The Fox

I figured I would finally take advantage of my long commute time and listen to an audiobook, instead of trying to find time to read regular books. I haven't done audiobooks in a long time, so I figured I was ready and pretty much just grabbed this one at random.

It's a story about a magical teenage hacker who can do anything on his computer, break into any computer, and the wild hi-jinks he gets into with the help of British Intelligence. 

It's silly, and it doesn't make a lick of sense, but it occurred to me that this answered a question that had troubled me recently about the superhero genre. The trappings of the superhero genre -- partial face masks and costumes under their clothes -- make no sense in today's world. So what form should superheroes take today?

The Internet is as misunderstood today as radioactivity was in the '60s and chemistry was in the '40s. It's something with just enough plausible vagueness that it could maybe account for super-abilities. If this was any more obviously a superhero story, the main character would turn into Freakazoid. 

And, like a comic book story from the '40s, the characters in this book are largely ciphers filling their roles in the plot. We don't ever get to know and understand the magic teen hacker or his family, even though keeping them alive is central to the plot.

Also like a superhero story, it's a story of wish fulfillment. If you've ever wished that Vlad Putin (although he's never named as such) or Kim Jong-un (who does get named) would get their comeuppance, then you might find those parts of this story quite satisfying. The bad guys get beat down, the old status quo is restored (the story is very conservative in that regard), and everything goes back to normal at the end.