The Bold World of Marcus Wachira
All photos courtesy of Marcus Wachira
Before he’d even graduated high school, Marcus Wachira had taught himself how to draw, then drafted 500 pages of his debut illustrated sci-fi novel. The first installment of an ambitious series, Be Bold is a graphic novel set in a universe with sentient robots, time travel, and plenty of familiar pop culture references.
Now that Wachira (’22, ENG’24) is about to graduate college with a degree in mechanical engineering, he has self-published a prequel novella to the series and hopes to publish Be Bold by 2025. Many grads would take this time to rest and recuperate. Not Wachira. In fact, he says, this is just the beginning of the story.
“I never thought, I’m going to write a book one day—I’m writing a book now,” he says. “There may be days where I don’t feel like writing, and I think that’s fine as long as I keep doing it. I want to do it for the rest of my life.”
Building a World
Be Bold (the title of the series and its first installment) started, as many things do, with a girl. Specifically, the enigmatic, smiling woman on the cover of Duran Duran’s 1982 album, Rio. Designed by Malcolm Garrett and painted by illustrator Patrick Nagel—whose “Nagel women” have come to symbolize 1980s glamour—the elegant face drew Wachira in, then taunted him with her mysterious origins.
“I couldn’t find anything about her, so I just started creating all these ideas of who this person could be, based on Patrick’s background and how he would go about his art,” he recalls. “And then that became the story—I added elements from my own life and eventually I had this whole novel in my head.”
Wachira started working on Be Bold as a high school freshman, and the story begins in a world that reflected his own. The biracial protagonist, 15-year-old Cy Manorhaven, feels alienated from his peers, until one day something magical happens.
“He comes home after this homecoming dance where he gets rejected, and there’s this beeping coming from the basement,” says Wachira. The device turns out to be a talking watch, “a sentient device that claims to be all-knowing.”
“From there, it just becomes absolute sci-fi craziness, with time travel societies and different elements of American pop culture,” he adds. “Cy feels like he doesn’t belong anywhere in the world, but the watch shows him the world is his.”
By the time Wachira entered college, he was ready to edit Be Bold and begin working on the prequel, The Lashe Contingent, about the villain in the series. He wrote the novella while studying abroad in London and published it in 2023.
“There were professors who believed in me and talked to me about [the series] before they even read a page or knew what the story was about,” he says. “They’ve been so encouraging throughout it all.”
During his time at CGS, Wachira was able to devise two directed studies devoted to drafting and editing his novel and studying the science fiction genre with faculty members Regina Hansen and Joelle Renstrom, master and senior lecturers of rhetoric, respectively. He cites their mentorship as particularly impactful. He made an impact on them as well.
“I was supposed to be the one teaching Marcus, but I think really it’s been the other way around,” says Renstrom. “Every time we talk, he mentions how much he loves what he’s working on and how he just can’t stop writing. As a professional writer and teacher, I think I’ve become accustomed to seeing writing as a job, not as a joy. Marcus has reminded me how important the latter is, and I can’t thank him enough for that.”
A fellow sci-fi fan, Renstrom codeveloped with Wachira a course reading list that included Mary Shelley, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury, among others.
“Every Wednesday we would meet up, and it was the coolest class ever,” says Wachira. “It was kind of a dream come true.”
Wachira kept adding personal elements to Be Bold as the series progressed, creating a world with a blend of the fantastical and the familiar. Once he began his studies at the College of Engineering, he was able to flesh out the technological scaffolding of his sci-fi devices. Characters would also encounter some of his favorite musicians—Mötley Crüe and Logic are two major inspirations—when they traveled back or forward in time.
“When Cy goes to the ’80s, he would see references to [Mötley Crüe] around,” he says. “There are so many Easter eggs I could put in, and it’s a challenge because you can’t add everything.”
Early responses to Be Bold and The Lashe Contingent couldn’t be better, Wachira says. Sections of Be Bold won a Best Literary Award from CGS after running in the school’s literary magazine, The Chimaerid, and at one point The Lashe Contingent reached Amazon’s top-20 list for books on time travel. Wachira will participate in a CGS Coffee House event on March 28, 2024, where he’ll sign copies of Lashe and promote the series he envisions; he’s also in talks with Barnes & Noble @ Boston University and other local bookstores about adding his work to their shelves. In the meantime, he’s looking for an agent for Be Bold and working on the series’ second installment, Don’t Go Away Mad.
Since the day he discovered Rio, Wachira has been defined by his determination. He cleared his first hurdle—learning to draw—in his earliest drafting stages (“I don’t even look at YouTube lessons; it’s just me and a No. 2 pencil, figuring it out.”), and his illustrations now show the fruits of intense practice with their intricate details and delicate rendering. Wachira also tackled a study abroad experience in London, an internship, and four years of college while fine-tuning Be Bold at every spare opportunity. Sometimes that meant waking up at 5 am every day to work on the draft, or completing 70 pages in a week and a half.
“I’ll always look back and be like, That was my quote-unquote college experience,” he says. “Once you start writing, crazy things start happening, and that’s what makes it so much fun and rewarding.”
Wachira will sign copies of The Lashe Contingent at CGS’ Art Show and Coffee House event in the CGS lobby on March 28, 2024, from 3 pm to 5 pm.