Getzen, who wrote the book under the pseudonym of Sean Austin, a minor character in the young adult series, has a professional background in 3D simulation and action film production and grew up in Kabul, Afghanistan.
WT: Do you think it necessary to create a virtual companion to a novel in order to get young males to read it?
HG:No; however, it’s so much more engaging for these guys to be able to go somewhere online and access a rich, thematically connected experience in a way that is familiar to them. Gamers are very digitally facile, and are far more comfortable reading and exploring text, images and video online than doing so with books. A virtual companion can expand the original experience in so many exciting ways- for example, by enabling the reader to learn new skills stimulated by a novel’s narrative.
WT: What do you think of the state of science education in the US today and how do you think the Echo series/universe might be able to affect it?
HG: I believe we really lost something when shop class disappeared. I’d like to see that spirit of invention and fabrication from shop come back to U.S. K-12 education, but connect it with the enormous digital realm that has developed since all that hardware was, sadly, dumped into warehouses. There’s a whole new world in which our youth could explore, invent, and excel if given the tools to
experiment with digital design, fabrication, and especially the integration of computing components into those designs. I hope that the Echo’s Revenge series will give younger students an idea of what’s possible, and will lead them, through the website, to some stimulating educational opportunities in the engineering and programming disciplines.
WT: Do you have sons? If so, did they serve as a focus group? If not, how did you research your audience?
HG: I do have sons and they did serve as a focus group. But I wanted to write something I’d like to read if I were a 12 year-old guy today. At that age, I wanted to know how everything worked and how to build real machines that
affected people. This project ties into real state-of-the-art technologies developed by real companies all over the world, and everything depicted is possible today.
WT: Was one of your 3D animation creations the inspiration for Echo-7? If so, which one?
HG: No one, specific creation served as the inspiration for Echo, but rather the idea that a sentient machine could determine what its opponent’s deepest fears are, and then change it’s form and behavior to terrorize that person into
a debilitating state of fear. For me, the idea of a machine relentlessly manipulating humans psychologically for some sort of unknown scheme is my greatest fear.
For more information: www.echohunt.com
