“I was exhausted and broke, young and evil and superintelligent, somewhere in America.” – Dr Impossible
Austin Grossman wrote a delightful romp when he penned “Soon I will be Invincible.” He tells the interconnected story of Dr. Impossible, who is the fourth smartest man in the world and a super-villain suffering from “Malign Hypercognition Disorder’” and the super-team called the Champions, focusing on the cyborg-woman Fatale.
It is a story about super-powered beings – comic book heroes and villains – living in a world that looks a whole lot like ours. The book opens with a listing of the “one thousand six hundred and eighty-six enhanced, gifted, or otherwise superpowered persons” and the various things they do, from the one hundred and twenty six who are civilians, six hundred and seventy-eight who use their power to fight crime and and four hundred forty-one who commit crimes, as well as super-powered animals and fungi.
The story follows Dr. Impossible as he escapes from prison and plots to take over the world one more time… he has already tried twelve times, with plots that ranged from orbital plasma guns to giant laser-eyed robots, as well as hypnotizing the president and impersonating the pope. His narrates his own story in a detached, slightly self-mocking tone that is, at the same time, painfully earnest as he goes back and forth between current events and flashbacks of his origin and various adventures.
The other focus is on the good guys, narrated Fatale, a relatively new super-heroine who is asked to join the newly reformed super-team the Champions. Fatale has no past, her memory was destroyed in the freak accident that allowed her to be turned into a super-powered half-human half-machine powerhouse. She spent some time working as a one-woman army for the NSA before striking out on her own. When the Champions were needed to face a complex crisis she was invited to join them. Like Impossible her narration covers current events and her own origin story, as well as back-story on her companions in the Champions.
She finds that the super-heroes sometimes have feet of clay. While they were once pure warriors time has effected them – they are worried about their business connections and marketing image, they bicker and stumble and make mistakes. In the end they succeed in saving the day, of course, but the path to victory is sometimes twisted.
The book is an easy read, the tone is light and fun. The plot is never more important than the characters and their interactions, but that works well in a book like this. I was enjoying reading it, but the point it really took off, the place I became a fan of this book, was when the term Malign Hypercognition Disorder was introduced as a politically correct tag for “evil genius.” That was a stroke of… well, genius in and of itself.
If you enjoyed comic books as a kid, and occasionally dive back in for a bit of nostalgia today, try this one out. It is worth the time just for the fun of it.
Bright Blessings – Stormie
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