By April MacIntyre Dec 31, 2007, 2:54 GMT
For the little bookworms: The children's literature series "Danger Boy" has become an underground classic poised for developing in a film franchise or television series.
In the truest sense of great underground classics, a smart children's series of books has been growing in popularity by the best possible advertising: Word of mouth.
Author J.K. Rowling is winding down her prolific "Potter" series, maybe she has one more in her.
But when it is all said and done, it will leave a void, one that author Mark London Williams hopes to fill with his time-traveling protagonist, "Danger Boy," 12 year old Eli Sands.
Williams, a San Francisco Bay area native, made his publishing debut with an inventively twisted time travel tale, the first in his Danger Boy series, Ancient Fire.
Set in the not-so-distant future, 2019, hero Eli Sands physicist parents are in the midst of conducting time travel experiments when Eli's mother is blasted back in time. Eli discovers his own time-traveling abilities and soon finds himself at the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt.
In 2019, 12-year-old Eli begins his narrative just after his move to Sonoma, Calif., with his father from their hometown of Princeton, N.J., where his father, Sandusky, experimented with "spacetime spheres." There he successfully changed the electrical charges of particles so that he could accelerate them through space and move them backward through time.
After Eli's mother disappeared in an explosion while working on a related experiment, Sandusky abandoned his project, took Eli and headed west. Yet his nefarious boss tracks him down at his new residence and insists that he carry on his work with Eli as the subject of his experiments. "I was going to be twirled around in time and history, like a smoothie in a great big cosmic blender," says Eli.
Eli's first-person narrative alternates with those of two other youngsters he meets in his time travels: Clyne, a good-natured dinosaur from another planet who gathers information for a school assignment, and Thea, the daughter of the last librarian at Alexandria, the ancient Egyptian city, who is accused of being a witch.
Monsters caught up with award winning author Mark London Williams while he was in San Francisco to share his thoughts on the literate and fun read for the 9-14 set, "Danger Boy."
Can you describe in a nutshell, what the series "Danger Boy" is about, and who is the audience (age range) for it?
MLW: Starting in 2019, the series follows the time spanning adventures of Eli Sands, the eponymous protagonist, and his companions: Clyne, a good-natured dinosaur from another planet who gathers information for a school assignment, and Thea, last librarian in Alexandria .
The three are jointly "unstuck" in time, and the government attempts to both master their secrets of time travel, and use them for intelligence ops throughout history, all of which the trio try to resist.
Eli and Thea age as the series unfolds, starting out at 12 and 13 respectively, and ending in their mid-teens with the current book.
They've visited not only ancient Alexandria, but World War II, Lewis and Clark, prophets in Jerusalem, and currently, Shakespeare, Chris Marlowe, and others in the Elizabethan showbiz "scene." The age range is from around 9 on up, but really, they're good for young readers of all ages...
Monsters: You are raising your two boys now ages 13 and 9, how has being a father influenced your writing, especially in your popular series "Danger Boy" which stars Eli Sands as he travels through time with his smart sidekicks Clyne and Thea?
MLW: Good question! In the series, my time traveler, Eli Sands, must "reboot" his own household, with just his dad, once his mom is "lost" back in time, in the first book. Although these events prefigure my own divorce, one author friend claims I already "knew" at some level, my own marriage was at an end.
Regardless, as Eli gets older in the books, and his dad reconciles himself to his loss, works to get over his grief, and become more ever more "present" as an active parent -- all that is a kind of call and response with myself, I think, over these past years, as I've written three of the series' five installments post (my own) marriage, now.
Monsters: Do you feel parents are reading less to their children in lieu of pacifying them with video distractions?
Everyone is too distracted, too busy. And we're starting to have a generation of parents that don't read much -- at least, not for pleasure -- themselves. Everything now is relegated to one "screen" or another, including the one you're reading these words on. And while I freely admit I've made much of my own livelihood on this same screen, we all need to step away from it once in awhile.
Monsters: What has been the hardest challenge in fatherhood for you? Conversely, the most rewarding?
It's all astonishingly rewarding. In these last years, it's been balancing time as a single dad, and a single person, which are two very different "modes." I'm with my boys about half of each week, so there's also the challenge of balancing that half of the week with them, and with work -- both "professional" and "household." Ideally, you need large chunks of quiet time, as a writer, but nearly all my work has been done in the hurlyburly of active dadhood. Which really, is quite a fine "problem" to have...!
Danger-Boy-Home
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