What is your super-ability? Would you consider your primary skill to be your superpower? What if you had an actual superpower, what would you like it to be? This episode is based on the book Fog Vol. 1. Chaos in Quantum City by Athanasios Panayotou. 

Welcome to this edition of Newsgram!

We all have unique skills and abilities but what if our strengths, our unique abilities, were our superpowers? Imagine finding yourself in a world where all that is possible. A world with a lot more than meets the eye and in that world these things are possible.

Speaking of Super-powers, when I was very young I wanted to be invisible. I thought it would be so cool to be able to go anywhere without being seen. Probably because I was a teen-aged boy and there were girls' locker rooms to be explored. As I grew up my interests became much more sophisticated. Invisibility changed to the ability to fly — because why not. Over the years I’ve given this a lot of thought. Now, I think if I could have any superpower it would definitely be super-strength. My hero has always been Spiderman and you can do a lot of good with strength like Spidey’s but I digress…

Athan Panayotou lives in the city of Larne in Northern Ireland. It’s a city very much like the one you live in. A place where young people dream about being a superhero or having super powers. Right around the age of seventeen he became enthralled with the superhero fantasy.

Athan Panayotou - I’ve always wanted to make my own kind of superhero kind of universe and from a very young age like sixteen-seventeen I had illustrations of these characters that I was doing and I really wanted to write the stories as if they were like the comic books and I ended up making it into a novel. 

His novel is now reality and it’s called Fog Vol. 1. Chaos in Quantum City and it is just the beginning! He calls it Volume one because there are definitely plans to expand this universe in fact Volume two is already written - but not published - but for now let's focus on Volume one. 

Athan Panayotou - It’s set in Ireland. There’s a lot of history I’ve fabricated too in between present day and 2183 to have things different and changed and new cities that have appeared. I like to say that it’s set in Galway but it’s like a fictional version of Galway. 

So this gritty take on the superhero genre is set on the West coast of Ireland in the fictional city of Quantum. 

Athan Panayotou - Quantum City is like a semi Utopian, the other half Dystopian, it’s not all good and there’s always people plotting behind the scenes and these characters just kind of get thrown in mix and have to figure out what’s going on and how they’re going to use their abilities. 

So Nathan, Keris, Felix and Natasha are just a few of the characters that are tasked with defeating the threats that plague them in Quantum City. Threats like Elliot…

Athan Panayotou - He’s the one that’s stirring the pot. He is causing grief and uh, what’s the word…hindering. He's a hindrance . He’s got his own plan in the works and things he wants to do and they’re not morally good. Elliot’s very upper class, stereotypical kind of snob, he’s very intelligent, he can be kind of unhinged. 

There is humor, suspense, revenge and of course superpowers but not everyone uses their unique abilities for good. How did they even get their abilities? Was it something they wanted or was it done to them? The answers are all in the book but here’s the deal. You can’t just have abilities. You have to have a a good story and this book does have that. A good story and some great characters. In fact character development is one of Athan’s super-powers. 

Athan Panayotou - Yea, definitely, I really do love character development. The characters definitely aren’t the same as they were in the start of the book as they are at the end of the book. I really had a lot of fun with their individual journey’s and like how they change.