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Engel: Regarding heroes and villains



(4/10)


The Ultimate Deal has four main characters: Barry Anderson, Alexandra Page, Dragan Angelov, and the artificial intelligence Entity.


In fact, it also has other main characters, but these are my personal favorites.


I needed some baseline to develop these heroes, so I injected in them parts of my character. But it is a big mistake for a writer to write about himself, or about their friends and to change their clothes so that they become characters in a book.


No. I broke apart my soul in parts and gave my main characters some of them. From then on, I wondered what parts could live in harmony within these characters. Then, through trial and error, and the skill to see how some friend of yours if changing their story to suit them, I put them in situations, where I could experiment on them.


I wanted to see what they would see. I wanted to see how they would react.


From then on, I let their traits interact with the situations around them. That way both their traits changed, and so did the situations around them.


But no matter how much I love my characters, people (and myself), I know that all these creatures have a dark side. These people can be assholes. Barry, Alexa, and Dragan are not necessarily "good" people, but they are not necessarily "bad" people.


All of them have the tendency to do something that would be unacceptable for someone else. That is why I wanted to write about them. But also, the three of them have the potential to be brave.


Very few people adore Superman. He is too perfect. Even kryptonite was invented later than Superman, so that he would turn a bit more human.


Barry, Alexa, and Dragan are also not villains, so that you can hate them easily. They are torn between every person's question: should they help themselves or help others.


And like the limited biological machines that they are, they cannot calculate everything. I have to admit that regarding morality, even a superintelligence such as Entity would be torn.


In any case, behind the human mask of an artificial intelligence there is something truly alien. But even if an intelligence is artificial, that would not mean that it would not be captured by the trap of morality. By the Trolley Dilemma.


This duality was a conscious decision for me. I don't want to read about perfection, because I am human. Utopias are not interesting. To achieve it, we first need to address our current problems. And since man likes to read about problems, especially the problems of others, I wrote about beings with problems: external and internal.


Maybe that doesn't make them heroes, but makes them human instead. You decide.



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