After writing four novels that failed to attract an agent or publisher, Constantine Singer, a Los Angeles high school teacher who lives in Echo Park, was open to suggestions.

That fourth novel, he knew, was a really good book. It earned high praise from a would-be agent who with deep regrets ultimately passed on it – not for any lack of interest but for the saturation of the marketplace for a noir-esque novel, he says.

And then his wife Araidne Shaffer, whose acting career had brought the couple to L.A. from Seattle nearly two decades earlier, offered a simple suggestion that would change everything.

In “Strange Days,” an Echo Park teenager is drawn into a battle to save Earth from an alien invasion. It’s the first book published by Constantine Singer, a Los Angeles high school teacher who lives in Echo Park. (Courtesy of the publisher)

Constantine Singer is the author of “Strange Days,” a young-adult sci-fi novel in which an Echo Park teen joins the time-traveling resistance fighting an alien invasion of Earth. (Photo by Kizziah Singer)

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In Constantine Singer’s YA novel “Strange Days,” protagonist Alex Mata, a teenager living in Echo Park, is confronted by large, black, insect-like and very deadly aliens. A friend who read the book created this illustration as a gift for Singer, who says it looks close to how he’d imagine the alien to be in this early scene with Alex. (Illustration courtesy of P.J. Clausen)



“My wife said, ‘Why don’t you write in YA [young adult]? You know kids better than anyone I know,’” says Singer, who for the last nine years has taught at Alain LeRoy Locke College Preparatory Academy in Central Los Angeles.

He opened up the Google doc where he kept random thoughts and ideas for future writing.

“There was one on there about what if a kid got in trouble for putting a picture in a time capsule that he could have never taken,” Singer says.

Then he thought about all of the audiobooks he’d listened in an effort to finally understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

The threads wove together in his imagination, the boy and time and the impossible ways in which they might intertwine.

“Strange Days,” is the YA sci-fi novel with which Singer debuted as a published author this month. It’s the story of Alex Mata, an Echo Park teenager drawn into a world-threatening fight between the aliens called Locusts, who want to exploit Earth as a factory farm, and those who oppose them — a mix of young humans and the Gentry, benevolent aliens fighting to save humanity from extinction.

Though Singer says he couldn’t deliver a good explanation of Einstein’s theory today if a Locust was standing in his doorway, he did spend considerable effort creating a framework for the time travel that Alex and his compatriots use in their struggles against the bug-like aliens eyeing the planet.

“Doing time travel as a concept in sci-fi is really hard to do without being stupid,” he says. “I was desperate to avoid that.”

So he scratched the idea of traveling into the past, an aspect of time travel for which there are few theoretical options and pitfalls all around.

“I made the decision to keep the past immutable, and that sort of became a theme in the book, which is ‘seen time is truth’ – once time has been seen it’s locked in, it’s permanent.

“The idea that the past is locked in becomes the whole engine behind the book,” Singer says. “It’s more metaphysical than physics, but it’s more appropriate than to try to be incredibly accurate.”

Echo Park, where he and his wife settled in 1999 because it was where they could afford a home, provided a setting, and his work with the students at Locke offered the DNA from which to build characters.

“I love the world in which I exist,” Singer says. “The places that I spend my time I do so by choice. I spend a lot of time wandering around and looking at places and thinking about how I can incorporate them.

“I really like taking areas and places that I know and making them ‘more.’” he says. “Adding a layer that could be but isn’t.”

His home turf in L.A., and how it has changed in his time there, also provided a theme that runs through the book.

“The whole book work’s as an allegory of gentrification,” he says of the ways in which the interests of the aliens in “Strange Days” are a fictional mirror to the changes Echo Park has experienced. “I think as I was writing it I was working through my issues about having been a part of that.”

Characters such as Alex and his Echo Park buddies and Corinne, an African-American teen he meets in the resistance, are also reflections of the kids he’s taught or sees around his neighborhood, young characters from backgrounds that aren’t all that often seen in YA sci-fi and fantasy books.

“These are the characters that invented themselves as I started writing,” Singer says. “And once they invented themselves it became a very intentional choice: Create as authentic a character as I could create as the lead so that my students and kids in the neighborhood would find themselves in the book, which isn’t normally a genre in which they’re represented.”

The kids who volunteered as early readers loved it, and reviewers on Goodreads.com are enthusiastic about Alex and the teens-vs-aliens plot and characters too. Though his 13-year-old daughter Kizziah is not yet among them, having not yet read the book, something she made clear at the book release party in early December through the haiku she wrote and read for her dad: “Your book is one I / have not read at all sorry / I’ve got (stuff) to do.”

Singer says he hopes “Strange Days’ cracks open a door to readers who’ve been left out of books about people like them in the past. While there are many terrific YA novels about people of color by authors of color, he says genre fiction such as the near-future fantasy of “Strange Days” hasn’t seen as many, leaving young readers such as the overwhelmingly Latino and African-American student body at Locke to add books to the list of things from which they often assume society excludes them.

“Their assumption is that they’re not invited,” Singer says. “So it was really important to me to create an invitation: ‘You’re welcome too. These stories can be about you, too.’ “