Who among us has not dreamed of having superpowers? We are urged thereto by the avalanche of comics, movies, novels, and roleplaying games featuring abilities beyond mortal ken. Yet not all superpowers are created equal. Some superpowers require secondary superpowers to survive.1 Other abilities have disquieting consequences for their possessors.
I’m not going to talk about superhumans with powers that would kill them or their friends if exercised. No one dreams of being any of the following:
- X-Bomb Betty (can self-detonate, producing a 150 million megaton explosion (once))2
- Hazmat (lethal radioactive aura)
- Absorbing Man (can duplicate the properties of materials he touches; see footnote)3
I’m talking, here, about powers that appear on their surface to be useful but later reveal themselves to be harmful to, or at least extremely alienating for, those who wield them. Below are my musings about five such examples…
Living Fire/Flame
Many characters in comics—the Human Torch, the other Human Torch, Flame Princess, and others—have the ability to cloak themselves in flames or in some cases (like Willy Pete (content warning) or Brimstone) are composed entirely of fire. Usually, such powers confer a degree of invulnerability to attack (ever try to shoot a fire to death?) and invulnerability to fire itself. A tricky power, which recurs again and again in comics because beings sheathed in flame look awesome.
There’s a downside, in that there are few problems that can be solved by setting things on fire. Also, human surroundings aren’t designed for fire resistance. Whole neighborhoods could go up in flames if the superhuman isn’t careful. Ditto fields and forests. Best to keep Johnny Storm far from the West Coast during the drier months. Or entirely, just to be on the safe side.
It is also true that fire is a horrific weapon. Burns are a painful way to die. Burn scars and associated trauma can be debilitating. Comics tend to handwave away these facts. But they are real. There is a reason Protocol III to the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons limits use of incendiary weapons against civilians.
***
Super Speed
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to run across the country in a heartbeat, to clean one’s house in a blink of an eye, to compose an overdue Tor.com article in one flat second? Except, of course, speeders are only fast from the perspective of normal people. From their own point of view, they move at regular speeds. Tasks that those around them think are finished almost instantly are still time-consuming from the viewpoint of someone whose perceptions work a thousand times faster.
Furthermore, from the speedster’s perspective, everyone around them moves at the speed of cold molasses. A five-minute conversation might to them feel like it consumed weeks. Alan Moore once described the Flash as “a man who moves so fast that his life is an endless gallery of statues.” How horrific is that?
***
Telepathy
Anyone who has ever struggled to understand other people or to make themselves understood might wish for the ability to imprint information directly into someone else’s mind (or conversely, to retrieve information from said other person’s mind and figure out exactly what they are trying to say). Telepathy provides convenience and clarity.
The catch is that telepathy provides convenience and clarity. People are used to the privacy of their own minds; they share with others only that which they believe socially acceptable to share. Scan someone’s mind and who knows what you might discover? Particularly if the person being scanned makes the mistake of trying not to think of whatever terrible inner thoughts they might have… Humans have conversational circumlocution for a reason, as Poul Anderson’s “Journeys End” demonstrated. Treasure your inability to communicate.
***
Heightened Intelligence
Wanting godlike intelligence also seems like something of a no-brainer. What could possibly go wrong with enhanced cognition (leaving aside the fact that there are lots of different forms of intelligence)? Intelligence is a powerful tool, an advantage that one might expect would allow the possessor to circumvent any obstacle, social or physical.
Except…unless you’re willing to contrive some way to boost everyone else’s intelligence, you are consigned to a lifetime as the smartest person in the room. You will be the person on whose shoulders others will happily drop the weight of the world. Worse, you may be the person whose advice is frequently dismissed because nobody around them can understand the logic behind said advice, even when you take the time to dumb it down for them. Just ask Brainiac 5!
Far worse is the possibility that your exalted cognition may allow you to fully comprehend the reality of impending doom without being able to do anything to prevent doomsday. Not every problem has a solution. Ignorance can be bliss.
***
Indestructibility
Indestructability has many, many positive aspects, starting with being indestructible. I cannot speak for the rest of you but whenever I am on fire, bleeding from conversational head wounds, hastily batting off fire-ants, or experiencing the immediate effects of having just been stabbed with semi-molten glass, I do yearn for a slightly greater resistance to physical harm than I seem to have. Even regenerative powers would be useful.
The catch in many cases has to do with time. Indestructible characters often gain comparative immunity to aging. On a personal level, this is awesome. On a social level, it means everyone around one is a mayfly. Every social connection between immortals and mortals is temporary by its nature. It’s the nature of life that we will outlive some friends. The excessively durable can count on outliving all of them, along with the cultures they grew up in, entire cycles of civilizations, their home worlds, and possibly the universe itself. But at least they will have lots of time to contemplate their situation.
***
Now, aren’t you happy to be your ordinary self?
No doubt you have your own examples of stock superpowers with unacknowledged drawbacks, or else you would like to dispute the points above. Comments are, as ever, below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]I am convinced the main difference between the Legion of Superheroes members Sun Boy and Wildfire is that Sun Boy had the ability to power up without instant incineration while poor Wildfire did not.
[2]Which she got courtesy of her doting father, as I recall. There are a lot of terrible parents in comics.
[3]Power and property duplicators all tend to have the same limitation. Gain the benefits of a power suite or the material characteristics of a substance, gain the vulnerabilities as well. This is so frequent as to define the character in many cases. See Rogue, with her accidentally filched memories, or that time the Absorbing Man was tricked into touching cocaine before being dispersed with powerful fans and sold as narcotics.
Re: Superspeed, check our the Ballad of Barry Allen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMe1qlyuMXQ
I have actually thought about every single one of these with existential horror so I feel like you are on my level :D Especially immortality/industructibility – what happens when your star goes out? Do you just float around for eternity?
Regarding Telepathy it’s something I’ve played with myself as I occasionally write Star wars fanfic and the Force is a form of telepathy – so what are the moral and mental/psyhcological implications of that? Not to mention that it can actually undercut a lot of plot (and interpersonal) tension when you can just read somebody’s thoughts, so at least in the way I developed it, so part of my writing was trying to both include natural limits on the power but also try to take into account how it would impact the person’s own mental state and their interpersonal relationships, as well as the ethics around how/when to use it.
Rogue (in the movies) was the first one who came to mind when I saw the title but I’m assuming she’s covered under the lethal/power absorbing exception.
The absorbing suite of powers is so commonly packaged with serious drawbacks it’s a bit challenging to name someone with them who doesn’t have potentially life-altering complications.
Of course, the Flash has a whole song about the drawbacks of his power.
“and I’m there before you know it / I’ll be gone before you see me / and I’d like to get to know you / but you’re talking much too slowly”
Then of course, there’s a whole subcategory of superheroes whose “powers” include horrific mutation, forever depriving them of a normal life (the Thing, Hellboy, the Ninja Turtles, Blue Devil, Swamp Thing, Captain Atom, etc).
Yeah, and I never blamed her for (in the movies) wanting to take the “cure”. A reactor I follow is doing a first time watch of the movies and in some ways Rogue’s predicament hits different after over a year of social isolation.
Also, I wanted to say that I read that wikipedia conversation and got a hearty laugh over it. I never realized how much went on behind the scenes there :D
@1, 5I also came here to mention the Ballad of Barry Allen. Although at least versions of the Flash are capable of dropping in and out of conscious super-speed perception.
For pretty much all of these powers, it’s a question of your level of control. Johnny Storm for example has always been portrayed as having really really fine control, to the point where he can carry someone while he’s flying, without harming them. And he has control over other fires, so you could in fact send him to the West Coast to fight fires. Similarly, Professor X and Marvel Girl have the ability to read surface thoughts without going deeper. It’s never been explicitly mentioned, but presumably most speedsters are able to make their time perception be a little slower than their actual speed, so they do perceive themselves as going fast — although you’d still need to be quick enough to avoid obstacles. (A variation I’ve never seen: a speedster who can slow down their time perception while not moving, so as to make enforced waiting more bearable.)
Almost any power without control is a problem. For a while, Colossus of the X-Men was stuck in metal form, and he couldn’t help do the dishes because he didn’t have fine enough control of his strength: he kept breaking them.
<i>you are consigned to a lifetime as the smartest person in the room</i>
Eh, it’s not that bad.
; )
you are consigned to a lifetime as the smartest person in the room
Eh, it’s not that bad.
:)
(Edit: Wow, did I get karma-ed on this one. Nothing like showing your super intelligence by double-posting!)
One of Peter David’s clever touches back in ’80s was explaining that Quicksilver was such a jerk because the world he lived in was like being in a perpetual slow-moving line at the bank.
The whole idea of the bad side to having special powers is the premise behind Dave Duncan’s, The Cursed. A plague gives those who survive it an ability but there are two sides to it. If you get the ability to read peoples thoughts then your thoughts can be read by those around you. If you have the ability to know the future you are actually living your life in reverse and don’t remember your past so you must write it down to remember it. Super powers might seem like a good idea but there are always drawbacks.
Telepaths in fiction tend to be cranky and misanthropic (sometimes to extreme degrees) – the only telepath I can think of at the moment who seems to be at peace with his powers is Arthur Mentis (in Carrie Vaughn’s “Golden Age” series).
@12 – how about Dr. Tachyon in the Wild Cards series? Pretty mellow as I recall.
@12
Most of the Lensman, Saturn Girl, Spock, the telepath in Buck Rogers (Selmar I believe, in the Cosmic Whiz Kid), others I’m sure I’m forgetting. Yes, crankiness and misanthropic tendencies can be a characteristic of telepaths in fiction, but it seems far from common.
I thought Amazing Man might be an exception to “absorption sucks” but DC nerfed the original’s powers and at least one of his descendants was vulnerable to the old “here, touch this glass so I can smash you” trick.
The downside of turning the Absorbing Man into cocaine was that anyone who snorted him got his powers. The Absorbing Man has years of experience but for someone without control and experience, the powers are potentially lethal.
@14: I mean the kind of telepath who receives all the time. Spock can read thoughts – but he has to make a conscious (and energy-intensive) effort at close quarters, and as I recall, the Lensman can turn it off, too. Brainwave, and Tim Zahn’s telepaths have it rougher.
@12 Streen was an example of the old EU who was basically a reculsive hermit to escape the voices in his head until he ended up at Luke’s academy and learned how to control it. (I still love that aspect of the old EU…some of it was nuts but was really attached to all those original students).
Wayne in Two Guys and Guy found out the hard way why it’s a bad idea to be indestructible.
Well, I would love to have the power to turn everything I touch into gold. What could possibly go wrong?
Because it came up on FB:
Conversational head wound: irritated with witty banter a home invader to the point he disarmed himself by breaking his gun on my head.
Fire-ants: sat on what I thought was a creek bank, was in fact nest of irritable fire ants.
Semi-molten glass: tested on my thumb the point of a sharp spike of glass my brother had just drawn and discovered that just because one end of a glass object is cool does not mean the other end is. Currently that event defines my 10 on a 1 to 10 pain scale.
An underappreciated downside of telepathy is the outrageous annual cost of Ticketmaster fees slapped on your Disaster Area tickets.
IMO, most wrenching examination of telepathy can be found in robert silverberg’s Dying Inside; not for the faint-hearted.
In Justine Larbalestier’s How To Ditch Your Fairy, the protagonist has a parking fairy- any car she’s in automatically gets a great parking place. She’s too young to drive, and is sick of being dragged along on everyone else’s boring errands, so the novel is about her efforts to get rid of it.
Telepathy might be useful in medicine, specifically in diagnosis. The doctor would know if it really hurts and how much. Of course, it would mean that there would be a lot of masochists in medicine.
@24: That application comes up in a Lois McMaster Bujold novel.
From a young age, I have dreamed (as when I sleep) that I had one superpower: the power of flight. However, there’s hitch: I can only fly three feet off the ground! In my dreams, I’m constantly crashing into people and car bumpers. Not the best of superpowers.
If X-Bomb Betty can only use her power once due it being self-lethal — how do they know she can do anything at all?
Bacteria Emission:
Although she was supposedly immune to most diseases, Infectious Lass “was rejected because she had no control over her power, which was a danger to allies and enemies alike. She was also asthmatic and prone to chronic congestion.”
Infectious_Lass
@23: any car with a wheelchair in it also gets great parking. So, maybe not to wish for. Perhaps this came up in the story?
There was that old, probably Marvel pre Marvel comic where the guy got to have the life span of a giant redwood tree. And the mobility. This is a one off case as far as I know, it isn’t Groot’s origin.
@23: any car with a wheelchair in it also gets great parking. So, maybe not to wish for. Perhaps this came up in the story?
There was that old, probably Marvel pre Marvel comic where the guy got to have the life span of a giant redwood tree. And the mobility. This is a one off case as far as I know, it isn’t Groot’s origin.
Fire Punch has my favorite example of the living fire thing. He spends 10 years writhing in agony after he gets the power because being burned alive is so painful.
We can all come up with counter examples. Selmar from the Buck Rogers episode never used anything but telepathy. The Ullilans from TNG’s Violations used telepathy extensively. The Cairn from TNG’s Dark Page could not communicate verbally until they started to learn from the Federation. Before that their sole method of communication was telepathy (and they were shown to be able to probe, not just send and receive thoughts). Contrarily, the Betazoid Tam Elbrun, a full telepath like most Betazoids, was neurotic since his powers were active from childhood, rather than developing in adolescence.
Ultimately, of course, it all depends on how the author(s) choose to look at it. Some make it difficult and debilitating. (Kzin telepaths were neurotic and ill), others look at it as a gift which can be controlled. In my own books most telepaths can shield themselves from a lot and only see what they are looking for.
Either approach can be interesting and lead to story points.
Heightened Intelligence: Austin Grossman has a great riff on this with his Dr. Impossible in Soon I Will Be Invincible. Basically, being the smartest person around can lead to Malign Hypercognition Disorder (“evil genius” syndrome). Really fun read.
I’m reminded of an early episode of This American Life: Flying is for people who want to let it all hang out. Invisibility is for fearful, crouching masturbators.
@33 – basically, Taravangian in Stormliight?
One of my favorite immorality stories is Sanderson’s Elantris. The big problem in that case was that not only did immorality not include invulnerability, it cost you all of your natural healing powers. Hope you don’t stub your toe into something… forever…
A reasonable freeform shape-shifting power should theoretically also handle most healing and aging issues. As an all-around go-to, it would be hard to beat.
A lot of despots and dictators would agree with you, RJ – immorality is a superpower (well, sort of). ;)
“Always on” telepathy, and king Midas, are just instances of “many powers suck if you can’t control them”, as is Rogue’s automatic absorbing power. Allow the bearer to turn them off, like closing your eyes or making a fist, and they become awesome. (There are possible bad outcomes, but you can hurt yourself running, not to mention driving, too. It’s very hard for bad outcomes to be impossible, so that’s a bad criterion.)
Likewise, the alleged horror of being an indestructible immortal who is the last person in the universe goes away if you can turn it off and die.
(The Rogue I first met, in Dazzler comics, had a pretty cool powerset, stolen from Miss Marvel or someone. And while lack of direct skin contact is frustrating, it’s not like she would have to be deprived of hugs or even sexual activity.)
@32:
I agree with that.
As I recall, they had a cultural norm that non-consensual thought/memory reading was wrong
I’ve always thought that phasing abilities are kind of dangerous in terms of the normal operation of physics. It seems very convenient that things like Newton’s laws of motion don’t seem to apply to characters that can phase. Like, does the mass change? If so, how does that work with momentum? Is it conserved? Could the coriolis effect, the orbit of the earth and the orbit of the solar system through the galaxy mean that the first time you phase and lose friction with everything around you, it just ends up with you zipping through the planet at breakneck speed or being flung into space on a seemingly random resultant?
Maybe Kitty Pryde has Lockheed around to tow her back to the planet when it all goes wrong!
When I was a kid, I enjoyed James H. Schmitz’s tales of telepath Telzey Amberdon. But a few years ago, I read all of them back to back within the span of a week, and realized that life with all those nifty powers was actually pretty grim and lonely.
Always on super speed would suck, but I think nowadays speedsters in various media have the ability to go in and out of super speed. But being stuck in that state? Probably the worst existence ever. All alone in a world full of people.
There was a version of superspeed even worse than always on, which appeared in a comic from a minor company I don’t remember the name of anymore. Guy had super fast perception but everything else was normal speed. Tried to be a superhero, got to watch the bullet that was going to kill him crawl towards him at snail speed. Without, of course, being able to get out of the way.
Being able to understand aminal sounds as speech might make the outdoors less enjoyable, with all of those pleasant sounds translated into animals yelling at each other things like “Get off my property!” or “Mate with me!” or “I’m the most macho man in town!” or “Feed me, Mom!” or “Where’s my child?” I hate hearing humans fight and scream at each other, but I’m happy to hear birds, frogs, or insects do so all day and night.
(Terry Pratchett has written about this, naturally.)
@43 – You’re right; that is worse. Though I imagine if he was watching the trigger being pulled he could still dodge. It’s the old Remo Williams trick; instead of hearing the finger tendons squeeze, he could just look for it.
Dude. Precognition. Knowing what will happen and not being able to do a damn thing about it — Dream Girl of the LSH, or, of course, the grandmother of them all, Cassandra from Troy.
@20, James, you are the definition of the Darwin Awards’ Endangered Survivor classification. The fact that you are still alive is prima facie evidence of some kind of superpower!
As I’ve mentioned before I have been irradiated, injected with strange chemicals and radioactive isotopes without gaining any superpowers. However if I got my choice I’d pick force fields. Though I admit to a fancy for prehensile hair too.
Having had a couple of experiences of knowing – involuntarily – what someone else was thinking on a particular subject – I’m going to nope out of telepathy as something to want. (It’s scary. And annoying.)
@30: “There was that old, probably Marvel pre Marvel comic where the guy got to have the life span of a giant redwood tree. And the mobility. This is a one off case as far as I know, it isn’t Groot’s origin.”
Some of the older “pre-Marvel Marvel” horror/sci-fi/supernatural stories read like a kind of dry run for later costumed superheroes. I remember an old comic where a scientist developed a super-speed serum, and, iirc, used it for selfish deeds, gloating at his advantage over the “motionless” normal people around him. Until he realized that all the energy used by that super-speed wasn’t free, and that he had aged himself into a weak, white-haired old man in a matter of weeks. (I guess when you’re gloating that hard, you don’t have time to look in a mirror very often.)
The cursed side of invulnerability was explored in John Byrne’s Next Men wherein the character who had it gradually lost the ability perceive tactile sensations and, by extension, became apathetic as she also lost the ability to experience anything emotionally as well. The comic also presented the practical problems that came with invulnerability like being unable to trim your fingernails, toenails and even your hair, as they continue to grow unabated. Also, being the hardest thing around could lead to the injuring of other people when you accidentally bump into their more squishier parts.
Anything that involves multiple bodies / personalities is probably best avoided. At one end you’ve got basic shape changers which probably isn’t too bad if you can change back 100% without any risk of retaining those awkward lizard talons or whatever in your secret identity. Moving on some you’ve got e.g. The Hulk where smashing Harlem a bit is one of the risks of using your power. And at the extreme end you’ve got Kid Miracleman, psychotic god (more or less), who basically had to be killed when he briefly returned to his (innocent) secret identity because Kid Miracleman had just turned London into a huge torture garden and killed several million people.
There’s a manga about a socially awkward girl whose embarrassing physical condition is that when stressed, she turns into a kaiju. This presents challenges for her dating life. So, basically the Hulk as a Japanese high school rom com. She does have the advantage few people are going to connect a building-tall monster with an unremarkable school girl,
For a great read about teletpathy, try to find Alfred Bestar’s The Demolished Man. A future society that is divided depending on one’s ESPER ratings, and one’s attempt to commit the perfect murder in such a society.
I remember reading x-men series which was kind of anthology series with multiple short stories per issue all about random mutants and situations x-men dealt with in everyday life called “unlimited”. And there was a mutant who had produce flames but wasn’t immune to flame so he got horrifically burned everytime he used his power (also My Hero Academia villain), there was a mutant who can produce explosions and blew himself up, and so on. Besides comics there is a plethora of works about super powers with major side effect of not being immune to own powers
For an interesting examination of the problems of super intelligence I like Tatja Grimm’s World by Vernor Vinge
That Alan Moore line is amazing, and comes from a scene where he tosses off one-sentence characterizations of DC superheroes each of which was better than any that had ever been done before. It’s not even the main point of the comic—it’s just a toss off. The man is a bloody genius.
Smarter than the rest of us… gets frustrated with others’ misunderstanding him… hmm… Do you think,,,?
Family Guy did a hilarious cut-away in which the police were trying to figure out how Lois Lane could have died. Poor taste? Yes. Funny? Also yes.
The problem with shape changing is conservation of mass. An 80 kilo human changing into a dog would still have to mass 80 kilos! One heavy dog since the density would be so great. Trying to be an eagle would probably make your mass to heavy to fly.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the old Mandrake The Magician comics. His power of creating seemingly real illusions in others or groups allowing him time to remove himself from danger or subdue bad guys seems handy.
In the Bobiverse (Dennis E. Taylor’s series starting with “We Are Legion (We Are Bob)”, the Bobs started referring to humans as “ephemerals” as a way to differentiate their machine existence from the temporal nature of meat-life. Since the story is told from the perspectives of the electronic clones of one Robert “Bob” Johansson, with his brain pattern recreated in Von Neumann probes — essentially ageless, and able to replicate themselves so long as resources remain in the universe — the question of how to interact with humanity is one that’s explored throughout the novels.
When I was in junior high my parents gave me a subscription to Fantasy and Science Fiction. I remember a Philip Jose Farmer short story about a telepath who couldn’t turn it off and the horror of being exposed to everyone around’s interior monologue constantly.
@57: I guess none of the members of Quahog’s police department had read Niven’s essay “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” that lists some of the issues that Clark Kent, Superboy, and Superman would have faced during puberty and when or if he wanted to have a sexual relationship with a woman. It’s linked from the Wikipedia entry for that essay.
Depending on how it’s handled teleportation could also prove problematic. I seem to remember Nightcrawler expressing some hesitation to bamf / teleport somewhere he couldn’t see lest he teleport into a solid object. There’s also the questions of conservation of momentum and of energy, taking into account the motion of the Earth around the Sun and the Sun around the galactic center, etc.
I’ve always thought healing would be a cool power, allowing you to make a real difference in the world . . . except, what would your ethical obligations be? Do you now have to spend all day, every day at a hospital healing people? If your power has limited uses per day or similar, how do you decide who gets healed first? Plus, there’s the danger that a powerful person might try to kidnap you and keep you in case they need on-the-spot healing.
With respect to telepathy and other PK, maybe an upside was shown in Zenna Henderson’s Pilgrimage and her other books about The People. And then another downside of TP in Spider Robinson’s Very Bad Deaths and follow-up. I still think teleportation would be neat, as long as I could bring my clothes…
I always wonder about the metabolistic needs of people with super-speed. I know I’ve seen comics wherein the Flash eats a bunch of cheeseburgers or whatever, and that’s kind of funny because it seems like the super-speed raises his metabolism, but not outside of human limits? “I can eat whatever I want and not gain weight” seems like a nice perk of super-speed, but if you actually had to eat enough calories to fuel all of your activity . . . well, I guess you’d just be constantly eating? Which would be pretty funny, if a speedster superhero was eating during every battle and every time they used their super-speed, just so they wouldn’t run out of gas and collapse. Could get expensive, though! But I bet you could get some sponsorships from snack food companies. :P
One of the most common powers is super-strength. How do you live a normal life when everyone and everything around you might as well be made of paper?
In the Champions superhero roleplaying game, many powers use up the characters endurance: run out of END, and either stop doing what you are doing or pass out from over-exertion in fairly short order. A friend’s homegrown campaign for Champions had a mass empowering event [1]. The END mechanic provided a way to distinguish between two kinds of super-strength types: full END costs meant the newly superstrong had accurate feedback about the force they were exerting. Characters with reduced END costs did not. The strong guy with reduced END trashed his clothes and apartment on the first day with powers, and later yanked someone out of their car without noticing the resistance of the seat belt the fellow was wearing.
1 I am sorry to say I’ve long lost the protocols we came up with to test abilities without killing people in the process.
It may interest readers to know that pretty much the first thing player characters (all Canadian) did on discovering they had powers beyond mortal ken was to work out how to monetize them.
“I am convinced the main difference between the Legion of Superheroes members Sun Boy and Wildfire is that Sun Boy had the ability to power up without instant incineration while poor Wildfire did not.”
Then, sadly, you have not read enough of the LSH and should read more.
Sun Boy is a human who has the power to project heat and light. Wildfire is a human who was transformed into a being of Anti-Matter (or anti-matter energy, since e=mc2) while retaining his consciousness. He (plus or minus a retcon or two) requires a containment suit, and can project that energy in a variety of forms, beyond heat or light.
(signed) lifelong fan of the LSH.
I don’t mean while using their powers. I mean at the moment of their respective origins, Sun Boy’s body sailed through becoming a channel for awesome energies whereas Wildfire’s did not. In fact, Wildfire once possessed Sun Boy’s corpse without said corpse disintegrating as did Wildfire’s original body so I think it’s reasonable to suppose Sun Boy just had more innate resistance to the destructive effects of energy-based superpowers than Wildfire.
Of course, Wildfire got abilities Sun Boy did not, like intangibility and invisibility if he was not in the suit, and involuntarily burning his girlfriend any time they tried to have sex.
Full disclosure: I kind of noped out of the Legion sometime around when they blew up the Earth.
@64: Yeah. Constantly eating would be logistically improbable for a superhero, but I don’t know how it would be biologically possible for anyone.
Vernor Vinge also did a book on teleportation, _The Witling_.
@56: what scene, what comic?
@52. I think that manga is just out as an animation movie.
I think the speed thing is, as usual for powers, partly a matter of control and ability to turn it off. For most I don’t think it’s really a problem–speedsters never seem to have any trouble having a conversation or, in general, functioning some of the time at typical people-speed. So that leaves mostly just upside. But also, I think it’s partly a matter of perspective, of attitude (actually, I think that’s true of the immortality angle of indestructibility, and of heightened intelligence as well).
Sure, the speedster moves fast, but to them time passes normally. All right, so? Time passes normally to me, too. It’s a question of how you want to pass it. Everything else seems to go slow . . .which can seem like a bad thing, or an opportunity to find out and experience masses of stuff you could never see otherwise. Or something to ignore while you read a book. A speedster has to pay the same amount of rent as anyone else, and for whatever reason they never seem to need ten thousand people’s worth of food. For a speedster, making a living should take up a tiny proportion of their time. Most of their life can be leisure, so the question becomes can you handle your leisure? If you can, it could be great, especially since a lot of the least productive kinds of leisure are kind of pointless for a speedster (eg watching TV, video games).
The “Absorbing Man” thing is just a matter of wearing gloves and carrying a utility belt with various handy materials ready for touching.
But the Absorbing Man would be touching his own gloves…
(There’s a very boring What If about him having so little control to start that he transforms to air and disperses. Won’t kill him, though)
@64 & 70, there’s a bigger issue the comics never addressed in regards to that. Where does all the food GO? It’s not simply being converted in to energy. If the speedster’s metabolism is sped up and they’re consuming food at, let’s say, 10x normal speed the remainders still have to come OUT. Also at super speed. The phrase “… through a goose” comes to mind.
@27, X-Bomb Betty’s powers were artificially induced, not natural. Her scientist father created them as an experiment & he knew what they would do.
I’ve always though that Swift got the drawback of immortality right in “Gulliver’s Travels” (but you have to have read the original, not a kiddied-down version), being a Struldbrug is not a good thing.
Eos, the Goddess of Dawn, abducted Tithonus, a prince of Troy. She gave her human lover the gift of eternal life—but not eternal youth.
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
[Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Tithonus, 1833]
Another note of horror for telepaths–people play music in their heads all the time, but often do it very poorly since they don’t always remember all the words or the notes. Think about listening to BTS’ “Butter” on infinite repeat when they can only remember about five notes worth of it, but keep on doing so.
#63,
Wasn’t there a Spider Robinson book where people becoming super-sensitive to odor kept them safe from also being telepathic?
Please see “Blessed With Suck”. If your example above is not listed, please add it!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlessedWithSuck
@43/45,
If you had that super-speed perception from birth, rather than gaining it through some mechanism while an adult, would you even realise you had it? In that case I don’t see why you would even try to be a superhero.
The one thing you COULD do with that ability is excel in many sports. Think about the mechanics of a baseball swing, for example, where being able to micro-adjust would boost your safe-hitting percentage without any physical speed change involved.
In fact, I’ve sometimes wondered if that very factor is what leads to sporting genius (as distinct from mere superiority) in areas not dependent on purely physical attributes. There have been stories from top sportspeople saying that at critical moments things just seemed to slow down for them . . .
@80: In Robinson’s Telempath, civilization is destroyed when an engineered virus increases people’s sensitivity to odor (but I don’t think there’s any telepathy as such in the book) – in his “Very Bad Deaths” a telepath who can’t turn off his power deliberately cultivates a bad odor to keep people as far away from himself as possible.
I’m surprised that no one’s mentioned either A Song for Lya or And Chaos Died with respect to issues with telepathy.
The DC Wikia refers to Flash-type speedsters (as opposed to people like Superman and Wonder Woman who just “brute force” their speed) as “Speed Force conduits,” as their power isn’t innate, but channeled from a fundamental force of the universe.
I tend to imagine it as being like a “faucet” that speedsters can turn off (normal speed) or turn to a trickle (to outrun a car) or a torrent (to run around the Earth in a minute) or turn fully open (to run through time) depending on training (Barry famously has to learn how to run faster, and Max Mercury has spent subjective decades becoming the Zen Master of Speed).
The established drawback to this is that if you open yourself too much, you can start skipping through time like a stone on a lake (which happened to Max), or lose yourself and become one with the Speed Force (which is how Barry and Wally “died” in their respective Crises [“on Infinite Earths” and “Infinite,” respectively]). There’s also the risk that something could interfere (worryingly frequently) with the Speed Force, leaving the speedsters powerless (like a cosmic water-main break).
Yeah, the 5 Years Later Legion got kinda grim, and not to everyone’s taste. But it also gave us the SW6 group, so it wasn’t all bad. I kinda liked 5YL myself, but I didn’t get hold of it until much later, which probably made quite a difference.
If you haven’t read the Reboot and especially Threeboot Legion, then IMHO, you have some great reading available. I especially liked how neither run was afraid of having different relationships or even very different takes on core characters. The Reboot also introduced several completely original members of the Legion such as XS, Kinetix, Shikari, Monstress and Gear.
Sadly, the same can NOT be said of either the Nu52 Legion, nor the latest brief attempt, which only lasted 12 issues before being canned. ‘Tis a real shame, I had high hopes for Bendis’s run, but from what I hear, he just wasn’t given much of a chance or freedom from editorial meddling. Plus a hefty dose of “It’s Superboy!, oh, and some others too.”
I’d really like to see a good 5+ year run of the Legion where the House of El wasn’t shoved in our face repeatedly. Though the Reboot Legion handled that very well too, instead making M’Onel the Superman analogue and the fellow Daxamite Andromeda was a very interesting take on/replacement for Supergirl. Even the appearances of Kon El/the 90s Superboy wasn’t annoying, mostly because, like Andromeda/Laurel Gand, he was very far from infallible, but kept trying anyway.
I’ve gotta say, it’s great to see so many comments after my own heart, with multiple mentions of The Ballad of Barry Allen by Jim’s Big Ego, and even a fellow fan of Soon I Will Be Invincible.
@58: If you’re going to allow superpowers at all, handwaving mass is trivial by comparison. (Push it into hyperspace, maybe?) OTOH, some authors have allowed for mass conservation, with varying results. Lieber had bowls of protoplasm discarded when humans shapeshifted to smaller forms and absorbed when they shifted back (yuck! also, limiting). (IIRC, one of the shifters was Mouser’s sometime-girlfriend Hisvet sur Hisvin, but I don’t remember specific stories.) Poul Anderson had an unbelievably small person as a were-fox, and a were-tiger whose human form was so obese he could barely move. (Both of these in “Operation Afreet”, later the first part of Operation Chaos. Anderson majored in physics; a lot of his magic tended to be … mechanistic.)
wrt speedsters: The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything isn’t exactly a superpower story (the gold watch is a Device) but has obvious parallels. As soon as the lead realizes that the device radically slows down time he remembers that the uncle he’d inherited it from seemed to age unusually rapidly — not as fast as progeria, but looking old earlier than expected.
Heinlein was relatively realistic about learning to use induced permanent ~superpowers; Friday mentions here and there how she had to learn to pick up things without crushing them, and eat without moving so quickly she stabbed herself.
@86. jaydzed: I tried the latest Legion reboot and dropped out early. At this point, Bendis is synonymous with verbose for me. In a visual medium, his characters just talk too damn much. I’m also a huge Dr. Fate fan and it didn’t help that they featured the cool looking multi-armed alien Fate on the covers, but he/she/neither? would not appear in that issue, or only show up in the background.
@66. James: the most hilarious limitation on a travel power for me was in the MMO Aion: your flight power was on a timer (initially very short, barely getting you off the ground), so the player had to find a safe spot to land or risk going splat. Even funnier, there was a game show style buzzer that would go off when the timer expired: loud bzzzt, “you’re dead.”
On flame manipulation powers:
Most of them, like “fire” from the justice league, have a form of elemental flame. This is a form of magics, which in both dc comics an Marvel, is a higher form of science, that we don’t yet comprehend.
They can make the flame intangible to others, and other objects at will.
Note: that starfire and Firestorm never actually had flame manipulation in comic’s. Starfire converted solar energy into starbolts, and Firestorm could transform non living matter into other types of non living matter.
On superseded, all flash family members live in real time. The can choose to live an speak in flash time. So no, they don’t experience things the way you suggest. They have the ability to but often choose not to for the reasons you mentioned.
As for most powers having a drawback, several independent companies have had their characters have different or almost no drawbacks to their powers to legally and morally differentiate their characters from Marvel and dc comics.
In science, several insects and other mammals, can do things that seem super powered, that have zero drawbacks, as every power they have, atomicly has a power to negate any side effects, or drawback that power would otherwise have accompany it.
@89 Bart Allen was often shown to experience time out of sync with the rest of the world. It usually wasn’t “a gallery of statues” level but it could be very unpleasant. I don’t think the comics ever get into the weeds of how perceiving and reacting to the world at super speed works which is understandable but annoying. The exact power levels of speedsters depends on the details of how they cheat things like reaction time and reflexes.
Indestructibility wouldn’t bother me, the fact that I would out live everyone else would just be part of life. As for the rest I believe they would be worth it
On the basis that work always expands to fill the time available, super speed would, I think, absolutely not make one more efficient, just more efficiently burnt out.
James @40: The thing that bothers me about “phasing” powers is that they’re almost always shown such that floors are impermeable but everything else isn’t, even for characters who aren’t supposed to have that degree of control. There was that episode of ST:TNG in which LaForge and Ro got zapped to be interphasic (metaphasic? telophasic?) and were walking through the walls, equipment, and colleagues, but the decks were apparently solid (and had proper gravity). I don’t think the issue of their going from one deck to another was ever shown.
X-Bomb Betty isn’t in the Legion Reserve?
You never know; you might need an explosion that large someday.
@43 – I remember that, funnily enough. It was from an issue of the long gone, mostly forgotten Hero Alliance, published by Innovation Comics. Poor guy didn’t have the physical reflexes to go with his superspeed perception.
I’ve always thought superspeed would be a nightmare. Sure, you can run across the country in a split second, but how long is that to -you-? At what speed does a speedster’s brain and reflexes operate? Because if you’re functioning at even something resembling normal speed (relatively speaking), the task that takes one real world second to accomplish might take you minutes, hours, even longer…
“Hey Flash, please run to Los Angeles from New York for us.”
“No problem, that’s just a few months, subjectively speaking…”
On indestructibility/immortality, while I sometimes think that it would be nice to see how everything turns out, my fear is that I’d just end up in a little bubble of 70-odd years moving toward through time, without the broader, centuries-long perspective I would hope to have. When I think of everything I used to know: the names and faces, the things I could recite rote, that I’ve now forgotten, and this is just 40-odd years later, I fear that immortality would be wasted on my puny human brain.