Today I am very excited to have Author Tracy Deebs on My Life With Books for a guest post.
About Tracy
Tracy Deebs collects books, English degrees and lipsticks and has been known to forget where—and sometimes who—she is when immersed in a great novel. At six she wrote her first short story—something with a rainbow and a prince—and at seven she forayed into the wonderful world of girls lit with her first Judy Blume novel. From the first page of that first book, she knew she’d found her life-long love. Now a writing instructor at her local community college, Tracy writes YA novels that run the gamut from dark mermaids and witches to kissing clubs and techno-Armageddon stories… and she still has a soft spot for Judy Blume.
MLWB:
The book blurb says: "Part The Matrix, part retelling of the Pandora myth, Doomed has something for gaming fans, dystopian fans, and romance fans alike." Can you talk about how you meld different ideas together?
Tracy:
I’d love, to but first off, I want to thank you for hosting a stop on my blog tour. I’m thrilled to be here today :)
I wanted to write a Pandora’s box book because I’ve always been a fan of the Pandora myth, but I’ve also always thought she got a raw deal. The way the real myth goes is two Titans—Prometheus and his brother, Epimetheus, were charged with creating all the animals on earth. Epimetheus is an impulsive kind of guy, so he worked quickly and created things like the rhinoceros and the giraffe and the platypus, and gave each one of them a gift from the gods. Prometheus was much more the careful planner and he worked and labored for a long time on his own animal—who ended up becoming the human being. But he spent so long making man that by the time he went to give him a gift, Epimetheus had used up all the gifts. Prometheus didn’t think it was fair to put his fragile creation down on earth without some kind of defense, so he stole fire from the gods to give to man.
This angered Zeus, and with the help of Hephaestus, he created Pandora out of clay. He filled her with an unending curiosity and thirst for knowledge, then bestowed her on Prometheus as a gift. Prometheus was smart enough to recognize that Zeus, who was angry at him, wouldn’t be gifting him with anything good and he passed on her. He also warned his brother, Epimetheus, to say no as well. But Epimetheus was an impulsive kind of guy and the second he saw the beautiful Pandora, he fell for her and accepted her as a wife. At this time, she was given a box by Zeus and told never to open it. But she was created for just that purpose—to open that box and punish both Prometheus and his creation—so it was no surprise that she did, indeed, open it.
My problem with the myth is with this question—how can we blame Pandora for doing exactly what it is she was created to do? It doesn’t seem fair. So I set out to create a Pandora’s Box story from her point of view, so that we can see what she was thinking when she opened that box.
But the world we live in is already filled with dangers and imperfections, so opening a box filled with evils didn’t seem like it would make much of an impact today. So when my agent, very early in the brainstorming process made the comment, “This could be a really stupid idea, but what if Pandora opens an attachment instead of a box?” I was captivated by the idea. We live in a world so dependent on technology that it’s hard to imagine what would happen if it all failed—not just the lights going out for a little while in one specific area as in the case of a natural disaster, but power and the internet going out everywhere indefinitely. What would happen to the society we live in if there’s no access to money, no way to pay with credit cards, no way to get gas or have shipments of products delivered to stores, no traffic lights to control the cars that do have gas and no ability to call 911 if something terrible happens?
This is the story I wanted to tell in Doomed, but to do that I had to figure out a LOT of science and technology. I had to ask a lot of questions of a lot of engineers and technology experts, along with a bunch of sociologists and law enforcement officers as well. The first thing I did was look at if what I wanted to do was even possible. It turns out it was—as I was writing Doomed the Stuxnet worm (the most powerful computer worm ever created) came to public attention. I was created under George W. Bush by the American government and Microsoft to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. He left office before it was finished, so it was implemented by Obama and while it had many different safeguards worked into it (very specific specifications of what kind of system to attack and a self-destruct date, just to name a couple) it somehow managed to jump from its specific target (as worms are wont to do) and was found numerous other places. Once it was found—in Russia, in the computers of the American company, Chevron, and various other places—it could be mapped. And once it was mapped, a terrifying new weapon in Cyber warfare became available.
At the same time this was happening, Egypt’s government took the entire country off-line, something even the most educated computer gurus around the world didn’t know was possible. Then Fukishima (the Japanese power plant meltdown after the tsunami) occurred and I knew I wanted to include that too in Doomed. At this point, it felt like I was adding everything but the kitchen sink, but all the components were necessary—and in existence in the world we live in-- in order to bring society in the book down the way I wanted it too. The only thing missing was a delivery vehicle—a way to get the worm uploaded onto the internet and then disseminated quickly by a lot of unsuspecting users. That’s where the MMO comes in—I created a very popular game that much of the world played—and spread the worm that way.
And finally, for the romance part of my cyberarmageddon story—it was already kind of built in. Pandora, Prometheus (who I call Theo in Doomed) and Epimetheus (Eli in Doomed) were already locked in one of the original love triangles of all time. I took those relationships and transplanted them into Doomed, took some artistic license and then sent them on a quest to end the destruction of the world—something I believe Prometheus would certainly have done (if he wasn’t chained to a mountaintop, that is).
And that’s how Doomed ( even the title is a shout-out to the first MMO, Doom) came to be a mixture of everything from gaming to romance to nuclear annihilation :)
Learn more about Tracy Deebs:
Pandora's just your average teen-glued to her cell phone and laptop, surfing Facebook and e-mailing with her friends-until the day her long-lost father sends her a link to a mysterious site featuring twelve photos of her as a child. Unable to contain her curiosity, Pandora enters the site, where she is prompted to play her favorite virtual-reality game, Zero Day. This unleashes a global computer virus that plunges the whole world into panic: suddenly, there is no Internet. No cell phones. No utilities, traffic lights, hospitals, law enforcement. Pandora teams up with handsome stepbrothers Eli and Theo to enter the virtual world of Zero Day. Simultaneously, she continues to follow the photographs from her childhood in an attempt to beat the game and track down her father-her one key to saving the world as we know it. Part The Matrix, part retelling of the Pandora myth, Doomed has something for gaming fans, dystopian fans, and romance fans alike.
Thank you for stopping by My Life With Books today Tracy, It was fun getting to know you better and learn more about Doomed.
