I have lived in San Francisco for 10 years. For all ten of those years on Halloween I stay home. If you are not familiar with Halloween in San Francisco let me just tell you that my first year here people were shot and killed.

Now I do not make a habit of letting fear dictate my actions. In reality I do not go out on most holidays because I do not like crowds, much less drunk crowds. Add on top of that the affinity for pot in this city and the over the top costumes. Having gun fire as well just tells me my instincts to avoid the whole affair all together were correct. 

However, I will be out there tonight. On the streets, in the underground train cars with all that craziness for one reason. Ender’s Game.

I can’t wait until Saturday and it starts at a decent hour. So for the first time ever I will brave the streets of San Francisco, at night, and on Halloween so that I can see a movie I have been waiting for for years. It is the first time and depending on how things go tonight, it could be the last. We’ll see.

It is an undisputed fact to say Isaac Asimov is astounding and/or amazing but after re-reading some of his essay’s its worth stating for the record again. Isaac Asimov is always looking to humanity’s bright future. He acknowledges war, overpopulation, and pollution as potential dangers to our continuance but his writing always points to the best we can offer in the face of these obstacles. 

In 1977 he wrote: “In any civilization with computer science so advanced as to make teaching machines possible, there surely will be thoroughly centralized central libraries. Such libraries may even be interconnected into a single planetary library... Each machine would be plugged into this planetary library and each could have at its disposal any book, periodical, document, recording, or video encoded there” -From The New Teachers

In this essay Asimov is imaging what education in the future will look like. Each person will learn what they want and at their own pace. The traditional class room as we know will be a thing of the past. This is a trend of course but the above quote sounds a lot like Google.

1989, Future Fantastic. “In the 21st century we will see a society in which one third of the population will entertain the other two thirds.” It might not be two thirds but with the proliferation of Podcasts and You Tube channels I would say it’s not that far off.

Same essay. “There will be no bar to travel. You can still be a tourist or visit your friends in person by closed circuit television.” Not exactly, but close enough. Can we say Skype, Google hangout, GoToMeeting, etc to see people we could not otherwise afford to.

This one is interesting. “...the technochildren of tomorrow will be accustomed to living in a decentralized world, to reaching out in a variety of ways from their homes—to do what needs doing. At one and the same time, they will feel both entirely isolated and in total contact.”

This is exactly what is happening. While Asimov is a perpetual optimist the simultaneous isolated connectivity is not having the positive impact I think he imagined. I have seen a few articles and I know there a couple books on the subject. Being connected online has not done anything to make most people feel MORE connected, only more alone. A person may have 2,000 friends on their social networks but still experience profound loneliness. It is definitely a modern paradox that we have yet to figure out how to deal with.

This is just what I read today. If I get any more good ones I will tweet them.

[There are two sentences that could be considered spoilers if you haven’t read Trespassing. I colored them in purple so it's hard to read. If you DO want to read it, just highlight it.]

In Trespassing you meet Brendan, Kristy, Matt, and Derek as adults. In Fallout they are teenagers. But age is not the only thing that changed.

The summer before middle school I wrote my first story. The kind you write for yourself. For fun, not for class. It was about a group of five friends who find an island of dinosaurs. (At the time I wanted to be a paleontologist.) Those five friends were Brenda, Jenny, Christy, Matt, and Derek. They have been living in my head for over twenty years.

Through middle school and high school these were the humans in my Transformers fan fiction. So they have had many adventures together. Hopefully they seem well rendered. And if they do, it is because I have been putting through quite a bit with giant robots before they ever met the Elbie. In Trespassing I have swapped out robotic life forms for energy ones.

If you look at the two lists of names you are going to see three differences:
                Brenda versus Brendan
                Jenny is missing from the second list
                Lysandra is missing from first the list

Brenda and Jenny were the core of the group as BFFs. In 2001 when I wrote my first draft of Fallout Jenny became Jake. Jenny never made it into the Elbie reality. I wanted the BFFs to be opposite sex because that was more of my experience and I had lots of these in my circle of friends at the time.

In 2006 I gave up on Fallout and I moved the timeline up, after the establishment of the Elbie in our world, Trespassing. This is when I brought in Lysandra. Lysandra had been a part of my Transformers fan fiction as well, in the post original movie reality. I really liked having Brenda and Lysandra as identical twins because it meant lots of messing around with identity and switching them out for each other but the story line still wasn’t panning out.

Finally, in 2010 I made a drastic change.

Brenda became BrendaN. The hobbies and interests of Jake became Brendan’s thus eliminating Jake and making Kristy the new BFF since she was now the only female in the group. Then it all came together. It seems so strange that something like that made the difference. While I don’t really know why it worked I can give you one theory.

The most interesting part about changing Brenda to BrendaN was their relationship to Lysandra. I say “they” because in a writerly way Brenda still exists on her own outside of Brendan but she is very different from her male counterpart.

One attitude Brenda/Brendan share is their hate for Elbie and specifically Esben. But for Brenda, the appearance of Lysandra meant she now had a method for carrying out the revenge she had wanted for years. Her feelings toward her identical sister were practically null. She was distant and calculated in the way she related to Lysandra.

**SPOILER** Brendan on the other hand, revenge is a thought only after Elbie have harmed his sister. Rather than becoming less human at Lysandra’s appearance, he becomes more human than he has in years.

This was not something I planned. Most of my characters are self-actuating. They tell me who they  want to be. I did not create Brenda to be cold toward her sister any more than I made Brendan to be gushing over her. That is just how they are. One worked and the other didn’t. Pure and simple. It is one of the mysteries of creating.

If I ever decide to release Fallout it will need some major overhauling because of the changes I’ve made to the character line up. I still write the kind of stories I want to, for myself, for fun, but it makes me happy to know that other people like them too. If you have any questions feel free to e-mail or Tweet me.