Favorite Anime: Astro Boy, Blackjack, Three eyed one, Space Battleship Yamato

Location: South Florida

Hobbies: Electronics, Astronomy, Amateur Radio

Occupation: Software Engineer

Favorite Authors: (off this site) Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, Isaac Asimov, Jean Shepherd

My Writing:

I'm an engineer and a tech junkie. It won't take you long to see that I let that invade my fiction stories. I simply HAVE to go into great details on the technical end of things, as if I have to justify that its all possible. I think I've actually made some people wonder why Tetsuwan Atom DOESN'T exist today.

It doesn't take much of an idea to suddenly suggest a possible story angle to me. I can sometimes suddenly see the entire thing outlined in front of me. Then I have to quickly outline the major ideas before it all fades ... At least two of my stories came to exist this way.

So far it's all been Astro Boy based stuff, but I have an idea for a Contact spin off sitting on the back burner, and I'd really like to write something based on Blackjack.

My Astro Boy AU:

I felt I needed to explain this.

The '63 series was brought to the US being fairly location neutral. Tezuka's artwork described a city of the future, that could have been located anywhere in the world. Living in NYC, and having also been exposed to the the Jetsons, I could easily imagine the story taking place in my hometown 40 years into the future.

SO ... I now imagined WHAT IF it is now possible with today's technology, or a reasonable extension of it, to create a robot like Astro today? How would it happen? I had already invented a fictional research organization for a different story concept (that I never developed further than a few concept ideas) which was very loosely based on Clive Cussler's NUMA. One character in this story theme (which became Simon Green) was a cross between Indiana Jones and Cussler's Dirk Pitt. Another character (computer geek Robert Levinson), was inspired by Cussler's Hiram Yeager. I ended up using this fictitious 'think tank', which I located deep underneath the American Museum of Natural History, as the birthplace of MY version of Astro. The scientist - engineer who creates him, Dr. Albert Tenamann, sounds like a spinoff of Tenma, certainly I started with a similar sounding name, and the inspiration for Atom's creation is the same ... BUT I didn't kill off the boy who would model for the Robot. Tezuka himself appears in this AU as the creator of the story that inspires the 'real thing', and Dr. Tenamann and his parents have met the God of Manga when Albert was a child.

Tenma's mistake was that his robot son couldn't replace the real boy, because he would forever remain a child. His robot body was fixed in size and couldn't grow. Tenamann, planned for that. My vision for Atom will parallel that of R. Daneel Olivaw. Eventually, I will take him far away from the innocent child and he will do what Tezuka's Atom wanted to do, but never could. He will grow up and become "human", in a similar way that Asimov's "Positronic Man" did. I've already cast the die in my current story for this to happen.

I hope this setting isn't too bizarre. I do see the child like Atom in the same light that Tezuka did. I just don't see him staying that way forever.

Other Story Backgrounds.

I've written two 'virtual' Astro Boy stories which take place outside of the fictional universe where Atom lives. Both of these involve a boy named Tobias who from time to time has imagined himself to be Astro, and sees the boy robot when he looks at himself in the mirror.

Another story idea imagines that Astro IS real and comes to the aid of an airliner in distress over Japan in today's world. The story is told by an airline pilot in the first person POV.

Finally, I'm working on an Astro - Eureka cross over where Dr. Tenma leaves the Institute of Science after creating Atom, and the two of them settle in Eureka.