Another week, another world to conquer

 kw: book reviews, semi-fiction, nonfiction, empire building, supervillains

Want to take over the world? You'll have to wait in line. Firstly, and more seriously, you'll have V. Putin, J.R. Biden, and J.P. Xi, at the very least, to elbow out of the way. More tongue-in-cheek, the number of aspiring globe-controllers may soon take a sharp rise, with the publication of How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain by Ryan North.

Indeed, the schemes are at least borderline practical. Mr. North knows what he is talking about; he creates supervillains in his day job with Marvel. I have but one quibble with the way the book begins: Chapter 1 is titled "Every Supervillain Needs a Secret Base." It needs to be bumped ahead to become Chapter 2, and Chapter 1 ought to be, "Amassing Your First Billion." 

Secret bases don't come cheap. Particularly now that every curious person with Google Earth can scan around, zooming in on anything suspicious. So first, you need to gather sufficient clout to coerce Google to fuzz out the area of your interest in both GMaps and GEarth, the way sundry world governments have had "areas of national importance" fuzzed out or blacked out (This site outlines 15 of them). Then you need to obtain title and control of the place (those don't always go together).

A few folks have tried making "new land" near existing land, "Seabases". Sometimes it even works for a while. Then the nearest country takes it over. It seems the first billion you can gather would just be seed money to work toward something more like a trillion, so you can buy your own country. That's a better beginning. The illustrations and the villainous character in them are the work of the author's friend Carly Monardo.

I seem to remember that L. Ron Hubbard lived aboard ship for decades to avoid extradition to the US on charges of tax evasion. The "Sea Org" of Scientology funneled supplies and personnel to the ship. I don't know what it does now that Hubbard has joined the Thetans. 

In one chapter—I forget which—we learn that the perfect crime is the one people thank you for. It might have been Chapter 4, "Controlling the Weather…", related to "solving" climate change. That's where I realized that the author's "supervillain" just might be a super-superhero in disguise. I like his take in Chapter 7, "Time Travel": as soon as he gets it, he'll come back and rewrite this chapter before the book goes to print.

Then Chapter 9 pulls out all the stops, "Ensuring You Are Never, Ever, Ever Forgotten." The time frames go by powers of 10: 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, etc. The 1,000-year memorial involves bronze items in shallow water. Costs rise with the time frame. The billion-year memorial requires getting it off Earth, and the 10-billion-year one? One must move it to the outer Solar System, at the very least. Beyond that, we learn of the times, in billions, trillions, quadrillions (we're just getting started) of years until the heat death of the universe, the decay of protons, and the evaporation of black holes via Hawking Radiation (that one has 100 zeroes after the 1. It seems the author found a use for Googol, different from Google!). I guess that has to count as "Ever".

It's a tremendously fun book. I don't care to partake of supervillainy, but if anyone is inspired by this book, I may know what to look out for.