Author Mark London Williams creates
"Potter's" replacement in Children's literature
Monsters and Critics
By April MacIntyre
article online

In the truest sense of underground classics, a children's series of books has been growing in popularity by the best possible advertising: Word of mouth.

Author J.K. Rowling is winding down her prolific "Potter" series, as is the fictive "Lemony Snicket" and it will leave a void, one that writer Mark London Williams hopes to fill with his time-traveling protagonist, "Danger Boy," 12 year old Eli Sands.

Williams, a San Francisco Bay area native, made his publishing debut with an inventively twisted time travel tale, the first in his Danger Boy series, Ancient Fire.

Set in the not-so-distant future, 2019, hero Eli Sands physicist parents are in the midst of conducting time travel experiments when Eli's mother is blasted back in time. Eli discovers his own time-traveling abilities and soon finds himself at the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt.

In 2019, 12-year-old Eli begins his narrative just after his move to Sonoma, Calif., with his father from their hometown of Princeton, N.J., where his father, Sandusky, experimented with "spacetime spheres." There he successfully changed the electrical charges of particles so that he could accelerate them through space and move them backward through time.

After Eli's mother disappeared in an explosion while working on a related experiment, Sandusky abandoned his project, took Eli and headed west. Yet his nefarious boss tracks him down at his new residence and insists that he carry on his work with Eli as the subject of his experiments. "I was going to be twirled around in time and history, like a smoothie in a great big cosmic blender," says Eli.

Eli's first-person narrative alternates with those of two other youngsters he meets in his time travels: Clyne, a good-natured dinosaur from another planet who gathers information for a school assignment, and Thea, the daughter of the last librarian at Alexandria, the ancient Egyptian city, who is accused of being a witch.

William's intrepid creation 'Eli" is the son of a Jewish mother and an Episcopalian father. The second book in the Danger Boy series, Dragon Sword, takes place during World War II; the third book Trail of Bones, is set along the Lewis and Clark trail, with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings thrown in for good measure, and the soon to be released City of Ruins is set in the rubble of ancient Jerusalem.

The latest book is noteworthy for explicitly tackling religious themes. "I always assumed Eli was a bit of a mutt, just like me. I have a Jewish mother and Episcopalian father, and our family traditions go in both directions. I never considered what that might mean in terms of the series until the second book, which revisits aspects of the Holocaust."

Mark London Williams writes the "Danger Boy" books, as he puts it "in the wilds of Los Angeles, while contemplating dinosaurs and keeping a careful eye out for wormholes."

Even then, though, religion was never as central a theme as it is in the newest book, City of Ruins. "In that book, the time travelers find themselves in the ruins of ancient Jerusalem, after another invasion and harrowing war." Says Williams.

Williams is also a columnist for the Hollywood Trade paper Below the Line, where he writes about Hollywood, labor issues and politics. Williams recently taught a "storytelling for executives" class at one of Hollywood's most famous entertainment combines and he is still a self confessed ink-slinger for Variety and the LA Times among many other outlets.

Williams will not be pigeon holed as just a novelist. A published poet, he has a slew of produced plays under his belt in venues ranging from California to London.

Mark's "Danger Boy" inspiration came from his own two sons. The Danger Boy series for young adults is published by Candlewick Press.

The latest Danger Boy review for City of Ruins will be posted prior to its release near the holidays.

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"City of Ruins" - "Danger Boy" series, #4
Monsters and Critics
By April MacIntyre
http://books.monstersandcritics.com

Recently, in those nanotech and multiverse-rich intersections of science fiction, reality, and pop culture reporting, there's been a lot of talk about the cable series "Battlestar Galactica," many articles calling it "the best show you're not watching," and then praising its astute mix of politics, alternate worlds, and raw human emotion.

Using many of these same criteria then, it's safe to call "Danger Boy" the best children's book series you're not reading. They're written by Mark London Williams, and published by Candlewick Press, perhaps the most "it" of kidlit publishing houses at the moment, being home base for Newberry-nabbing writer Kate DiCamillo, and just now grabbing a National Book Award for the in fact astonishing (and lengthily titled) "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party," by M.T. Anderson).

The series tells of the adventures a young time traveler from circa 2020, named Eli Sands ("Sands of time," get it? Though the author swears that wasn't his conscious thought when picking character names out of the ether).Eli hooks up with a girl named Thea - daughter of the last librarian in Alexandria - in the first, Egyptian-set book, and they find themselves in the company of Clyne, a teenage dinosaur-ish fellow from a planet where lizard evolution was never shut down by a visiting meteor.

In the series, the three are torn between their "present" in the near future- -- where a panicky government is trying to use time travel as a kind of ultimate "black ops" (code name - that's right - "Danger Boy") to bail itself out after years of mishandling its responses to global warming, spreading disease, terrorism, etc. --and whichever "past" they're visiting in the given stories.

Previously, that's included WWII-era San Francisco and the Lewis and Clark trail (with the surprising addition of Tom Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and a somewhat circumspect examination of their relationship - and American race politics) and now, as the earlier books find re-release in paperback, comes the new hardcover: "City of Ruins."In this fourth Danger Boy adventure, Williams decides to tempt fate, or at least, censors, by sending his characters straight back into the Old Testament, the titular "Ruins," which turn out to be Jerusalem after the Babylonians have invaded and sacked the city, and forcibly removed most of the inhabitants to serve as slaves.

But a remnant is left behind, including two prophets - the notoriously glum Jeremiah, and the lesser known Huldah. And if that latter name sounds female to you, well, you're right.Williams has joked - half-joked - that this book would be a "'Da Vinci Code' for kids."

In other words, though the surface reason for the trip back to ancient Israel is to find an old cure for a modern disease, the time-tripping trio also come face-to-face with some of the Ur-concepts of Western religion, including the degree to which female contributions may have been deliberately played down.

That's a lot to chew on right there, but Williams' adds his usual stew of baseball history (Satchel Paige makes a cameo appearance! This is indeed the only novel anywhere with both Paige and Huldah), renegade time-traveling Nazis (another government black op - an offshoot of the very real "Operation Paperclip"), environmental ruminations, and philosophical observations from Clyne, the dinosaur, who finds human behavior, which he tends to call "mammal dancing," beyond the ken of known galactic scientific precepts.

There's also the twist that Eli and Thea are growing older with each book, and the hormones are kicking in, though Eli, being essentially "home schooled" by virtue of always time-traveling or being held prisoner for "observation" by the government, is kind of naïve in terms of knowing what to do with this very smart young "renaissance woman" (Pre-Renaissance, actually) in whose company he keeps finding himself.

They are both missing their parents, though Eli still has a father "back" in 2020. And like too many young people today, they find it's their task to try and rebuild - create - a "family" that's been taken away from them.There's even a traveling carnival, and a weeping bat. Hmm, maybe this isn't sci-fi at all, but magical realism.Either way, the narratives tend to be dense; this isn't namby-pamby "Magic Treehouse" stuff.

This is the real deal, on a par with all those Brit-lit offerings (or faux Brit-lit, like Lemony Snicket) that seem to have crowded the market on novel series with serious chops, and interesting arcs. That said, and metaphor continued, it may not be everybody's cup of tea. And even if it's yours, you may do well to pick up an earlier book first, if you haven't read one of these "Danger" tales previously.

This one Williams has likened to writing a "season finale" for television, in that he wanted to wrap up a lot of previous loose threads, and maybe start some new ones, so it's probably the least immediately accessible of any of the books, as a stand-alone.But working your way through the series so you can pick up this book (or use the excuse of buying them for a young reader near and dear to you) ain't such a bad thing. It is, after all, the best kids' series you're not currently reading.Though that, hopefully, will soon change.

On which note, as much as I'm looking forward to the "Eragon" movie this holiday season, while there are distant rumblings of a "Danger Boy" film project, why hasn't this been in active development all along? After all, there's even a character who looks a little dragonish. It's just that he's prone to taking field notes. Hollywood, are you listening?