyline underneath. Moments when Doctor Impossible is beaten up or bullied by heroes could have made for an original read if the book had been about the injustices perpetrated by the heroes, but Grossman seems more concerned with showing everyone as grim and thoughtful and world-weary rather than flipping the script and showing heroes as villains and villains as heroes.

More interesting stories were completely sidelined. Lily, the woman who played both sides and Blackwolf, an autistic superhero are both just sideshows. Not to mention that I felt somewhat offended by Blackwolf being portrayed as being autistic when there is no further explanation of his autism or how he works with it to become a successful superhero.

Such a novel following an autistic superhero would be tremendously fascinating and original, but of course, Grossman skips right over it.

The biggest problem I had with this novel is that it wanted to paint itself either as a satire or a humanization of comics, but didn't address it's source material well enough to do either. It seems as though showing people in spandex being angsty was supposed to suffice.

Throwing together literary structure and prose with comic-book characters, plot, and settings, shaking it all up and spewing it all out does not work. That's like saying that if you throw some eggs, flour, and milk in a bowl you'll get a birthday cake. Unless you mix in the right amounts under the right circumstances, you're going to get nothing more than a hot mess.

In the end, the novel fails at what it tries to do, and takes the reader on a tedious ride in the meantime. Instead of holding up a mirror and exposing what is broken, interesting, and revealing about comics, it really just indulges in the same monotonous, repetitive absurdities.


CoC Score: 0. No significant characters of color in this novel - and there is no excuse for that whatsoever. Scenes take place in settings that should be filled with characters of color and yet there are only white folks. They have their headquarters in present day New York City and yet all of them are white?

This is the second book in a row which whitewashes itself even though it is set in a large, metropolitan city. This one decides to whitewash New York.

Listen up, all you authors who want to set your books in my fair city: NYC is full of beautiful, vibrant, unmissable, indelible color. It is a fucking awesome city because of that diversity. Trying to rip away the colors of my city - especially for some tedious piece of pretentious pseudo-literary garbage - angers and offends me and proves to me that you are willfully blind and in dire need of an infusion of Get-A-Clue, stat. It also means I won't be seeking you out again or recommending you to anyone, ever.

If you're going to write a literary novel based on comic books, not addressing the decades of on-going racism and prejudice in comics - from token characters to erasure to all the villains being people of color - you're failing. Hard.

GLBT Score: 0. No significant GLBT characters or content mentioned in the novel. Yet another way in which this book fails spectacularly to really deal with it's supposed subject matter. Comic books are filled with both unintentional homoeroticism and completely intentional homophobia at the same time - not dealing with this paradox? Is deliberately stupid and shows that you didn't really think about what you were writing.

Gender Score: 7. Points for a female protagonist and several different kinds of female heroines and villains, and somewhat fair treatment of women in the novel. It actually passes the Bechdel test in some scenes.

Comments

[quivo.livejournal.com]

I knew there was a reason I kept passing over this book while browsing the Kindle store :P. It's weird, because I seem to remember hearing good stuff said about this book. Then again, there is that CoC score to consider, and the point that 90% of SF reviewers don't seem to be aware that racism exists at all...

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

Then again, there is that CoC score to consider, and the point that 90% of SF reviewers don't seem to be aware that racism exists at all...

Yeah, that's about the long and the short of it. Most of the good reviews I've seen have come from sources which seem oblivious to racism. Some of the sites that gave it good marks were sites that also said that "The Thirteenth Child" by Patricia Wrede was a wonderful book.

If I had known that this book would be so *facepalm* inducing and navel-gazing to boot, I wouldn't have wasted my time on it.

This is why I am so grateful that K. Tempest Bradford put out that list of Mindblowing SF/F by Women and PoC - because it's like a buffet of WIN that I can feast upon to get the taste of fail out of my mouth.