Austin Grossman, aside from being consistently one of the best-dressed gentlemen of my acquaintance, is a novelist and an influential presence in the modern history of video games. Most people know him for his work on games like Deus Ex or Tomb Raider: Legend, for his 2007 novel Soon I Will Be Invincible, or the time he charmingly explained Steely Dan the world’s smartest Taylor Swift fan (at her request). I read his 2015 novel Crooked while I was on my Nixon binge several years ago, and it is one of my favorite alternate histories. It asks, basically, What if Nixon was a flawed and corrupt antihero holding off an invasion by extradimensional Lovecraftian monsters? You get to see every element of the Nixon mythos reworked in terms of this story — Eisenhower is now not just the world’s most withholding boss but a mocking elder wizard with a secret agenda; the Russians have their own foreign policy toward the occult realm; etc. It’s a lot of fun. His delightful new novel, Fight Me, has been commented upon in an earlier installment of this newsletter.
Fight Me, like your first novel Soon I Will Be Invincible, is a novel about superheroes; unlike Invincible, it comes at a moment when we hear more and more about "superhero exhaustion." A part of me immediately recognizes and responds to that concept: There are a million Marvel movies; the weekly comic book as a form seems economically endangered (I keep hearing rumors that DC is going to give up entirely); it feels hard to strategize your way past the innovations and revisions that Moore and Morrison introduced in the '80s and '90s to greater innovations and revisions. Another part of me thinks the concept of "superhero exhaustion" is fundamentally silly: the superhero is just a version of the epic hero or mythological figure, and those have been around forever and seem unlikely to go anywhere. Obviously it's both these things, but do you think of the superhero story more as a historically distinct thing, or as a perennially recurring tendency in storytelling? Which way of approaching it is more artistically fruitful for you?
Thanks for having me here! And okay, answering this is in two parts.
We definitely had a superhero bubble economy and I'm fine seeing that collapse. It was a quick reliable route to creative exhaustion, and I hope nobody thought it was going any other way. A show like The Boys seem almost intentionally determined to turn the whole genre into an empty exercise, but it’s never more than temporary. Superheroes were pretty irrelevant to the culture in the early 80s, then we had those dramatic reinventions (which to me weren’t really subversions, more like reconnection to what was exciting to begin with). In the 1960s, they had the campy and meta Adam West Batman, probably in answer to an earlier phase of self-seriousness. The cycle has been running since the beginning.
As to the second part — I am definitely on the side of the genre as historically distinct, at least from a writer's perspective. There are larger similarities to other stories and myths, but the superhero genre is also its particular self, premised on how supernatural abilities appear when set in the modern world, made part of a life story — they’re impossible, they’re incongruous in ways that feel specific to this place and time. That's where the charge and the friction start to appear.
I think putting superheroes in a novel doubles down on that. It's the medium that gave us narrative realism, the medium par excellence of irony and modernity and psychological depth, the medium created to take apart the marvels of romance. It's like it's exactly designed not to hold the superhero genre, so it's fun to see what happens it’s forced to.
You have written on superhero fatigue yourself, of course: "Let the writing stay quiet and small and aware of how impossible [superheroes] are. Keep it mundane and human until you’re able to feel the exact moment in a character's life where their body has to break the laws of physics if anything is to be bearable ever again. When you can feel that fracture happen, the genre starts to have a meaning." In the post that I'm quoting, you're writing about the superhero film specifically, and the way the best actors in that tradition (Downey, Ruffalo) find and represent this moment. How do you find it in prose? What does your process look like when you're trying to get inside the head of a character who has a Shazam-like split personality, or is a bioengineered fighting machine, or an actual fairy princess?
Hilary Mantel has a good story about this, from when she was writing her book The Giant, O'Brien, a fictionalized account of the 18th-century Irishman Charles O'Brien, who was well over seven feet tall. She said (I read or heard this someplace but I'm choosing not to check) that she wasn't sure she could write it, but then in her mind, she saw him come into the room and sit down. But just before he sat, he stopped for a moment to test the chair and judge whether it could bear his weight. That small gesture opened up the whole thing for her.
It's the same for me — I build everything from the bottom up, from a sentence or gesture, that captures their physicality or the way they use language. The superhero genre is of course especially good for that — everyone has very specific, very odd physicality to work with, and usually they have their own absurd way of speaking. A character like Stefanie DiDonato is a fairy princess and that gives her a whole way of speaking and who in the real world would talk like that? That's the question I get to answer (although she code-switches now because she was brought up in the Boston suburbs). I tend to see them on the stage, speaking to a theater because of the way that isolates and heightens everything.
The first of these was my first novel, of course. I would write these remarks in the margin of lecture notes, and strung together they became supervillain sitting in a jail cell. I thought of him tapping his finger against the glass with the slight numbness that came from his hardened skin...
You're also (to bury the lede a little) a video game designer, and you have written about your conviction that video games are best when players resist designers to a certain extent, that that looseness is part of the art form of the video game. The superheroes of Fight Me are, in a way, cast in prewritten roles within larger "games": you've got a guy who swears an oath to a weird wizard, a fairy princess whose kingdom is usurped, another guy who is supposedly following a script written for him by a future version of himself, and a woman whose nervous system has been preloaded with "scripts" of various fighting styles. Are these characters like players of a video game, alternately resisting and adapting to an imposed story?
I've never been able to field these questions on the game/novel relationship. Partly because I see a vast gulf between them in terms of writing craft, each a very different body of technique and formal problem-solving.
I could go on about that, but the truth is, they don’t relate inside of me because keeping them separate is kind of essential to my being able to survive working two jobs. Each one involves talking to a different set of people, during different parts of the day. They happen in different work cycles, on different economic models. Each one is a break in my day from the other and if they were more connected I would be doing the same thing all the time which would probably be the end of my ability to function
Your fiction returns to the 1990s fairly persistently. What are some of the things that are interesting about that period, or that are useful to a novelist?
So yes — Fight Me is set in the early 90s and then 2015, and it's all very basic to what that project is.*
I was born in the U.S. in 1969, which means that for me and my cohort the Nineties was our first decade of being out in the world as adults. I was getting through my useless twenties — making video games, going to grad schools, all the professional experiments that I would afterward cobble into a career of sorts. Other people did, of course, other things.
But, born when we were, all the changes of our twenties were taking place at the same time as everything was being upended and transformed by the Internet. By the end of the decade, nothing looked the same and we looked back at the 1980s across a vast divide — personally but also as a culture. It had all happened to us at once, woven together.
We're both fans of Anthony Powell and A Dance to the Music of Time, possibly the best novels ever written on the topic of What Happens to All Those People One Knows. His group were born in the very early 20th century, and by their late 30s there’s always that phrase about who “had a good war" and who didn't. That's what the 1990s were for us — the massive changes happening around us threw what was happening in our own personal lives into sharper relief; all the small-scale personalities and luck and the rest of it, interacting with this great slow wave breaking over us — all those changes we saw made are still with us, turned into the world we have to live in, the great revolution of online even though we knew that mass optimism was marketing copy. It was the moment of people making their way, or failing to. You rose with the tide, or were left behind; you laid the foundations of something or you drifted; you made good on early promise or fell through the cracks. You bought in early or you didn’t.
So when I think about What Happens to People — when I think about writing like Powell which I do very often — I think about that decade. You had a good Nineties or you didn't. I didn't particularly but at least I got to watch.
Brag here about your other ongoing or upcoming projects! And what's the best way for readers of Fight Me to keep up with you?
Right! This is the year of Fight Me but I have various new projects in the works.
Mostly they’re still secret, but I can talk about We Hate Wizard School, which is a graphic novel I'm doing with Savanna Ganucheau, a superb comics artist. It’s set in the 1980s rust belt and it’s part school story and part road trip, a mix of Harry Potter, punk rock, Y tu mamá también. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, and it should be out from First Second Books in late 2025.
I'm most easily tracked on Instagram, and occasionally on my Substack.