Hello and welcome to this Track of Words author interview, where today I’m joined by Austin Grossman to talk about his brand new novel Fight Me, which is due out on the 23rd of May from Penguin Michael Joseph. A superhero story unlike any I’ve read before, Fight Me is a fascinating read, exploring unusual perspectives on heroes and villains, power and consequences, and I was thrilled to be able to chat to Austin and delve into some of the themes running throughout the book! So read on to find out more about the cast and themes of Fight Me, along with observations on the appeal of superhero stories, the nature of villains and heroes, the reasons for wanting super powers, and loads more!
Here’s a quick synopsis of Fight Me, then it’s over to Austin:
Rick Tower, an unremarkable professor at an unremarkable New England college has a secret. It began twenty-five years ago in 1991, in a room in a community center with three other lost teenagers, each with a strange power, facing their last chance to avoid a lifetime in metahuman confinement facilities.
The four of them came together for one glorious summer to win freedom and battle unspeakable evil. But then came college, and divorces and lapsed friendships and turning forty, and now that brightest period of their lives is the last thing anyone wants to think about.
But the chance discovery of an obituary in a small-town newspaper reawakens an old mystery no one can afford to ignore…
Track of Words: To start things off, could you tell us a bit about Fight Me and what readers can expect from it?
Austin Grossman: First of all, these are great questions! Thanks for reading and thinking it through so thoroughly.
Okay. Fight Me starts when an ordinary-sounding news story brings a group of middle-aged adults back to their hometown, to confront an ancient evil they thought was gone forever. It brings back the memory of this bright extraordinary time in their lives; and it sets their present-day lives on a new course. Oh, and they have superpowers.
Is this also the premise of Stephen King’s It? It is, and I make no apology. It’s a wonderful device for cracking into people’s shared histories, and what happens when long-separated friends come back together.
ToW: You’ve written about superheroes and villains before, in Soon I Will Be Invincible – what is it about this genre that keeps you coming back to them?
AG: It has all these themes I can’t leave alone! How events in your life shape you, and makes you powerful and also vulnerable. And sometimes you have to hide it, even lie about it, but it’s always there rooted in your body.
And I see the MCU doing superhero stories – and these themes get raised but never quite become the focus of the story, it’s always about some outer-space light show, and I think aaaa there’s an amazing story there if you would just tell it. So I have to do it myself.
Austin’s debut novel – Soon I Will Be Invincible
ToW: As superhero teams go, I think it’s safe to say that The Newcomers lean towards the dysfunctional side of things – could you talk a bit about the dynamic between the members of the team, and why you chose these particular characters to write about?
AG: One thing I love about the Avengers is that they’re people who have no business being in a room together, let alone a story. A Norse God, a chemically induced super-soldier, plus some guy who’s good at archery. So I thought about people whose personalities were that different from each other, I put them in a high school and gave them all detention.
Did I base their personalities around characters in The Breakfast Club? Maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t.
ToW: There’s an interesting feel to the setting of this story, which views superpowered people through a lens of control and accountability – similar in some ways to what we see in The Incredibles, or Captain America: Civil War. Were those the sorts of stories you were drawing inspiration from with this book, and what else did you look to for inspiration?
AG: I try to look outside the superhero genre for inspiration – to start with the human stories before the powers. So this is mostly a story about a reunion – a kind of story I’m obsessed with – so it began with many re-watches of The Big Chill and The Royal Tenenbaums.
But I’ve watched The Incredibles a great many times. I love the way it mingles the extraordinary with the real world, how it uses the tropes of superpowers to intensify and distil recognizable characters. But then those superpowers are also treated as real, and crash into real-world logic in fun ways.
(I liked Civil War but the scale felt overblown to me. The Incredibles keeps things smaller and more local, which feels paradoxically bigger and more powerful to me).
ToW: There’s a theme running through the book of the difficulties inherent in ‘doing the right thing’. For characters with so much power, do you think it’s inevitable that good intentions will eventually turn into using that power for something other than ‘good’?
AG: I feel like people like the ideas of good and evil but nobody’s actual personality fits neatly inside them, at least not in any remotely normal way. There’s always going to be messiness and darkness inside someone who invests in the idea of themselves as good. Or with Doctor Impossible [from Soon I Will Be Invincible – ToW], evil is a lot of things to him – he relishes it but it’s also partly a self-defeating obsessiveness – like a neurotic friend who just can’t catch a break but it’s kind of their own fault but you like them anyway.
Reimagining the Cold War as “an epic battle against the occult waged by the ultimate American Richard Nixon”? Yes please!
ToW: You spend some time digging into the question of why people want – pursue, even – superpowers, and the desire to be ‘special’. At what point in your own experiences with superhero stories did you start asking that question?
AG: I think a lot of people grew up with the pressure to be a gifted child. Get into the Gifted and Talented program, get into the Advanced Placement class. Skip a grade. People get invested in it until they can’t be okay without it. And then they go to a college where everyone who got in is the same way, and then they hit the real world, and it’s all a mess. Don’t ask me how I know.
ToW: Whether heroes or villains, there seems to always be a cost to the superpowers on display here – and not always (or not just) a physical cost, but often an emotional or psychological one. How important do you think this cost should be to powerful characters like these?
AG: This is – as the kids say – everything. When somewhere behind what makes you great at something – or just gives you a specific insight into the world – is the thing that almost killed you. Or maybe it’s not you – maybe your parents paid the cost – but somebody did, and you always feel it.
ToW: There’s a great line which says: “Villains have a simplifying effect, morally, and without them things get a little bit rudderless. You’re left with the larger systemic injustices, and thinking too hard about those is how a lot of people become villains in the first place.” What would you say makes a good villain, and what impact do (or should) they have on a hero?
AG: God, I love supervillains. In any story they’re the creative ones, the driven ones, the ones who make it okay to just be obsessive and angry all the time. And of course they always lose, and always try again.
I like it when there’s something about them that undercuts the hero’s idea of themselves as good. Syndrome in The Incredibles is a terrible person, but he still serves as a reminder of that one time Mr. Incredible was a total dick. And Magneto, as they say, made some valid points.
Video games meet science fiction – sounds great!
ToW: Aside from writing novels, you’re also a game designer – how do you find balancing the two different kinds of creative work? How much overlap is there between writing for games and writing novels?
AG: In game design, you’re always making space for the player – you’re giving them the tools to be skilled, or brave, or creative. To make choices and define themselves. It’s a good reminder that in writing you have total control but you need to give them a little space – you’re telling a story for them to read.
And then in fiction writing, you don’t have to go to meetings.
ToW: From a craft perspective, what did this book teach you that you’ll use in future writing projects?
AG: Novels are big, and no single way of working is going to give you everything. Like, I mostly write in the moment, letting one sentence build to the next. Spending the day on whichever scene feels like it has heat, even if it means skipping around and writing them out of order.
However, if you’re going to have a mystery and four central characters with interconnected lives that you track over the course of twenty-five years, you should probably do some initial planning. That one cost me a lot of time.
ToW: To finish off, other than perhaps Stefanie I don’t think any of your superheroes wear capes. If you were a superhero (or villain) though, would you wear a cape or (in the immortal words of Edna Mode) no cape?
AG: I would absolutely wear a cape! They’re a regal garment, and there is almost no context for a man to wear one nowadays, apart from fighting a bull or stopping crime with your superpowers. I feel like Edna knows this. Fashion is an art, darling, and sometimes you have to break the rules.
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Austin Grossman is a novelist and game designer. His novels include Soon I Will Be Invincible, YOU: a novel, and Crooked. Soon I Will Be Invincible was nominated for the 2007 John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. His writing has also appeared in Granta, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.
His game credits include Ultima Underworld 2, System Shock, Trespasser, Deus Ex, Epic Mickey, and Dishonored, which received the 2012 BAFTA award for Best Game. He is currently Director of Game Design and Interactive Storytelling at Magic Leap.
He has an M.A. in Performance Studies from N.Y.U .and is A.B.D. in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
Find out more at Austin’s website.
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Big thanks to Austin for chatting to me for this interview, and for writing both great answers and a fascinating book!
I hope this has piqued your interest for Fight Me – if you like a superhero story, this is definitely worth checking out.
Fight Me comes out on the 23rd of May – check out the links below to order* your copy:
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*If you buy anything using any of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
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