By Cynthia Cheng

 

In 3002, poverty, disease, and violent crime do not exist. In this futuristic era, two twelve-year-old twins named Elsie and Everest attend a boarding school for clones while their parents are away on a secret mission. At the boarding school, Elsie and Everest encounter distrust from their clone peers who are unaccustomed to being around natural-born children. During the story, the twins travel back in time and make contact with present-day Silicon Valley.

 

Such is the plotline for The Basker Twins in the 31^st Century: Danger at the Clone Academy, a new children’s book written by Kristi Wright.

 

“I’ve always written since I was a child. When I was growing up, my favorite books were science fantasy, like Lord of the Rings and CS Lewis. I liked lots of different books- there are other genres that I love too,” says Wright, a Santa Clara resident.

 

Before breaking into the children’s book genre, Wright liked to write adult romance. But her young daughter wanted to read what Wright wrote, and Wright didn’t feel that her daughter was at the right age to read romance. So she started to write a children’s book.

 

“The book is set in the future and the future seems superficially like a perfect world, a utopia. There’s no crime, no disease, the sky is clean,” Wright says of her vision for the future in her fiction. “The future is a much more blended society. Everybody would be mixed- you wouldn’t tell what race someone was because there’d be so much blending of people it wouldn’t be so obvious what background you were. Since there isn’t an obvious race issue in the future, I still explored the idea that people can still have prejudices but by using the clones versus the non-clones. I didn’t change human nature. I just changed the situation. People still have pre-conceived notions about others.”

 

Wright also incorporates Silicon Valley into the book when the children time travel back into the past through a “time travel field trip.”

 

“The kids have a totally different world that they are used to so when they come back here, they see our world with different eyes. They go to places like a pancake breakfast house and The Tech Museum- for them all that technology is ancient,” Wright says.

 

In her efforts to make her vision for a disease-free future a reality, Wright is donating 75% of the royalties from The Basker Twins in the 31^st Century: Danger at the Clone Academy to the Friedreich’s Ataxia Research Alliance and the Muscular Dystrophy Association, two organizations that support research for treating and reversing Friedreich’s ataxia.

   

“Friedreich’s ataxia is a life-shortening degenerative neuromuscular disorder. My daughter has a really good friend who has it. He goes to school in Santa Clara. It’s a very rare disease. It’s something we probably would have never known about if it wasn’t for her friend.”

 

Visit www.baskertwins.com to purchase The Basker Twins in the 31^st Century: Danger at the Clone Academy.