The Story Behind: A TALE OF NEW HOPE CITY
This story was another one inspired by my eternal quest to do the superhero comic book as the superhero short story. Searching for ways to twist ideas to which we have grown accustomed, I asked myself, "What if the struggle between our heroes and villains wasn't between good and evil? What if there were other forces that governed our morality? And what type of world would grow from that?"
The basic concept behind Latimer Vul stretches back to the DC Comics Teen Titans series of the early eighties by Marv Wolfman and George Perez. The early issues featured a group called the Fearsome Five, one member of which was a dwarf named Gizmo with a peculiar talent for building machines from other machines and/or spare parts. For instance, in one getaway scene, he takes a few seconds to convert a fire extinguisher into a jetpack. You might say Gizmo was good with his hands. (You can see Gizmo's latest incarnation, as a smart-ass little genius kid in the Teen Titans cartoon on Cartoon Network.) That sort of character always fascinated me and I have often toyed with the idea in one story or another.
If you read many of my stories you may also find that a common theme for which I hold a fondness is the blurring of the mechanical and the biological, primarily as it pertains to minds, but not always. Vul was originally conceived as a character who employed a merging of these characteristics. His tools are living things.
The Gardxeek came about after an evening of brainstorming pure and simple. I wanted an alien that was truly alien and I pieced together its attributes with pen and paper. That's important to me. I avoid aliens when I can in my stories. When I can't, I want them to resemble earthly creatures as little as possible. If there's one thing that drives me to the edge of sanity when I'm reading the work of other authors, it's the aliens that resemble cats, or the aliens that resemble insects, or dogs, or weasels or any other terran animal. GAAAAA! Just writing about it raises my blood pressure.
The chemical reaction of the piece's finale was inspired by a few lines in the book "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. Sagan's writings in general are fantastic inspiration for the aspiring science fiction writer. The questions that he asks and the questions that pop into the astute reader's brain are good for a dozen story ideas a chapter.
I have to thank Dave Felts, editor of the late great Maelstrom Speculative Fiction for helping me make this a better story. His questions about my admittedly confusing submission led me to rethink the story and rework it into something much more coherent. If you still don't understand it, get over it. Dave paid me, did you?
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