The story introduced you to sixteen-year old Lex, who has many of the same problems that pre-collapse people had to deal with. As he struggles to make peace with feelings of abandonment, he fights for survival in a post-apocalyptic world where fading memory and old video recordings on a wireless phone are his keys to salvation.
Justin Oldham is the author of this book. “I wrote this as an origin story,” he
explained, “The first iteration of the idea came to me a long time ago, I
started working on this about ten years before we launched the game. I started this project in mid-winter of late
2009, finished before January.”
Justin is visually impaired, meaning he is legally blind. Several real-world factors were
hard to overcome. “It’s common knowledge
that I don’t see very well. Writing a
hero who has better eyesight than I do is not as easy as it sounds. As farsighted as he is, Lex still has
something like twice the visual acuity that I do. I had to get a feel for what the sighted
community takes for granted, without over-emphasizing the point.”
Why was Haven’s Legacy
written for Young Adults? “Looking at it
chronologically,” Justin remembers, “we go back in time about ten years ago,
when we were still feeling our way through the minefield of game mechanics. I had quite a bit of the backstory fleshed
out. Even so, some members of the team
were having a hard time envisioning what the post-collapse world would look
like. The solution seemed obvious to me,
I had to show them—so—I did, in the form of this novel.”
What else could we expect from Lex in the future? Justin says, “Lex is a young man, soon to be
adult. All you’ve got so far is his
origin story. He could be very important
to the post-collapse world, as a leader of some kind. Who knows how many historical figures he
might meet and be influenced by before he is thirty years old? Anyone who reads historical fiction knows
what I’m talking about, there’s no way to know what mysteries he solves or who
he influences.”
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