Spoiler Alert: If you haven't read "Super Man and the Bug-out" yet, you may not want to read this blog.
Before I started reading the stories in this book, I went through and read Cory Doctorow's commentary on them. I was highly intrigued by his description of a Jewish superman who believed in the Canadian values of "Peace, Order, and Good Government" rather than the flashy Super Man we all know, and possibly love.
I actually ended up reading this story before the ones we were required to read first, and I love it. A world where Super Man is useless because crime has been made obsolete, and he chooses to become an activist? Not only that, but he lets his overbearing Jewish earth mother guilt trip him about it. It makes a more human Super Man, something I appreciate in my heroes.
I also enjoyed seeing the bug-out up close in one of the stories for the first time. His interactions with "Supe" are genius and the political implications are astounding. Choosing to allow Hershie to speak at everyone of their war seminars effectively nullified the resistance in two ways that I could immediately see.
- Seeing their opinions on the feed will assure dissenters that they are being represented, and will lower the likelihood of protests being staged. This will lower the current uproar in society.
- Allowing Super Man to speak at the beginning will not actually achieve anything for "Supe"s cause. People will hear five minutes worth of reasoning on why war is bad, then they will hear hours worth of people refuting this opinion.
In the end, I felt more sorry for Super Man than you could possibly believe. Not only was he obsolete because of the lack of crime, but also by being given this glorious speaking job he was made useless to the resistance he believed in.
I much prefer Doctorow's take on Super Man to the original (it reminded me of Hancock with his flawed and jaded persona, but better because Hershie seemed like your fairly average Joe), and would like to read more stories about this Super Man that has normal problems along with his earthshaking ones. I feel like he is easier to relate to, and more a believable character.
Personally, I found this story to be one of the weakest in the collection; one might say the'first among equals.' For there was a particularly striking parallelism between the preface and the story - between the "'Peace, Order, and Good Government'" and the bugouts' promises of ending "war, crime, and corruption." I suspect that Doctorow wrote this when he was still fired up about his premise, but the fact that he doesn’t revisit it by name makes it feel artless and orphaned. Perhaps I’m thinking of it too much as an essay, and not as the amorphous agglomeration of various words that is the short story.
ReplyDeleteThe story does have its good points, though. For one, Doctorow doesn’t sell out any characters like he did in “Home Again, Home Again” to emphasize the Faustian aspect of that story. At least all of Hershie’s actions are moderately rational.