the golden

June 13th, 2011

Most characters get their own character pages, but there is no way to talk about Craig, Will, and Sharon Golden separately.

They go to the same school as Ron, who says that she likes Will and finds the other two "stuck up." This makes her about the only person who can tell the three siblings apart. If they are siblings.

Little is known about the Golden. They are called that because they use the surname, but also because their skin is a strange golden color. It goes well with their blond hair and gray eyes, but the overall effect is rather unnatural.

Comic books teach us that those who are peculiar looking and mysterious also have special powers, but there is no evidence that this is true of the Golden. Their main goal seems to be to blend in with the other teenagers around them, to be normal, but they're not very good at it.

The Golden first appeared in "The Golden Mystery," appropriately enough. They are also in the stories, "The Mystery of the Quiet People" and "Michael."

Also a word on names, especially since Sonje over at sonjejones.com was just talking about naming characters in this post.

The Golden are somewhat inspired by three characters called The Golden from the late, lamented comic book The Establishment. Those characters are quite different, since the comic-book Golden were very powerful superheroes, quite a bit older than our characters, and they looked similar to each other but not identical.

The comic-book Golden were named Alex, Stuart, and Will, after the actors in the British television show The Champions (who the comic-book characters were somewhat based on). In that show, Alexandra Bastedo, Stuart Damon, and William Gaunt played Sharron Macready, Craig Sterling, and Richard Barrett, so I called my characters Sharon, Craig, and Will (for symmetry it should have been Richard or Rick or Dick, but those didn't seem right so I went with Will).

To go further into pop culture history, the look of The Golden (both groups) were inspired by the children in Village of the Damned, a movie which was based in turn on the book The Midwich Cuckoos, which also influenced the characters The Stepford Cuckoos in the X-Men comics, sisters (originally five, now down to three) who share telepathic powers and, to some extent, a common mind.

However, as I say, all of the characters named above are very powerful, which is apparently not true of The Golden.

Entry Filed under: characters

4 Comments Add your own

  • 1. sonje  |  June 13th, 2011 at 10:35 am

    Reminds me a bit of the relationship between the three empaths in that Tom Cruise movie, “The Minority Report” (which was based on a sci-fi short story, which I never read).

    Do you ever consider giving all the characters the names of the actors since you wanted to use one of the actor’s names anyway?

  • 2. Anthony Lee Collins  |  June 13th, 2011 at 11:07 am

    Very good analogy, and also appropriate to the general “name” thread since the three precogs were named Agatha, Dash, and Arthur, after Agatha Christie. Dashiell Hammett, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

    As for your question, that makes sense, but I wanted to emphasize that they are different from the comic book characters (a difference that only matters to me, since the comic book was not popular), and also I liked the idea of giving the sister a specifically female name (Sharon, rather than Alex), since she looks identical to her brothers (and since I’ve confused readers in the past by having too many female characters with gender-neutral names).

    At a certain point it goes by feel, more than anything else, and those names felt right.

  • 3. tpaulin  |  June 14th, 2011 at 10:46 pm

    All this naming talk makes me want to invent new characters just for fun!

    Anthony, I added you to my blogroll!

    ttyl

  • 4. Anthony Lee Collins  |  June 14th, 2011 at 11:32 pm

    Cool. Welcome aboard, Tamara. I was going to add you to blogroll, but you’re already there. 🙂

    Speaking of names, I almost had a character named Tamara, but it didn’t work out.

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