"Love Songs for Depressed Cyborgs and World-Conquering Mad Scientists"
The Official Soon I Will Be Invincible Mix Tape with Extensive Annotations is over at Largehearted Boy's books/music/&c blog.
From the liner notes:
This is the mix for those nights in your hidden island fortress, when it’s five in the morning and you can’t sleep, and CNN’s stuck on another economic summit. You’re blacked out and can’t work because some hero team is trolling the South Seas, you're doodling assembler on notebook paper just to keep busy. The heat is unbearable, and it’s an hour until dawn and the slow tropical sunrise over the lagoon, and you’re thinking about how far you are from home, and that this whole thing was maybe not such a brilliant idea after all, but there’s nothing you can do about it now.
This is the mix for when you have to ride Amtrak and people are staring at your height, the armor plating, the glint of metal in your skull, the lens that replaced one eye. You get a seat to yourself even though people are standing, because no one want sit too near the fusion reactor in your pelvis. And you know you're just a line-item in the DoD's black budget, or a B-list metahuman with maintenance problems, but if you think about the other way you're an exotic armored warrior princess, and you're trying to figure out which is closer to the truth.
Feel free to debate me on these selections, but I thought pretty hard about it - you'd better bring some game.ps If you ask me it's worth it just for the vintage Thomas Dolby video - skip past the intro tag for pristine New Wave brilliance:
8 comments:
I love it... you're quoting him, he's quoting you, it's like a big Soon I Will Be Invincible circle thing. I wasn't going to say "jerk."
Anyway, maybe there could be an iTunes playlist so people can just go there, spend ten bucks, and have the whole list on the iPod immediately.
Or just look up the songs on Hypem.com - I'm sure you can find most of them.
Largeheartedboy is a great music blog - I've got it linked through mine.
I linked out to mp3's and youtube where I could - but you're right, there should be a better system. Sadly, Melt Wizard isn't coming to the iTunes Store any time soon.
Are there any of those DIY radio station websites around anymore? I remember one called "Live365."
Maybe we could make a SIWBI radio station, and have the music interspersed with audio from the interviews and excerpts from the book.
Soon I Will Be Invincible
Austin Grossman / £16.99 / Penguin
Who can deny that the first decade of the 21st century hasn’t been entirely obsessed with the hero? X-men heralded a comic book takeover of our cinema screens followed by Blade, Hulk, Elektra, Daredevil, Fantastic Four. The heroes just kept on coming, relentless, a never ending stream permeating our popular culture: Batman, Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider, Spider Man. Who can deny film screens and comic book pages do not greedily proclaim this genre to be entirely theirs? Until now. Until this revelation of a novel quietly crept up and broke the mold. Soon I Will Be Invincible is a first person window into the life of two deeply contrasting comic book characters. It follows the lives of the self proclaimed ‘world smartest man’ the evil super villain Doctor Impossible, and Fatale, the rookie Cyborg in an celebrity team of super heroes. Sounds like boring formulaic stuff doesn’t it? You’re probably thinking ‘I’ve heard this story a thousand times before’. And who could blame you? While the hero genre may have become as fatigued as a octogenarian tortoise, this novel offers unique reading. Grossman portrays his high-powered heroes as fallible, unsure, gripped by usual insecurities and doubts. In other words, human. But this isn’t a tragedy; over each page you’ll find yourself laughing out loud at Grossman’s chaotic humor, blended with a gripping plot of the world facing imminent peril. The first time author, Austin Grossman excels in making the reader sympathise with his truly three dimensional characters in an utterly fantastic world. Don’t judge this book by its odd cartoonish cover; open up and welcome to refreshing insightful writing. The comic book hero continues to evolve, cape and all.
Hi Austin, I didn't know you had a blog. The above is my review which was published last year in my University's Newspaper. I hope you like it - it was read by a lot of people, although I can't say how many of them ran out and bought your novel the next day. I really (as you can tell) enjoyed Invincible.
When is the sequal coming out? I've been waiting for months, but theres no whiff of one. You are writing a sequal, right? Did the book sell enough copies to keep your publisher happy? I have no idea, you could have sold 5 or 500,000 and I wouldn't know. I really do hope you are writing a sequal to this fantastic novel.
http://www.daviddarkly.co.uk
Thanks David! Sequel is under way, as we speak.
(I believe my publisher is reasonably happy, although we artists have no truck with worldly concerns...)
I vote the sequel be entitled, Soon I Will Be Even MORE Invincible.
Any chance of getting David Lynch to direct the movie? Probably not, he's more of a producer these days. Just keep Spielberg away from it, I beg you.
There will be a sequel? Cool, and thank you!
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