CraveOnline: The synopsis for Big Egos sounded very interesting for film lovers. Can you describe it in your own words?
S.G. Browne: Sure, it’s hard to do it. Breathers I can say is Fight Club meets Shaun of the Dead only with the zombies as the good guys. I don’t have a tagline for Big Egos so much. This was actually based on a short story I wrote too way back when called Designer Brains. Then it became If I Only Had a Brain and I actually wrote a new version of it in my short story collection called My Ego is Bigger Than Yours.
The idea is playing with the idea of role-playing. You go back to Dungeons & Dragons and live-action role playing where people would dress up and go out somewhere, even if it was re-enacting Civil War battles but it was live-action role playing. Then you go to stuff like World of Warcraft and Skyrim and all the online avatars in the role-playing. I thought about taking it to the next level whereas instead of something else being the platform and a virtual reality thing, instead of virtual reality goggles where you’re using that as the platform, you’re the platform. You actually take a consumer product, you either inject it into your brainstem or you can take it by mixing it with food or water, and you become a dead celebrity or fictional character for six to eight hours, a specific one.
So you’re taking a DNA laced cocktail of amino acids, potassium, serotonin and all these different things that have actually been biologically engineered to become this person or character. There’s a little bit of morphing that goes on, you can buy accessory packs for it but other people see you as this person. You believe you are this person, so you’re actually taking that role-playing to the next level.
The underlying idea of the story is what happens to your identity when you’re constantly pretending to be somebody else? It plays on a larger level in that you have all these people who think their lives would be better if they were somebody else, or people who pretend to be somebody they’re not, even just out in public on a daily basis. Who are you really? Because if you’re a teacher, when you’re teaching your kids or out drinking or dancing or playing poker with your buddies, you’re not always the same person. So what person is actually you? What’s your real identity?
The idea is if you continue to pretend to be somebody you’re not, your identity of who you really are eventually gets lost, so that’s what happens to my main character in Big Egos. He is constantly pretending to be somebody else because he’s actually happier when he’s somebody else because he hasn’t been able to figure out who he is. He just starts to lose control of his own identity as the story progresses.
What celebrities are name-dropped in Big Egos?
A lot. There are actually seven chapters, it’s a first person point of view anyway, but it’s written from the perspective of that character. You’ve got Elvis Presley, Phillip Marlowe, James Bond, Captain Kirk, Holden Caulfield, Jim Morrison and Philip K. Dick.
So more fictional characters than real celebrities?
They have to be dead celebrities because you cannot get the licensing rights to a live celebrity and you actually have to get the licensing rights to these fictional characters or dead celebrities from their estates in order for the company to be able to make them. Then there’s black market egos and the black market egos actually can produce egos that are not licensed or are of characters that are unsavory. If you did the John Wayne Gacy or the Adolf Hitler or the Hannibal Lecter, those are not available by the regular product line because those would not be egos you would want people to be. On the black market you can get those egos.
At all of these parties, Elvis is at a 1970s party so there are all these people from the ‘70s that are dead: Sonny Bono, Andy Kaufman, Richard Pryor, Liberace, Farrah Fawcett. and a bunch of others. Joey Ramone and Sid Vicious are there. There’s a lot of pop culture references in there because all these people are pretending to be other people that they would rather be or they would like to be to experience what it would be like to be Jim Morrison or Elvis Presley or William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway or Holden Caulfield or Captain Kirk or Picard or Han Solo or Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia or Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Johnny Carson. It’s whoever you want to be so long as it is, again, an ego that is licensed and approved.
And when you’re in character, people just greet you as, “Hi, Elvis?”
Yeah, yeah.
Even when there’s 10 Elvises in the same room?
There could be. In mine I don’t have multiples.
That would make showing up in the same dress even more awkward.
Yes, it would be. Showing up in the same ego. I do have a couple of instances where the same ego is there. Two women who are both Meryl Streep are arguing with each other and things like that, but I have a lot of fun juxtaposing fictional and celebrity characters together. I have a party with authors and they’re all doing certain things and fictional characters. It was a lot of fun to do that and play with it. Hopefully the pop culture references won’t overwhelm people.
Would Hollywood ever touch Big Egos as a movie? I can’t imagine the rights issues it would take to adapt.
I don’t know. I don’t know what rights issues they would have. Legally, for the book purposes, they went through it with a legal fine-toothed comb at my publisher to make sure there weren’t any issues. There were a couple minor things I had to change but otherwise everything was okay. A lot of it has to do with because it’s parody and satire. I have a chapter where he’s Holden Caulfield and he’s writing in the voice of Holden Caulfield, so he sounds like Holden Caulfield and it’s a chapter with Holden Caulfield at a party seeing all of these other characters.
Calling everyone phonies?
Yeah, calling everyone phonies and using his language.
Did you lose any celebrity names through the legal process?
No, I just had to change some things that were in there because the celebrities that were ideal to have in there wouldn’t work because they’re still alive. Even though it’s set in the future a little bit, it’s only set about 10 years in the future. I thought, well, this person might be dead but there’s no guarantee that they will be so I can’t. I needed to have it so that it made sense for now in terms of the celebrities.
What is your superhero book about?
It’s actually based on a short story as well in my collection called Dr. Lullaby. It’s about professional guinea pigs who test phase one clinical trial pharmaceutical drugs. There are professional guinea pigs who do that. They make their living at that. Robert Rodriguez financed El Mariachi by doing clinical tests, so these guys do it for years and they make their living doing that and they all live in Manhattan. I got the idea for this based on that and also from years ago watching all the TV commercials where you’d get 30 seconds of how wonderful this drug is an then a minute and a half of “may cause sterility, may cause vomiting, may cause death, may cause diarrhea, may cause blindness. For those of you have high blood pressure, it may cause stroke or heart attack.” They’re just saying it in these nice voices and it’s like wow, really. I’ve had some personal experience, not me personally, but with people’s reaction to drugs.
This is actually sort of a commentary on how dependent we’ve become and how abundant the use of pharmaceutical drugs has become, so my main character starts to develop unique side effects from these drugs. Some of them very common side effects but what those side effects actually cause them to do, they become these pharmaceutical guinea pig side effect superheroes who are able to project their side effects onto other people.
Do they become heroes because of it?
Some of them do. They’re a little bit antiheroes too so there’s that thing of if you have the ability to do something, would you use it for good or bad? Some are using it for bad, some are using it for good so it becomes a little bit of a struggle in there. With this book, I’m tying it a bit into the concepts that I brought up in Fated about fate and destiny but from the perspective of human beings as opposed to the entities that are in charge of your fate and destiny.
When are you going to be finished with it?
Hopefully soon. I’m looking at mid-August is when I’d like to have it done. It would publish sometime next year but I hoped to have it done before I came to Comic-Con and that didn’t happen.
What’s the title of the superhero book?
It’s called Super Duper.
What are some of the side effect powers?
Well, there’s vomiting, may cause vomiting, may cause rapid weight gain.
Vomiting becomes a super power?
Yes. Hallucinations. Memory loss.
So they can give other people hallucinations and take away their memory?
Absolutely. Then they get dubbed names by The Daily Post and the New York Daily News. They become specific superheroes or antiheroes based on what the press is naming them.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
