Leave it to HBO to reinvent the superhero genre with a non-superhero series.

The show, called ECHOLAND, presents an endlessly fascinating world in which tremendous superpowers of an incredible variety appear in a population at random—and then, just as abruptly, disappear.

Think about what this means. You are going through life as an I.T. tech guy in a believable, often crime-ridden, nose-to-the-grindstone capitalistic city… and you can one day wake up with all of the paranormal abilities of a Superman.

What’s more, you know this, and so does everyone else in the city. You just get used to it as a fact… that somebody somewhere, every few days at random, will acquire astounding capabilities without any known cause or reason. It can happen to anyone, anywhere within the borders of the city. It’s been this way since the 1950s, and some people obsess over it, just as you might fantasize constantly about becoming a Lotto millionaire.

And yes, some people use these powers for evil of various kinds, which can lead us directly into the darkest of human potential. The variety of people who acquire these skills, from the elderly to angry ghetto denizens to greedy stock brokers is as numerous as in any city.

The series was born from the short story of the same name, which might have more in common with a magical-realist tale by someone like Borges or Marquez than any comic book. The characters in the series are intensely believable, and spend considerable amounts of time interacting with plots that would be engaging in any drama and have little to do with heroics. No one wears a costume, either. People who want to serve the community wear body armor or gear that is much like SWAT uniforms, and despite some stylized cinematography, the feel of the show is like a paranormal-twinged crime drama of the ilk of The Wire, Sopranos, or Animal Kingdom.

It’s hard to carve into the superhero world with something new—but this definitely has the quality, tone, and premise of something richly unique. One can almost see in essence how it would be that the HBO executive who discovered the story began to get too involved in its backstory lore. It is a tragedy, what happened to him. No one should blame the series, or the short story it’s based on, for causing this pain to his family, however. People make choices of their own free will.

We will not make light of mental illness here, but let’s be honest: any HBO executive who claims to have the abilities of an insect and begins crawling up a highrise to display this…has psychological issues to say the least. Those closest to him have to bear some blame, because we know he had made this trek up the side of the skyscraper a few times before. When he eventually threw himself off the side of the wall into the ether, he had gone far beyond someone enjoying the depths of a science-fiction concept.

It is a troubling tangent to any review of ECHOLAND that this HBO exec claimed that his powers to fly left him at that crucial moment. He says the abilities vanished. Our hearts go out to his family, and we will be forever puzzled how he survived with only broken bones after a fall that severe. It will make for tantalizing copy in any entertainment magazine. Still, one man’s mental issues should not derail consideration of a fantastic new series.

Since HBO may let it go due to the tragedy, Netflix is moving in to pick it up, and the rest will be superhero history.

Below is the short story the series is based on to tide you over until this hits a screen near you.

E C H O L A N D – the original short story by Henry Jaison.

Echoland

We are never more alone than when we are in a city.

This must have always been true; one thinks of ancient Roman times, of Babylon, the collision of spiritual worlds there must have been. One thinks also of old London and the hatefulness of old class strata. One thinks of cold-hearted, Cold War Berlin and the danger of the wrong word in a totalitarian state.

Here there are other worries.

In our city, we roam in a casual daze, pretending all of life is as ordinary as a dull-colored penny in a gutter. And then, it’s there. It births in your chest: the idea, the gnawing idea, that it has happened to you.

Has it happened to you?

Some of us don’t know for quite a time. It is not automatic. A lot of people don’t know that. You could pass a week after a fomenting and not know it.

We learn to be polite here, or we try to. Because of course, not everyone this happens to is so kind. And not everyone reveals themselves.

We learn to live with a delicate morality.

If you lived here back in the 1950s, just before it began to happen, I’m sure things were very different. I’m sure the city was the same as Seattle or St. Paul or Detroit but I would love to know how things felt when people began to make the connection. I mean, you think about the implications of sex, class, and race—back in the Fifties, can you imagine?—and there’s your afternoon, daydreamed away.

We still don’t have a name for it which is one of the more perplexing, under-studied aspects. The process is often called fomenting which refers to when it starts happening within you. Other people call it Alteration and there’s an Urban Dictionary word, “Clarking,” which I bet you can figure out the origins of.

We learn to dream about it happening to us.

We learn to fear it happening to us.

In the cafes and offices and bars and apartments, everyone talks about the why. It could drive you insane, the why. But how long has it been, and still there is no answer. We begin to feel the pointlessness of looking for answers. In our city, we accept things.

You must.

It’s the outsiders who obsess over the why. We talk on the phone with them, we visit them, and it probably comes up more often than any other subject. There is a particular and annoying subtlety about how people seem to believe we are keeping the reasons for all this secret somehow. Like it’s a city-wide conspiracy that has lasted since 1955 …

The fact is, no one knows, or at least, no one has ever publicly stated a verifiable reason.

Immigrants who come to the city, as you well know, have two options: be accepted or not. We have no control over that. There’s no halfway. No appeals. Either you just wake up seven days later, and you’re outside the city limits spontaneously, or you don’t and you’re accepted. It has never been determined whether a Potential is behind that or if it just happens. Most of us vote the latter.

If you are ejected from the city, whatever way it occurs, you wake up at midnight just outside the city limits, past the bridges in to the island. It’s always midnight when it happens.

In any case, since 1955, there have been 53 immigrants who have gained access to Potentiality, which is a small number to some people, but again, no one has ever determined any significance to this. It’s just speculation, all those things you hear.

We all look at this as a wonderful way to live because no matter the risks, something monumental could happen to you on any given morning, something universe-shattering, like a lottery played out by gods, and how many people get to live that way?

You can go through city life in terror, if you want. Same situation. It’s just a matter of perspective.

On Wednesday, we saw part of the city reshaped where one of us—unknown—moved, or we could say smashed several 1930s luxury highrises together. They now form a kind of beautiful pile downtown. They are livable. People still reside there, regardless, if you can believe it. Whoever did it just hoisted the structures up and set them back down again, all together, rather than on different sides of the I-87. No one saw an agent actively working at this. It was probably done invisibly or by dint of mental effort.

One gets used to such randomness.

The city is often torn up and reworked overnight.

There are the religious nuts, of course. They claim divine intervention. They call the process divinification, too. Most of us find that irritating. There are Satanists and weirder cults around, too, but we steer clear of such parties.

In the center of the city, there is a massive device that looks like a clock and it marks when the transformations occur, when they are identified. It is a clock, in fact, an Art Deco-looking thing, but built into it are these huge wooden tiles, painted with interesting designs like suns and moons and Atlas and Apollo and Athena and all kinds of Olympian this-and-that which signify what powers have been assumed and a separate tile near it shows you what part of the city it occurred in. So you have a tile that flips over symbolizing ability and then another that flips over stating the borough, like, two bright suns on a tile and another that says “Broadin” means someone living in Broadin has the quality of manipulating fire.

The City Planner’s office runs it.

They don’t let you know the names of people if they can avoid it, but you know the tabloids. If their reporters figure it out, it’s printed on Page 3, or there’s a directory online that’s updated every night, but everyone knows it’s unreliable.

We heard of a young guy in Delphia, in one of those low-rent houses under the bridge, who gained strength. His was the strongest ever clocked, and he could move intensely fast, too, though it generated this weird and intolerable heat all around him. He was a college drop-out, had to take care of a sick mother, and he hurt himself in a skyscraper construction job, so for awhile, it was an amazing boost to him. He was a good-looking guy, kind of big and sturdy, really looked the part. He put up the entire building himself in a day. The people he used to work with loved him. Thing of it was, they didn’t get paid much for the job because it had been budgeted as a two-year project, and he finished it for them, clarked it right into existence in one day. Still, his co-workers liked him. There were youtube videos everywhere of them taking him out for beer and pizza, slapping him on the back. As it turns out, he couldn’t save his mother, though. Healing power, which occurs in the populace, is rare and many of those with the Potentiality don’t come forward because they get overwhelmed, so no one helped out this college drop-out hardhat guy. We heard he got half the money for building the skyscraper and he’s doing okay financially now.

How these things work, that power went to another guy across the river…

How these things work, that power went to another guy across the river in Tawback, and he was not such a pleasant individual. He killed the three guys he lived with, migrant workers who did food service of some kind, and ripped them up pretty bad. Body parts were left all over the place. He had been on drugs, meth we think it was, right when the abilities kicked in, and his body just didn’t deal with it well. He ran through the streets such that no one could get a good fix on him. It was so fast it was like a series of hot colorful blurs, but the police didn’t need to go for him: he seemed to run himself to death. Weirdest thing.

Did you know they’re trying to sell us on insurance you can buy to cover the damage you cause UTP (under the power) in case it happens to you?

We don’t know if it’s selling or not.

A lot of these people buy the body armor. It’s not like those juvenile comicbooks, the way they picture that. It’s like SWAT team material you wear. Black or red or blue, but it’s very basic, very cop-like. A lot of us wonder how that works, you know, if you maybe act more like a good person simply because you went ahead and purchased the hero gear. It’s got to affect your mind a bit, right?

People say power corrupts, and we know that’s true, living in a place like this, but consider that most of us in the city, we behave well, we do our part, we try to help, if not in a heroic way, at least a helpful way, at least opposing those who abuse their capabilities, and many of us would say that such a fact speaks to the way that a narrative shapes who we are, who we want to be.

After all, we have all read the comic books. We want to be good. We want to be valued. We want to be heroes.

A lot of us here, we consider that profound.

There are so many stories, some of which never even get written down. At least 20 or 30 authors per season come into town hoping to chronicle all of it, to create an encyclopedia of the powers, but they always fail. Too much to know, too many secrets. On the other hand, maybe there’s someone out there tracking them down, eliminating their ambition, one way or the other, so the stories never get told in their entirety for some purpose. Who can be sure.

A couple stories that ought to be more popular occurred on the South side. A Black woman, young, beautiful, but very poor, a single mother, she manifested a Potential for reading minds, but only for children. If you were over the age of eleven, she had no abilities with you. Aside from that, she could know anything by taking it from your mind. This seemed like a useless power until a four year old wandered off and got lost, and by working on her talent, this Black gal was able to expand her Potential, and track the kid via his thought patterns. The four year old belonged to a millionaire trucking magnate, who paid her a sizeable fee. She kept the ability for five years, longer than most people we know. Before it left her altogether, she heard music in the minds of twin infants in Foette Park, and remembered the tune which became a well-known nursery song.

Another tale from that same area of the city involved two tech developers, some men who lived together as somewhat hostile roommates in a very cold, sterile, silent-treatment kind of existence from what we gather. No one is sure if they once had a deeper personal relationship. They had bought a rundown house in a bad neighborhood and renovated it into a magnificent space, causing resentment with neighbors. The place was supposed to be an office but they couldn’t retain their staff, and ended up staying there alone.

The efficacy manifested within both of them was a teleportation skill, and there were rumors they used this to get back at poorer residents who had complained about the gentrification of their neighborhood, slipping in and out of homes and causing violence very quickly. It was never proven.

But their skillset came with a kind of curse. After a few weeks, wherever they willed themselves to be, they would arrive spontaneously, and then move in a progressively slower state, as if time was running down for them. It was a warped but arresting sight: they would move in extreme slow motion, and always with their clothes and hair being blown back powerfully, as if in a driving wind, even indoors. It would take hours for them to return to normal.

They went all over the world. People took pictures of them in their bizarre state of slowness. It would have been somewhat comical had it not been for their growing dislike for each other. Eventually they got into a fight at home, teleporting toward the other to attack, but misjudging distance, they collided, enmeshing flesh to flesh and bone to bone, right at the instant the powers began to fade. They found their dead fused bodies in that part of Spain that had been seeking independence.

There are thousands of weird little tales like this. In fact, there are not a few armchair social scientists who theorize that the Potentiality within the city brings with it an equally random set of curses. The idea is, just as the city grants abilities randomly, so too does it curse certain people who live here.

Agatha Tarterman is a case in point. She was an elderly woman who gained efficacy in traveling through matter. She did the same thing as hundreds of other people in the past who briefly gained that same power. She robbed a bank by walking through its walls into the safe. Some banks still do not have a standing offer to whoever manifests the ability to restrain others, so these Savings and Loans just use standard security officers. Agatha evaded them and simply moved through an area where they could not follow.

But later, her ability metamorphosed as sometimes happens, and she found herself unable to move easily, hunched over as if by a huge burden, until she collapsed to the floor, barely able to lift a finger. The autopsy later showed her bones had solidified into a gold alloy. The bones were on display at the Hammerschmidt until someone went through the museum walls—and stole them.

Some occurrences in the city are poetic but not nearly so amusing. There was the time a few street gang youths gained both flight and telekinesis, and wreaked havoc against their rivals across town. It couldn’t have been ten months later, the other side of town received those same powers, and family members of the opposing gang came calling to exact revenge. Another time, a cop received the efficacy of granting other Potentialities to 5 other individuals; he handed out strengths and mindcontrols to some of his partners, and for three weeks, they became probably the worst criminals the city ever knew.

On at least two occasions, the abilities re-occurred in the same bloodline, though separated by four decades. A salesman who could grow four times his size did nothing with his attribute but walk around and get stared at; 42 years later, his grandson received the same random power, and, true to his family, did nothing whatsoever with it.

Other Potentials have more predictable ends. Those blessed with astounding marksmanship nearly always join the police force; those with genius skills have standing offers at both tech firms and universities, where those places have welcoming revolving doors; those who can affect the weather often find each other and get together, aiding farming in the surrounding towns.

The greatest pain lies in when the power leaves you. Significant others, husbands and wives suffer terribly when this occurs. These people have known the highest of highs, and are then left devastatingly ordinary. It destroys marriages. It causes suicides.

It must be an unconscionable difficulty to one day wake up and have all your efficacy lost. Worse, you might look across the room and see your wife or your little sister gaining the very capability you once held in your own grasp.

We always know the chances of such Potentialities coming back to us are so rare as to be hopeless. There are support groups, naturally. We do what we can.

We as a general rule are more interested in the future, in protecting the city from the roiling chaos this state of affairs will inevitably cause. We are looking into a dynamic new method for locating and incarcerating those who gain Potentiality, at least until their efficacy period ends. We have a new associate with a proven technique for this. These methods are under lock and key for now. It cannot be discussed yet.

We hope this has been educational for you as you enter a city that is soon to be altered in dramatic and yet safer and life-affirming ways for every person of every kind within its borders. Enjoy your time here.

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