Someone is taking the Seeded.
Can a psychic hacker crack the digital world and unearth the conspiracy before it's too late?
Read on to learn more about Vanessa MacLellan's new novel, Reluctant Hero!
Reluctant Hero is peppered with character from roleplaying games I've played for decades. Yes, I'm a gamer geek and nowadays it almost seems a badge of honor versus something you hid from normal people. And, being a girlgeek at the time, was even more unusual.
Nekoka, Sepia, Berlin, and Trior are all characters I've played at some point. Jenni, Palbo, Chandler, and Zack are friends' characters. Nekoka was a superhero character that was so powerful in the game that I had to clip her tail, so to speak. She's much more tame now, even if still one of the more powerful Seeded in the world.
So, the inception for this entire book adventure was those characters. There are three things that spark a story: Character, plot, or world. And this was totally the character. I just needed to give them a world to play in.
Once I decided where, in my world, the powers came from, the plot just unfolded.
I needed to do a lot of computer technology research, because Nekoka is a technomancer/cyberkinetic. She has psychic power over computers. So, in one point of the story she is searching for someone using her electronic powers, and I had to keep updating the story. The original version was written in 2009, and tech is SO different now. Everyone has cameras on everything, for one. And speakers. Finding someone would be easy now if you had access to all that. So, I had to keep updating and trying to add the new stuff to the novel. This book will be outdated in two months.
She also had this great tech that was inspired by an anime, where you use your phone/invisispecs/whatever to look at an item and it knows everything about it, or a person, or a place… I thought, this is cool, I'm going to totally include that. And… I think that exists now. So, not so near future anymore. It's just contemporary!
Also, I had to think… how would the world accept people with superpowers. Well, there would be a definite split. Look at how we address AI right now. And it's done A Lot in superhero fiction. It's what the X-men are all about, but it is definitely something I had to address. So, I split up cities. Some loved the Seeded and others didn't like them an really limited their rights. And this aspect is a big part of the world background.
One historic aspect I included was sparked by a road trip I did in 2006 where I visited Minidoka in Idaho. It's a Japanese internment camp. It was very little known at the time, and so I included it in my book as a way to remind people of problems in our past without being preachy about it.
Read on for an excerpt from Reluctant Hero! You can find more about Vanessa and her work at her website, or on Facebook. Add the book to your shelves on Goodreads.
And if you're curious about that engineering marvel I mentioned, Vanessa says, "So, this has nothing to do with superheros or writing. I just visited Scotland and saw the Falkirk Wheel As an engineer, I found this utterly interesting, though it's not really used for anything other than tourists. Instead of a long series of river locks to get a boat up a hill, they built this wheel that swirls the boat from the bottom up to the top. It's amazing and takes very little energy to use. Check it out."
I had a chance to visit the Falkirk Wheel last year--and it's truly astonishing!
Reluctant Hero, excerpt
"What are those papers?" Nekoka demanded. The world had suddenly gotten hot, and with a ripple, her fur thinned out over her body. The blood was pounding in her ears as her gaze homed in on the papers.
They couldn't do this. They wouldn't do this.
They were her friends.
Her family.
"It's just a trial," Zack said, finally facing her, his silver eyes barely meeting hers. "Temporary. So, you can see how it won't be that big a deal."
Nekoka charged forward and snatched the papers off the tiled countertop.
Application for Hero Certification – New Orleans
"I told you," Minnie said, crossing her arms over her ample chest. "We can't do this without everyone's say so. Nekoka and I aren't certain this is the best path for us. It takes away our autonomy."
She'd told him. Told Zack she didn't want this. They'd talked about this.
"I know you think this is going to be some big Supervillain versus Superhero all-out war. That's ridiculous." Zack shook his head, then returned to staring at Nekoka, his silver eyes red around the edges, a sign of sleepless nights. A sign that this had been planned, and he had been worried.
"We have power," he continued, pleaded. "We've a duty to help people."
"No!" Then she took in a breath. The air felt stiff. "We do not." Her voice sounded hard, alien. Then words kept coming, flowing from her mouth. "We have a duty to ourselves. That's it. Bottom line. All else is simple choice." Everything went numb inside. "Listen, you go ahead."
Would her mouth stop talking? Would her friends not do this?
Her sour gut churned. Everything was hot. So hot.
"You go ahead," she said. "Go Certified. Do what you want."
She walked away.
Want to know what happens? Check out Reluctant Hero!
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