[Plura-list] Austin Grossman's 'Fight Me'

[Cory Doctorow]

Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/01/the-big-genx-chill/

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I leave for my summer vacation tomorrow morning! This is the last edition of Pluralistic for two weeks. See you on Bastille Day!

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On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth Hackers On Planet Earth, in Queens, NY:

https://www.hope.net/talks.html

On July 20, I'm appearing at Chicago's Exile in Bookville:

https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808

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Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

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Today's links

* Austin Grossman's 'Fight Me': Gen-X superheroes, aging badly.

* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

* This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014

* Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.

* Recent appearances: Where I've been.

* Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.

* Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.

* Colophon: All the rest.

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🥼 Austin Grossman's 'Fight Me'

In *Fight Me*, the novelist and game developer Austin Grossman uses aging ex-teen superheroes to weigh the legacy of Generation X, in a work that enrobes its savage critique with sweet melancholia, all under a coating of delicious snark:

http://www.austingrossman.com/fight-me

It is, in other words, a very Gen X kinda novel. Prodigy (AKA Alex Beekman) is a washed-up superhero. As a nerdy high-schooler, he was given super powers by a mysterious wizard (posing as a mediocre teacher), who gave him an amulet and a duty. Whenever Alex touches the amulet and speaks the word of power, reaclun (which he insists is not "nuclear" backwards) he transforms into Prodigy, a nigh-invulnerable, outrageously handsome living god who is impervious to bullets, runs a one-minute mile, and fights like a champ. Prodigy, he is told, has a destiny: to fight the ultimate evil when it emerges and save the world.

Now, Alex is 40, and it's been a decade since he retired both Prodigy and his Alex identity, moving into a kind of witness protection program the federal government set up for him. He poses as a mediocre university professor, living a lonely and unexceptional life.

But then, Alex is summoned back to the superhero lair he shared with his old squad, "The Newcomers," a long-vacant building that is one quarter Eero Saarinen, three quarters Mussolini. There, he is reunited with his estranged fellow ex-Newcomers, and sent on a new quest: to solve the riddle of the murder of the mysterious wizard who gave him his powers, so long ago.

The Newcomers - an amped-up ninja warrior, a supergenius whose future self keeps sending him encouragement and technical schematics backwards through time, and an exiled magical princess turned preppie supermodel - have spent more than a decade scattered to the winds. While some have fared better than Alex/Prodigy, none of them have lived up to their potential or realized the dreams that seemed so inevitable when they were world famous supers with an entourage of fellow powered teens who worshipped them as the planet's greatest heroes.

As they set out to solve the mystery, they are reunited and must take stock of who they are and how they got there (cue Talking Heads' "Once In a Lifetime"). With flashbacks, flashforwards, and often hilarious asides, Prodigy brings us up to speed on how supers fail, and what it's like to live as a failed super.

The publisher's strapline for this book is "The Avengers Meets the Breakfast Club," which is clever, but extremely wrong. The *real* comp for this book isn't "The Breakfast Club," it's "The Big Chill."

When I realized this, I got briefly mad, because I've only had two good movie high concept pitches in my life and one of them was "Gen X Big Chill." Rather than veterans of the Summer of 68 confronting the Reagan years, you could have veterans of the Battle of Seattle living through the Trump years. One would be on PeEP, one would be an insufferable Andrew Tate-quoting bitcoiner, one would be a redpilled reactionary with a genderqueer teen, one would be a squishy lib, one a firebreathing leftist, etc. The soundtrack would just be top 40 tracks from artists who have songs on "Schoolhouse Rock Rocks":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoolhouse_Rock!_Rocks

Every generation has some way in which they seek to overthrow the status quo and build a new, allegedly better one, after all. "Big Chill"'s impact comes from its postmortem on a generation where it was easy to feel like you were riding destiny's rails to greatness thanks to the sheer size of the Boomer cohort and the postwar prosperity they lived through. A Gen X Big Chill would be a stocktaking of a generation that defined itself as a lost generation reared in the Boomers' shadows, armored against the looming corpo-climate apocalypse with the sword of irony and the shield of sincerity.

Which is basically what Grossman is doing here. What's more, doing this as a superhero story is a *genius* move - what could be a better metaphor for a teen's unrealistic certainty of destined greatness than a superhero? Superhero fantasies are irreducibly grandiose and unrealistic, but all the more beautiful and brave and compelling for it.

You know, like teens.

At 52, I'm a middle-aged Gen Xer. I've got two artificial hips and I just scheduled a double cataract surgery. My hairline is receding. I'm an alta kaker. But I wasn't always: I was a bright and promising kid, usually the youngest person in the room where we were planning big protests, ambitious digital art projects, or the future of science fiction. I had amazing friends: creative and funny and sweet, loyal and talented and just *fun*.

We're mostly doing okay (the ones that lived; fuck cancer and fuck heroin and fuck fentanyl). Some of us are doing pretty good. On a good day, I think *I'm* doing pretty good. I had a night in 2018 where I got to hang out, as a peer, with my favorite musician *and* my favorite novelist, both in the same evening. These were artists I'd all but *worshipped* as a teen. I remember looking at the two selfies I took than night and thinking, *Man, if 15 year old me could see these, he'd say that it all worked out.*

But you don't get to be 52 without having a long list of regrets and failures that your stupid brain is only too eager to show you a highlight reel from. No one gets to middle age without a haunting loss that is always trying to push its way to the fore in order to incinerate every triumph great and small and leave ashes behind.

That's why there's a "Big Chill" for every generation. Each one has its own specific character and meaning situated in history, but each one has to grapple with the double-edged sword of nostalgia. Not for nothing, John Hodgman (a bona fide Gen X icon) calls nostalgia "a toxic impulse."

Grossman really makes *Fight Me* work as a Gen X Big Chill. He's a great Gen X writer; his first novel, *Soon I Will Be Invincible*, was a knockout debut about superheroes and supervillains that had a very "The Boys" vibe, you know, that neat little move where you contend with the banal parts of a super's life and show how super powers don't make you a good person, or even a competent one.

His followup to *Invincible* came six years later. *YOU* is a coming-of-age story about the games industry with a second-person narrator (think "Zork"). Grossman is an accomplished game dev (Tomb Raider Legend, Deus X, Dishonered, etc), and he uses *YOU* to really plumb the depths of what games *mean*, what *fun* is, and how working on games isn't just *work*, it's often really *shitty* work, the opposite of fun:

https://memex.craphound.com/2013/04/16/austin-grossmans-you-brilliant-novel-plumbs-the-heroic-and-mystical-depths-of-gaming-and-simulation/

Grossman's last novel was *Crooked*, a very daffy alternate history in which Richard Nixon is a Cthulhoid sorcerer locked in a Lovecraftian battle of good and evil. This is a purely hilarious romp, wildly imaginative and deliciously certain to offend reactionary jerks:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/26/austin-grossmans-crooked-the-awful-cthulhoid-truth-about-richard-nixon/

All those chops are on display in *Fight Me*: a book that covers its brooding with wisecracks, that spits out ten great gags per page even as it drives a knife into your heart. It's a *great* novel.

*Fight Me* doesn't come out in the US and Canada until tomorrow (it's been out in the UK, Australia, NZ, etc for more than a month). Normally, I would hold off on reviewing this until the on-sale date, but this is my last day on the blog for two weeks - I'm leaving on a family vacation early tomorrow morning. I'll see you on July 14!

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🥼 Hey look at this

* Honest Government Ad | AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtVJ4JDM7eM

* Pascal Poster http://www.danamania.com/print/Apple%20Pascal%20Poster/ (h/t @NanoRaptor at bitbang.social)

*  How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe https://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-inside-story (h/t Gregory Charlin)

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🥼 This day in history

#20yrsgo Flickr adds Creative Commons licenses https://web.archive.org/web/20091226143532/http://blog.flickr.net/en/2004/06/29/creative-commons/

#20yrsago Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom wins Locus Award https://memex.craphound.com/2004/06/29/down-and-out-wins-locus-award/

#20yrsago Fast Company’s new linking policy still broken https://memex.craphound.com/2004/06/29/fast-companys-new-linking-policy-still-broken/

#20yrsago Bayesian spam rumination: when word-frequency-histograms attack! https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2004/06/29/victims-spam-filtering/

#15yrsago Pirate Bay to sell to private company, go legit (?) (!) https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/30/swedish-software-firm-acquires-the-pirate-bay-for-77-million/

#15yrsago Gold farming, real money trades banned in China https://web.archive.org/web/20090706063914/http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/ebusiness/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218101859

#15yrsago 13 year old kid reviews a 30 year old Sony Walkman https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8117619.stm

#15yrsago Little Brother wins the Campbell Award — see you in Lawrence, KS https://web.archive.org/web/20090703190435/https://www.news.ku.edu/2009/june/29/sciencefiction.shtml

#10yrsago Internet’s Own Boy, free CC-licensed download on Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz

#10yrsago Black ASU prof beaten by campus cops without provocation, charged with assault https://newsone.com/3028140/ersula-ore-arizona-state-university/

#10yrsago Stupid Congress: 20 years of GOP war on congressional competence https://washingtonmonthly.com/2014/06/09/the-big-lobotomy/

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🥼 Upcoming appearances

* HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY)
https://www.hope.net/talks.html

* Exile in Bookville, (Chicago), July 20
https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808

* American Association of Law Libraries keynote, (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/

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🥼 Recent appearances

* Big Tech and the News (Tech Policy Press)
https://www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-and-the-news/

* Living Your Principles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTfqxF5KyCc

* Reimagining the Internet
https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/102-cory-doctorow-enshittification/

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🥼 Latest books

* The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

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🥼 Upcoming books

* Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

* Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

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🥼 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Friday's progress: 838 words (20090 words total).

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast:
  The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/

This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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