Spanners: The Fountain of Youth, published April 11th, 2014
What’s the book’s first line?
Balthasar Guzmán de Balboa was awoken at 2 a.m. by Christine, who apparently now went by the moniker Drayne.
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
Spanners
The average human being lives from 0-80 sequentially. Spanners don’t.
These rare beings have different lifespans than the rest of us. Some live their lives in reverse, some live only six months, and some are immortal. There are hundreds of classes of spanners that live hundreds of different ways, and each class has a unique lifespan that gives them unique powers.
A few spanners find a way to live in normal human society, but most live in the shadows. There are some spanners that are extremely dangerous, and with the help of a mayfly-class spanner, an 8,000-year-old detective named Adam Parr is doing everything he can to keep them under control.
The Fountain of Youth
When one of Adam’s old adversaries uncovers the most powerful and deadly spanner in history, it’s up to Adam and Mayfly to take her back before she unleashes her full power and ends the world as we know it.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
The idea that differing lifespans could give beings strange powers came about when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Namibia, Africa. There was a plant there called the Welwitschia that lived to be well over 1000 years old, and there were insects that only lived for a day. I saw that each of these creatures had unique abilities to live the way they did, and it fascinated me.
Years later that notion of ‘lifespans bringing powers’ became the independent movie Spanners, which serves as a prequel to Spanners: The Fountain of Youth.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
Adam Parr is an 8,000 year old immortal spanner that works as a detective, and is slow to adapt to change. So though he has witness human history from the beginning, he still has difficulty operating a mobile phone.
Who does he remind me of? Adam Parr is definitely linked to the actor who plays him in the film and is on the cover of the book, Shawn Christian.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
Spanners: The Fountain of Youth has Dark Fantasy, Historical Fiction and SciFi all wrapped up into one pulse-pounding adventure. It flashes back from the modern day to times of the Conquistadors, and travels from Northern Canada all the way to the Sentinel Islands off the coast of India. The book grips you from the opening chapter and doesn’t let go until the epically satisfying finale.
And most importantly – Spanners: The Fountain of Youth was fortunate enough to receive the 2015 IndieReader Discovery Award for Science Fiction!