How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain

by Ryan North

A tongue-in-cheek introduction to the science of comic-book supervillainy, revealing the true potential of today's most advanced technologies

Taking over the world is a lot of work. Any supervillain is bound to have questions: What's the perfect location for a floating secret base? What zany heist will fund my immoral plans? How do I control the weather, destroy the internet, and never, ever die?

In How to Take Over the World, bestselling author and award-winning comics writer Ryan North details a number of outlandish villainous schemes, drawing on known science and real-world technologies. Picking up where How to Invent Everything left off, his explanations are as fun and informative as they are completely absurd.

As he instructs readers on how to take over the world, North also reveals how we can save it. This sly guide to some of the greatest challenges and existential threats facing humanity accessibly explores ways to mitigate climate change, improve human life spans, prevent cyberterrorism, and finally make Jurassic Park a reality.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Humor, Audiobook, Comedy, Technology, Politics

388 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2022

About the author

Hi, I'm Ryan! I was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in 1980 and since then have written several books. You can read my Wikipedia page for more, or check out my author site at RyanNorth.ca!

I'm the author of the webcomic Dinosaur Comics (that's the comic where the pictures don't change but the words do, it's better than it sounds and I've also done crazy things like turn Shakespeare into a choose-your-own-path adventure, write a comic for Marvel about a girl with all the powers of a squirrel, or mess up walking my dog so badly it made the news.

I'm working on more stuff as we speak, hopefully it's good

Reviews

[Emily (Books with Emily Fox on Youtube) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taking notes in case this YouTube thing doesn't work out.

[Ryan North · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hey, I wrote this! But I honestly think it's PRETTY GREAT. I hope you do too!

The book's a fun and funny deep dive into science and technology and history, all viewed through the lens of "wait, what if you really did want to pull off classic supervillain schemes here in the real world?" What do you actually need to build a floating base, and what kind of research is needed to clone dinosaurs to ride around on? What sort of technology lets you dig to the Earth's core to hold it hostage? And while we're at it, how close are we to curing death and living forever anyway?

Like How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, the fictional premise of world domination is used to motivate learning about all this really cool science and technology, and yes it's full of jokes and great illustrations, but it's also a sincere book that's doing what it says on the cover: the plots are real, priced out, and all you need now is $55,485,551,900 USD to pull off every one of them (but don't worry: there's a heist included that turns an initial investment into an ongoing source of income too.)

I hope you have fun with it!

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Ryan North's sense of humor, and I like the wide variety of wacky facts in this book. Some chapters were better than others. The climate change chapter didn't have much new info for me. Same for the chapter on the internet, and trying to explain Reflections on Trusting Trust to non-programmers seems like a bad idea. I didn't love the mocking tone toward all forms of life extension research, but that chapter did have cool facts in it. Probably my favorite chapter was the first, about how much land it takes to completely sustain a group of people with no outside help.

[Cav · Rating 2 out of 5]

"A supervillain is normally considered the bad guy. I should know, I’ve written enough of them..."

How to Take Over the World sounded like a fun change from some of the books I typically read, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Unfortunately, instead of enjoying a light-hearted book, much of the writing managed to thoroughly irritate the shit out of me. More below.

Author Ryan North is a Canadian writer and computer programmer. He is the creator and author of Dinosaur Comics, and has written for the comic series of Adventure Time and Marvel Comics' The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

Ryan North :


The audio version I have was read by the author. I normally appreciate it when authors read their own books, but I found this author's voice to be particularly grating and annoying. He also tried to make his presentation funny and whimsical by employing a light-hearted flippant style. This can be very difficult to pull off effectively, and unfortunately (again), I felt the overall style just didn't work here...

The quote from the start of this review continues:

"But what’s uncommon knowledge is that if you take that universal law of storytelling and combine it with the fact that Marvel and DC are owned by the Walt Disney Company and AT&T’s Warner Media LLC, respectively, then you uncover a terrifying truth. Two of the most powerful multinational corporations on the planet have spent decades, in plain sight, paying some of the most creative people alive today to design increasingly credible world-domination schemes—and these schemes have been thwarted only by chance, by circumstance, by the pins we writers have carefully inserted into our own grenades. Once you understand that, it doesn’t take much to wonder: What if the supervillain didn’t have to lose? What if the heroes faced a scheme so clever and bold and audacious and unprecedented that it could never be predicted, much less foiled? And if a supervillain could do that in fiction, what’s to stop someone else from doing it in real life? That was the origin of this book: that moment when I realized that not only have I spent years working on ways to take over the world, but thanks to my background in science[*] . . .
. . . I’ve actually figured it out.
And unlike most supervillains, I’m more than happy to share."

As touched on briefly above, the author tries to make the book funny and engaging. He narrates the audio in a very exaggerated style for added emphasis. He also uses many different voice affectations and other unnecessary and annoying literary accouterments. While being mildly amusing for the first ~10 mins, it gradually became incredibly grating and obnoxious as the book went on.

There were also a bunch of back-and-forth exchanges and other hypertexts interspliced into the writing here, with similarly frustrating results.

Further, there was a huge chunk of writing about climate change that managed to be both poorly done, as well as mindless fear-mongering nonsense. When breaching the topic, he formats the writing into the above-mentioned hypothetical back-and-forth social media exchange between humanity, plants, and other participants. This was passed the point of obnoxious and almost made me put the book down. Did his editors not tell him how annoying this is?? They should have.

He also says this, during the hypothetical back-and forth between humanity and plants, when the "plants" are complaining about rising CO2 levels: "...if u don’t do anything a significant portion of them (people) are going to die as the areas they live in become inhospitable to human life." LOL. Imagine actually believing this... People are problem-solving, adaptable creatures. Problems arise, and then solutions are found. If some areas become inhospitable, people don't just sit there and die. They move. The history of humanity on Earth is in fact the global movement of people, to gradually encompass the entire Earth.

Also, in case no one pointed this out to him, plants actually thrive on CO2. CO2 is literal plant fertilizer. More CO2 = more plants. The increase of CO2 in the last few hundred years has resulted in a dramatic greening of the Earth. Why would his hypothetical "plants" not like increased CO2 levels? What a moron...

He goes on to say that to fix this problem, all we need to do, is stop burning fossil fuels:

"We’re addicted to the cheapness and convenience of fossil fuels, and even after we’ve invented and invested in renewable fuel sources like solar, hydroelectric, and wind power, those are often used to supplement our ever increasing desire for power, rather than to fully replace fossil-fuel generation."

~ Civilizations need energy. Developing economies and countries need to use more, not less energy if they are to escape the entropy that conspires to drag them backward into antiquity, and away from modernity. This energy needs to be: 1) cheap, 2) reliable, and 3) scalable. Like it or not, fossil fuels are the only energy source that currently fits that bill. In the future, as fossil fuel stores become lower and their prices gradually become higher due to scarcity, the market will gradually transition away from them; making other sources tenable. Raging at the burning of fossil fuels is a low-IQ take that fails to see all the benefits and prosperity that they bring to humanity on the whole. Virtually everything you touch, look at, or interact with in your modern day-to-day life would not be possible without the usage of fossil fuels. See Alex Epstein's 2014 book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels for a more deep dive.

******************

I was excited to start How to Take Over the World. Unfortunately, the finished product was a frustrating mess. Ironically enough, it sounds like the author has no clue about actual power, realpolitik, or the application of force...
I would not recommend it. I'm not sure how it managed to have such a high aggregate score here.
1.5 stars.

[Enid Wray]

OK. I tried. I really tried. I’ve been plugging away at this for four (4) days now… and I’m still only 50% of the way through it. The universe is sending me a message… I am, finally, prepared to listen.

This is not what I was expecting.. But then again, I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting. Certainly this is no Squirrel Girl… although there are a lot of similarities to Dinosaur Comics… but Dinosaur’s came in small bite sized chunks... This is just too much.

There’s lots to like about this title. It’s an ass-backward guide to saving the planet - pointing out our excesses, and showing us how to address climate change (while we still have a chance, small albeit). He does a good job of pointing out the interesting history of ridiculous behaviour and ideas that has gotten us to where we are in the present moment.

I get that he writes super hero comics… so obviously adopting the concept of ‘Supervillains’ - who by the way, are all of us collectively - as a conceit is only logical. But it is a conceit that wears thin very quickly. The playful jabs at ‘we humans’ are cheeky, yes.

But… Would the book be as good and gain the same kind of traction if it were not couched in ‘comic’ terms? That’s a good question. I get that the ‘villainy’ angle makes what w/could otherwise be a very ‘heavy’ conversation a little more lighthearted and perchance palatable…

But I also appreciate, very quickly, that I am clearly not the reader for this book. This is a moment where I wish I wasn’t retired, and still had purchasing power to make sure that this book ended up on the shelf in my school library. The kids will eat this up… like they did all his other work that I had in the collection. I hope that my replacement already has this on order.

Had this ended at page 150, I probably would have been cool with it (although I’d already taken multiple breaks from it by that point…). But at page 200, with the prospect of 200 more pages to go… I’m done.

Be forewarned though… Even though I am choosing to DNF this title - too much else on my TBR pile - I couldn't keep myself from popping out and googling and reading about all the cool projects he talks about (many of which I’m, sadly, all too familiar with, but many that I’ve never heard of before). There is some really fascinating stuff here… it’s a truly laudable compendium of miscellany. I finally stopped doing that though because it was just too time consuming… prolonging my reading time beyond all reasonableness.

Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for granting me access to an early digital ARC for review.

[Sahitya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of cool facts, things I didn't know at all, so many wacky ideas. This made for a fun listen while doing my chores or when I was bored out of my mind. Definitely don't have enough money to think of implementing any of these ideas though.

[DeAnna Knippling · Rating 5 out of 5]

A funny, complex book about exploring logical extremes.

I am a huge fan of farces, where mistakes pile on top of mistakes until the whole structure collapses. A moment of clarity often emerges at that point; then the characters then usually shake themselves off and proceed to farce again (or get married). There's often something very sweet about a farce--love conquers all, the class clown is really just trying to put a smile on your face, and forgiveness is a grace. But there's also darkness, too; a farce is an improbable situation in which people narrowly escape the full, awful brunt of their mistakes.

"Hahahaha," says the audience. "THAT could never happen. In real life, it would be..."

And then they pause for a moment, thinking briefly of the things that could have happened in a farce, that didn't.

This is a farcical book that takes on things like politics, technology, and death. The sweetness at the core of it goes something like this:

"The truth is, as complicated as our planet now is, there's still room for individuals, acting alone, to change the course of history.*

"*Though it's worth pointing out the examples I gave [...] were all group efforts."

I'm not sure what the genesis of writing this book was, but I wouldn't be surprised if global events of the last couple of years didn't contribute.

An excellent spirit-lifter, a snort-out-loud book. Plus the interior illustration villainess gives Death a noogie.

Highly recommended if you love this kind of comedy, or think of yourself as too intelligent to find any reason to cheer up in this lifetime and you'd like to see someone try.

[Logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 out of 5 stars contingent on the author keeping his promise in Chapter 6 -- I'll be checking.

This was a fun read, and what I enjoyed about the book most was the practicality of it. There were options for world domination that could fit nearly any budget depending on your goals. Secret bases come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and locales after all.

Some of it was sad and/or enraging, depending on your personal ability to accept that humans are causing an environmental collapse that will catastrophically impact the majority of life on the planet (but it's not like the sun isn't going to do the same in billion years or so), as well as the fact that the exponentially widening wealth inequality gap is enabling the ultra-rich to not only live however they want but also dictate how everyone else must live. Those of us not okay with this status-quo must, as dedicated supervillains, figure out a way to reign in this madness and save the world.

But these facts are facts, it's not the author's fault the world is dominated by such an absurd species.

The illustrations are very humorous, the footnotes are fantastic, and overall the book is equal parts history and science lesson, so you'll have a much better understanding of where life's come from and where it's going (which is a future universe filled with black holes until even they collapse and the final effects of entropy rip everything else apart).

{note I received an advanced copy via a Goodreads contest}

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Wait, are there any ethical concerns with telling people how to take over the world? It’s just this seems like the sort of thing that ethicists might describe as “really, really wrong.“ This is a reasonable question, so let's get it out of the way early. Is it truly "unethical" (and "potentially dangerous") to provide detailed instructions for breaking the letter and spirit of local, national, and international laws, enabling readers to take the fate of the planet and everyone living on it into their own hands? I mean... maybe? Expensive, highly trained lawyers and ethicists have said yes, but I already wrote this book and I say no way, so unfortunately, it's impossible to say where the truth lies.”

This book uses real life knowledge, science, and technology that we have today to explore villainous ambitions such as how to start your own country, how to clone dinosaurs, how to control the weather, and how to become immortal. There are a ton of interesting facts about humanity, history, the earth, space, and so much more. I feel like I learned so much - about such a wide range of topics. Among all the facts there was also goofy commentary and fun comics. Plus the cover made for a really fun conversation starter.

[Rick Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just harmless escapism from a fun writer.


Right? Right?


Mwhahahahahahahaha. Fools!

[LAPL Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

In How to Take Over the World, Ryan North, an award winning comics and science writer and computer scientist, provides a primer for those considering supervillainy as a career. He provides step by step instructions, beginning with where to build a secret lair (no matter what you see in movies, television, or comics, do NOT build a lair in an active volcano – North explains why!), potentially villainous schemes to pursue, along with explorations of the existing, or soon to exist, science, including physics, mathematics, biology, history, genetics, along with political science and international law, to make your schemes come true. North also provides cost and time analysis of each pursuit allowing for informed choices to be made before the reader chooses to pursue a life, and career, of evil.

Toward the end of the book, North claims to take readers from being someone who is a “curious reader of funny nonfiction books” to “someone who now knows how to mess with the weather, take over a country, become immortal, and ensure that they’re one of the last things existing in this universe, all while piloting a floating geodesic sphere from the comfort of your dinosaur steed.” Who wouldn’t want to read a book that can accomplish that?

Read an interview with author Ryan North.

Reviewed by: Daryl M., Librarian, West Valley Regional Branch Library

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a lot of fun.

Ryan North (Ottawa boy) provides a wealth of knowledge for the aspiring supervillain. Where should you build your secret base? Is inside an active volcano really the best spot? Should you start your own nation? What is the easiest way to bypass democracy and steal elections? How can solving the climate crisis clear a path to world domination?

I listened to this one and Ryan sounded a bit like Jeff Goldblum, so that was a nice touch. My attention waned a bit near the end when discussing the idea of shooting your dead corpse into space for any other life forms to discover after the eventual heat death of the universe. A good idea, sure, but seemed to be overexplained. Otherwise, I had a great time pocketing schemes.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 The sections on climate change and immortality (or lack thereof) get a little dark naturally, but despite those somewhat depressing parts, this was nearly as fun as North's "How To Invent Everything."

[Ellyn Yost · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5

[Haiden · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5*
My only complaint is that at times my eyes were glazing over the exact specifics of some of the science. Thankfully, North's sense of humour combined with his intelligence and charm is devious and irresistible. I'm glad i took my time with this one, and I will never stop thinking about floating Geodesic-Sphere cities and reverse-engineered dinosaurs.

[Laima · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book for anyone who loves fun facts and random trivia

[Madi Str · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ryan North has created a non-fiction book so funny you barely notice you're learning.

In this work, he talks about new developments, discoveries and inventions of the last few years. Touching on issues such as climate change, the problem of self-sufficiency and being remembered after death, he teaches you concepts in one of the most accesible ways I have ever encountered.

Basically, this is made up as a guide to become a supervillain - but at the end, you will have the knowledge to understand what the world would need to become a better place.

The cartoonish drawings were a huge plus, and I will be looking into chapter 6 regularly.

[Stanley · Rating 4 out of 5]

prakticke a vedecky schodne rady pre zacinajucich zloduchov ako: vybudovat svoju tajnu zakladnu, ako zalozit vlastny stat, ovladat pocasie, klonovat dinosaurov a mnoho ineho
autor si dal namahu konzultovat a dolozit jednotlive casti knihy vedeckymi experimentami ktore uz ludia spravili v minulosti
(mimo ineho v minulosti napisal Adventure Time comix a knizku How to invent everything)

[Kiril Valchev · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Аз Озимандий съм и цар съм над царете!
Делата мои всички със завист погледнете!“
— все още на пиедестала тез слова личат.
Но друго нищо няма. Покрай тая
развалина огромна голи пясъци мълчат,
самотни и безжизнени, се губят във безкрая."
- "Озимандий", Пърси Биш Шели

На вниманието на всички диктатори, тирани, деспоти, автократи и най-обикновени мегаломани, отегчени от баналността на злите си дела и таящи аспирации към нещо по-значимо! " How To Take Over The World ", е книгата за вас. Практично насочен и научно достоверен, това е идеалният наръчник по световно господство за всеки перспективен суперзлодей. Райън Норт се е постарал да раздели книгата на части, според амбициите ви и дадения етап, до който са достигнали пъклените ви планове. От създаването на тайни леговища и собствени държави (в част I-ва: "Супербазово суперзлодейство"), до клонирането на динозаври, контролирането на климата, похищаването на земното ядро, пътуването във времето и заличаването на интернет (част II-ра: "За какво говорим, когато говорим за превземане на света"). Последната, трета, част ("За ненаказаното престъпление никога не се съжалява") е посветена на това, как да осигурите своето безсмъртие - физическото ви или това на вашите дела. Вместо да потънете в забвение сред пясъците на времето, като онзи несретник Озимандий, вие ще си гарантирате вечна слава..., или поне до самия предсмъртен спазъм на Космоса.

П.П. Много напомня на "Какво би станало ако...?" от Рандал Мънро.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a habit of maybe being a bit overzealous with my ratings after finishing a book, but i found this book:
* funny (laughed out loud on numerous occasions)
* tremendously informative
* well written and engaging

So i don't think I'm being overzealous here! I really enjoyed it.

[Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

A worthy follow up to How to Invent Everything, one of my favorite books of all time.

[Rachel Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny, witty, and incredibly informative!

[Joshua Glasgow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I usually try to limit my audiobooks to 6-8 hours’ length at most given that the only time I listen to them is during periods when I’m driving, which, because I telework from home (currently! At least until my employer hits upon mandatory return to office as a way to force its best employees to quit—something that HQ is apparently trying to do, for some reason? This is a whole side conversation that doesn’t really belong in this review, but suffice it to say that leadership at my place of work is very actively, egregiously, and unforgivably mismanaging in an unbelievable way) is relatively infrequent. It can take me several weeks to finish an audiobook and usually anything longer than that 6-8 hour sweet spot will not be finished before the loan period is up. When I’ve chosen a book which is even moderately popular, the result is my inability to finish the book before it gets delivered to somebody else who has it on hold and then I have to wait even longer to finish it, or decide to just give up on it altogether. I nevertheless chose Ryan North’s HOW TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD despite it’s 12+ hour length for two reasons: (1) I anticipated there wasn’t a high likelihood I would be interrupted by somebody else putting it on hold during my listen, and (2) I am a big fan of Ryan North, particularly from his ‘Dinosaur Comics’ and his run of SQUIRREL GIRL for Marvel, and so my feeling was that despite the extra length this was likely something that would keep me entertained and eager to push through.

That was, generally, my feeling upon listening to the book! It’s nice when your expectations are met, isn’t it? I didn’t take down any notes to refer to when writing this—I often fail to take notes when listening to audiobooks for the aforementioned reason that I’m driving when I listen to them. Aside from my inherent wordiness, I feel this will likely be a short review.

In fact, most of the schemes detailed in the book don’t necessarily seem geared toward taking over the world, per se; for example, the last chapter (or several chapters? I’m a little unclear on this) are about ways to successfully send a message to the future, be it 100, 1000, 1 million, or 1 trillion years. The first couple of chapters are about what is necessary to create a supervillain lair and how to go about becoming the leader of one’s own country. Though both of these are no doubt helpful lessons for the sake of villainy, that thesis mostly falls by the wayside in favor of just marveling over all of the conditions that must be met and the obstacles that must be overcome to put such a plan into action. Which is fine, of course – North takes each of his schemes very seriously. He’s obviously done a ton of research and has a lot to say. It was enjoyable listening to the audiobook because you can hear the amusement in North’s voice throughout.

. . .Yeah, that might be all I have to say. Sorry, me in the future—I know this is a disappointment to you, but me in the past had little to say and was tired of writing this! I’m sure you of all people can understand that. In short, though, the book was good. I’ll admit I grew a little bit weary of it as I got closer to the 12-hour mark, but mostly it was fun. The end!

[AHCuteArt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why did you read this book?
This is the SFF book club chosen book of this month.

What format did you read this book in?
Listened to the audiobook on Audible.

Is this an educational book or a book for entertainment?
This book was an educational read but the book turned out to be entertaining.

What genres do you think this book belongs to?
History, Humor and Comedy, Nonfiction, Psychology, Science, Young Adult

What was your favorite part in the book? SPOILERS
My favorite part is the chat room story about antient earth. “Plant baby” made me chuckle.

Who would you suggest this book to?
Anyone who like weird and unique science facts.

What is your general opinion/ rating of this book? SPOILERS
Okay, this book was a ton of fun to read. I knew some of the scientific facts (because I am a nerd) but there were several concepts and ideas that were completely new to me. I want to do more research on the floating city idea (for some reason that one seems too scientifically impossible to me). I really liked the estimated cost of each villainous scheme. I really enjoyed the concept of how to drill to the center of the earth and how to have a “dinosaur” mount. If you like humor, science, and history then you’ll love this non-fiction book. (Unfortunately, I could only get a hold of the audiobook version. I missed out on the illustration that were inside the book.)

[Dan Cassino · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ll admit to being in the bag for Ryan North books- I’ve been buying them since the bad old days, when we had to back them on Kickstarter. What I like about North’s books- across all of the mediums he works in - is his relentless combination of science and whimsy. In the ranks of people communicating science through the most ridiculous possible means, he’s outranked only by Randall (xkcd) Munroe.
Put another way: if Neil deGrasse Tyson is a 1 (lots of science, no, perhaps negative, whimsy and wit), and Bill Nye is a 4, Ryan North is an 8. Is there lots of real science that he got from reading real papers in there? Sure. Is it put to use in ridiculous ways? Absolutely. I mean, this is the guy who taught my 5 year old to count in binary in a Squirrel Girl comic
I liked this book in particular because North also brought in some very good social science research. As a political science professor, I got a little worried when he started talking about how to take over a country. “Oh no,” I thought, “he’s doing selectorate theory. I’m about to be disappointed.” But, by the end of the chapter, I was musing about whether i could reasonably use it in class.
It’s a lot of fun, and I hope it reaches the audience of people who like the silliness, and don’t realize they’re learning all sorts of science. Mostly useless science, but science nonetheless. Unless, of course, you’re really going to take over the world- though maybe a certain absurdly tall Canadian will have beaten us all to it.

[Walter Ullon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a series of science lessons, combined with a bit of history and a healthy dose of trivia, all disguised as quirky supervillanous plots to take over the world, one step at a time. Now excuse me while I figure out how to raise 55 billion dollars for, you know, stuff...

If you ever wanted to know how and where to build a super secret lair, then Ryan North has you covered. If you thought that breeding your very own army of "Chickasauruses" was impossible, then think again - it's not as far-fetched as you thought. It reminds me a bit of the What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions series of books, where you start with a harebrained idea and then discover the actual science that would make it possible. I like books that teach me stuff in unconventional ways.

It's a fun book to have around and read a bit at a time. My favorite parts were the "The Inferior Plans of Lesser Minds" section in each chapter, which recount real-life attempts to carry out similar plans with humorous, and often eye-opening results.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeah, I dunno. I like Ryan North a lot, but this one missed me a bit. Part of it is a complaint I often have with nonfiction books: he didn’t commit to the bit. Obviously this was always going to be a popular science book, and I knew that going in. But I found myself a little disappointed that it was “just” a popular science book. Even though he played lip service to the supervillain theme, the bulk of what he actually discussed in each section was all the reasons you can’t or shouldn’t do it. I don’t know what I was expecting, really, certainly not a realistic and practical guide for how to be actually evil. But it felt like the premise was just an excuse for Ryan to tell me about a bunch of interesting things he learned.

Perhaps my bigger complaint is that a good half to two thirds of the ideas he talked about here I had already encountered in various ways. Perhaps for someone less online, or less informed about things like space, this stuff would have been new and exciting. But when the ideas are not new (to me) it’s just down to how funny the writing can be, and this isn’t the most consistently funny Ryan North work I’ve ever read. And this is where the weakness of the premise hurts: if it was themed around a topic area I could have self-calibrated and determined if it wasn’t for me. But with this theme it’s just a random collection of stuff and I find out while reading if I am learning anything.

Anyway, it hits the mark for the most part, I am mostly grousing here.

[Petri Saarela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok, so I guess it's time to embrace the supervillain in me and make the career change now that I've gotten the gist of all the steps that have to be done and thought of.

North's book on How to Take Over the World is a treasure trove of trivia from a variety of different fields of science. You learn about agricultural self-sufficiency, underwater building challenges, governance and creating a nation, genetic manipulation, hacking, boreholes and lots and lots more. Everything is kept on surface level and entertaining and all the science is wrapped into a framework of starting a career as a supervillain. There's even a nice twist of thought for if the general population and political system refuses to solve fex. the issue of climate catastrophe, it's supervillainous to do something about it to "fight the power"!

For me the book worked best savored in bits, a few chapters at a time, and I did got some nice chuckles from the read. It maybe could have used a bit trimming especially near the end but I highly recommend this to anyone wanting a career change or who wants to learn lots of obscure and amusing (and sometimes horrible) trivia.

[Samantha (MiawgicalReads) ✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I'm a bit dissatisfied with this book, not because it's bad, but because I thought it was a funny book, like some kind of comedy non-fiction and event tho it has some fun gags here and there, it's more like a bunch of facts thrown together with the occasional "this is how you can become a supervillain", and my problem with the facts is that the author rambles a lot around the same topics and it makes the whole chapter so long and unbearable, to the point it get boring and I really struggled to finish most of them.

Not super bad, but this book really made me want to become a real life supervillain because of how boring it got.

[Luuui · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not only suitable for rich supervillains, but also for artists in search of inspiration for their next massive and expansive art projects ;)

It's a quite funny book about science, history, geology, astrophysics, medicine, politics and economy. To do the comic-villain-ish schemes in this book, you need a lot of money. Sorry to all poor aspiring super villains out there! This book is solely for your entertainment (unless you get rich in the meantime).

But anyways, its nice and funny and contains great illustrations. Its full of funfacts you dont need at at all in your daily life but you surely wont forget!