How to Take Over the World by Ryan North
North writes comics, among other things, so he is well up on the business of supervilliany. The conceit of this book is that he and other writers routinely create supervillian plots that involve advanced, astonishing, super-sized schemes that could work, or almost could work. The villain is just barely stopped at the very end, just in time, by the heroes.
But, “What if the supervillain didn’t have to lose?” (p. xvi)
The other conceit is that the point of being a supervillain is “someone ambitious, competent, and clever works outside existing power structures to do something that’s not getting done on its own.” (p. xx) This is, “enlightened supervillainy”, and it can be you.
What the book contains is a bunch of out-there science, stuff that is at the edges of what could actually be done. Of course, it’s dressed up in comic book style. So, we have, ‘how to set up a secret base’, ‘how to set up your own country’, ‘how to clone dinosaurs’, ‘how to control the weather’, and so on.
This is a book of science, so no magic. Everything has to be at least possible. (Note that the chapter on time travel is basically a blank page.)
Some of the best parts of the book are the “Inferior Plans of Lesser Minds”, which are surveys of previous work, which failed, often comically so.
I have to say that many of the nefarious plans he comes up with are disappointing. The requirement of scientific feasibility tends to pare back our nefarious plans. Sigh.
For example, cloning dinosaurs ain’t gonna happen. But, maybe you could fiddle with standard chickens to unleash their vestigial dinosaurian traits, creating a chickenasaurus. Which would be awesome, for certain values of awesome.
Much of the fun of this book is giving permission to unleash your inner supervillain, to imagine actually trying to do these things. What is the purpose of a chickenasaurus? It’s purpose is to be awesome! And to make me look awesome riding it.
But here’s the thing. Not all supervillains have the same concepts of awesomeness. When I read a quote about how awesome “riding in on a dinosaur” would be,(p. 85) to the supervillainess whom I have co-conspired and cohabited with for several decades; she expressed little interest. A personal dinosaur? Meh. A saber-toothed tiger, perhaps. Or a sabre-toothed kangaroo! Yeah!
The point is that there may be entire demographic sectors of supervillainy that are not represented in this book, not only villainesses, but every other way that humans (and superhumans) can be different.
In fact, I myself found some chapters way more awesome than others. Concepts for a secret base were cool (though the resulting plan wasn’t actually all that secret). Tunneling to the center of the Earth wasn’t that interesting, and the realistic possible schemes were boring (in more ways than one). And so on.
So, sure. There’s lots of cool stuff here.
But it left me wanting a lot more of some things and a lot less of others. (Ninety some pages of “Ensuring You Are Never, Ever, Ever Forgotten” was way more than I cared about, especially since most of it won’t really work all that well.)
And there seems to be a need for some sequels from different points of view. A sequel? A sequel with a reboot, with alternative demographics? No one has ever done that before! : – )
- Ryan North and (Illustrations by Carly Monardo), How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain, New York, Riverhead Press, 2022.
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