Where did you get the idea for the Reckoners series?
Where did I get the idea for writing the Reckoners series? I almost got in a car wreck. I was driving to a book signing and I was late and somebody cut me off in traffic. And it was like– I had to slam on the brakes and things like that and I thought– At that moment I’m like “You, person in front of me, are so lucky I don’t have superpowers, ‘cause if I did I would blow your car up right now. BOOM” It’s a great Michael Bay effect, like it explodes and I drive through the smoke. It was really awesome I remember it. And then I was immediately horrified, right? I’m like “Here I write all these books about people protecting the world with their powers and what would I do if I had them? I’d be blowing up people because they inconvenience me.” *laughter* And this is where the series came from, I thought about that the entire rest of the drive, which was about another hour. And I thought “What if– What could we do if people just started manifesting superpowers and– You couldn’t throw them in prison, or if you did they’d just break out. You couldn’t defeat them with the armies. What would the society do if there were legitimately superpowered individuals?” It’s kind of the same tactic that Watchmen took, if you’ve ever read that, but it kind of goes the other direction with “They are all evil, what do we do?” That was the origin and I wrote a whole book series about it.
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