DEMENTION HITS THE ROAD!

Here at Demention we're packing our bags and our books (but hopefully not our wellies) for the Hay Book Festival (Friday May 31st 5.30pm) and the Edinburgh International Book Festival (Wed 21st August am & pm) for DARK, DANGEROUS & DYSTOPIAN debates. Come and meet us - we’d love you to join in. Here’s a taster of what we’re all about...

JULIE BERTAGNA 

A boy and girl, oceans apart, fates entwined, fight for a future in a flooded world. 

Julie says, ‘An SOS from islanders at the mercy of rising seas on the other side of the world sparked Exodus, Zenith and Aurora. I kept thinking, what if that happens to us? How would we cope in a climate-changed world? So I began an apocalyptic tale of young survivors on a storm-ravaged Earth.

I set my story 100 years in the future - then climate change kicked in for real, affecting millions. The floods, tornadoes and storms are unnervingly close to my imagined world. Published in over 20 countries, I love that they’ve made lots of shortlists and won awards (even Green awards in the UK & US) but the most brilliant thing for me is that young readers across the world write and tell me how the books have made them think about the future - though some teachers and librarians in the USA have blasted them as too dangerous...’  

Why do we enjoy dystopian and apocalyptic stories when the real world is scary enough? Are they a thrilling escape? Dangerous? Can they inspire hope and change? 

Watch EXODUS TRAILER 

TERI TERRY

Imagine you’ve been SLATED - your memory wiped clean and you don’t know why. 

Teri says, ‘Slated grew from a dream in the dark murk of my unconscious, so it wasn't a plan to write a dystopian novel at all. But I think I end up writing about my obsessions, things that worry me. Whether I want to, or not. I didn't set out to consider big questions, but the story took me places, and the questions were there.’

If a young person commits a terrible, violent crime, why did they do it? Are people born bad, or made that way? If someone commits a crime as a reaction to horrible things that have happened to them, is it their fault? Should they even be punished? But if they are dangerous to everyone else, you can't just let them go...

CLAIRE MERLE

In a society divided into Pures and Crazies, a DNA test can destroy your life forever.  

Claire says, ‘I don’t write to be controversial, but I do hope to make readers think. My debut novel The Glimpse addresses mental health issues from a rather different dynamic than is more common in fiction. Some readers have completely embraced and understood the book in the way I intended, but interpretations have been wide and in some cases very surprising. 

I didn’t set out to be provocative. I just wanted to write about a subject that concerns me deeply – the direction western society is headed in terms of the perception, diagnosis and treatment of mental health problems. I’m not a particularly confrontational person, but I could easily end up having a heated debate about a pint of milk...' 

Are dystopias so popular because they take risks, exploring all kinds of possible futures in challenging ways? Should there be boundaries in YA fiction? How far dare authors go?

From the Hay Festival Programme...book here:

‘Claire Merle’s The Glimpse was welcomed as a grippingly readable and deeply unsettling British dystopian thriller. Her new book The Fall will be out in June. Claire’s website

Teri Terry’s Slated, a dark psychological thriller, was published to great acclaim last year and has now been followed by the engrossing, fast paced Fractured. Teri’s website
 
Julie Bertagna’s award-winning Exodus is a brilliantly imagined story of love and survival in a climate-changed world. Zenith and Aurora complete this highly-acclaimed, classic dystopian trilogy.’ Julie’s website

Seige by Sarah Mussi review by Julienne Durber

Siege by Sarah Mussi tells the story of Leah Jackson, a sixteen year old girl who finds herself trapped when her school is overrun by a gang of gun-wielding students, one of whom is her brother.  Told from Leah’s point of view we follow her as she rescues her wounded friends and tries to find a way to escape from the school.

From the cover design, which if it hasn’t featured in the pages of Creative Review I’d be surprised, the reader is fired into an uncompromisingly harsh situation.  The action zips along at just the right rate.  Leah’s internal voice is excelently written and really connects us with the claustrophobia and the harsh decisions she has to face.

Now I remember having a conversation with a friend about the Tarantino film Pulp Fiction after it first came out.  She decided that it was an average film that had been chopped up and re-edited in a funny order to make it seem interesting.  I argued that she was missing the point and that the re-editing was a vital part of the intertwined ‘pulp’ story feel.

But I fell into that exact trap when I started reading Seige.  In fact after twenty pages I was convinced I was going to call this review ‘Die Hard meets Columbine’ (and part of me hopes that was the phrase Mussi used to pitch the book to her agent).

Die Hard meets Columbine

It is undeniable how close to Die Hard this book is.  The violence is visceral and present from the first page.  Leah is caught unawares but escapes as others are captured.  The Nakatomi building is the school, the terrorists are the gang, and the twist … well, that would be giving the game away - if you have seen the film you'll spot the similarity.

And when Leah found herself having to negotiate a corridor strewn with broken glass, in my head she had morphed into a young, female Bruce Willis.  The bald head really didn’t suit her!

I was the one missing the point.

It doesn’t matter that certain elements are familiar.  This is a totally immersive story that raises real questions about society, community responsibility and personal choices.  Leah’s situation forces the reader to question what they would do in the same situation.  And the fact that there have been incidents like this in the news adds a truly chilling edge.  This is a book about today.  Society.  Right now.

Which is why the dystopian thread was the one thing I didn’t like.  It seemed to detract from the purity of the situation – terrified student against terrorising gang.  The events in the school would have had greater impact without it, and it ended up feeling like a device added to allow certain things to be rounded off blamelessly in the last chapter.

The actual ending, however, was excellent.

I don’t think that this is a genre defining book, though I predict some copycat titles are flying towards the shelves as I’m typing this, but it’s certainly genre influencing.

Read and enjoy.  Yippie kay ay …

Royalty free images from freedigitaphotos.net

Jeff Norton, Author of Metawars 2.0:The Dead are Rising - interview and review by Julienne Durber

Ahead of the release of Metawars 3.0: Battle Of The Immortal
I'm interviewing Jeff Norton, author of the Metawars books
Scroll down to the end of the interview is my review of
Metawars 2.0: The Dead are Rising.

(To read my review of METAWARS 1: Fight For The Future click here.)

Jeff has kindly donated a signed copy of
Metawars 2.0:The Dead are Rising
Leave a comment to be entered into the prize draw, tweet and repost on FB to be entered twice more
(you know the deal.)
Giveaway closes on 1st June. Winner's name will be posted here.

Welcome to Demention, Jeff, and thank you for agreeing to be interviewed about Metawars 2.0:The Dead are Rising - a book I enjoyed a great deal.

Thanks for having me!  I love the Demention blog, so this is a real honour!

When I read book 1, Fight for the Future, I felt that it relied quite heavily on the technological elements and was worried that the technology it references would start to feel dated.  In book 2, The Dead are Rising, the story seems to breathe more and we are drawn further into the real world, and while the technology is still present you touch much more on the characters and their situations.  Was this a conscious change of direction, or had you always planned it that way?

The series is anchored in technology, specifically the interface between the real and virtual worlds, but that’s not what the books are about. For me, the entire four-book MetaWars saga is a coming of age story for Jonah and Sam.  I want the reader to feel as though we’re growing up alongside both of them.

In the first book, I had to set up the rules of both worlds.  But once those rules are established and understood, I was free to focus more on the characters and their growth and development. 

 

Without giving too much away to those who haven't yet read it, The Dead are Rising treads some quite sinister paths and looks further at the issues of mortality and loss that you touched upon in the first book.  How important do you feel it is to underpin your stories with such weighty subjects?

MetaWars is about choice. It’s about choice and consequences, which is fundamentally about morality.  I don’t shy away from weighty, serious issues because the characters are grappling with defining their own moral code across two very confusing worlds. In this book, I tackle everything from gang membership to suicide and explore one recurring question: does the end justify the means? 

I want my readers to always question and interrogate their own moral code as the books evolve.

And have you had to tone down any of the darker aspects to suit your readership?

If anything, I’ve dialled up the drama and with it the terrifying consequences to certain choices that the characters make.  This book, The Dead Are Rising, is essentially the exploration of the chilling consequences to one impulsive choice that Jonah made at the end of the first book.  He chooses to save the ‘life’ of his dead father, and the entire population of the digital dead.  In doing so, he unwittingly grants the dead a new form of consciousness.  This book investigates how far someone who knows they are dead (in this case, Jonah’s father) will go to be alive again and how far someone who mourns for the dead will go to keep them ‘alive.’

In terms of the audience, I think younger readers can handle a lot more than we adults give them credit for. The very essence of adolescence, the process of moving from childhood to adulthood, is an incredibly dark process as your childish beliefs are (sometimes painfully) replaced by real-world experiences.  I think young readers can relate to this experience, and older readers can remember it viscerally – which is why I’ve always maintained that MetaWars is for readers aged 9 to 90!

You also play very effectively with the morality of the characters, leaving the reader to decide the merits of each character's situation and the decisions they make.  Did you find it hard to stay away from the traditional 'authority figures = bad, rebels = good' dystopian paradigm?

It was a very deliberate choice because I think it’s more honest. Each of us is the star of our own movie and we look at the world through our own moral lens. Every terrorist thinks he’s a freedom fighter. Every authoritarian figure believes he’s doing the right thing.  It’s far too easy in contemporary dystopian literature to play into the tropes and conventions, but it’s much more fun to upend those conventions – and much more reflective of human nature.

In The Dead are Rising, even more so than in Fight for the Future, you look at the negative side of people relying on the Metasphere as an escape from reality.  Do you worry that the virtual experiences we have today could have a similar negative effect as they become more advanced?

I’m no Luddite and I love technology, but yes, I am very concerned that as the world turns online for connection and communication that we risk alienating ourselves from the real world.  I’ve based MetaWars on the ten 'meta trends' that I believe are shaping our future and meta trend #10 is the what I call the 'virtual bubble'.  It’s the idea that whenever we engage with the internet, we enter a virtual bubble – effectively leaving the real world behind. You see then whenever someone checks their iPhone while walking down the street, they’re suddenly not paying attention to the real world and thus susceptible to bumping into someone, walking into the path of a bus, or having their £500 portable computer nicked.  Author William Gibson called it ‘cyberspace’ and I do think that the more time we spend away from the real world, the less time we spend thinking about or caring about the real issues facing our real world. 

And finally, can you tell me a little about book 3?  When will it be out?  And can you say anything about the fourth book?

If book 2 is about the rise of the digital dead, then book 3 is about the war between the living and the dead. It pits Jonah against his father in a very emotional struggle over the rights of the living and the ‘reborn’ digital dead. It’s the most emotional book yet, and I guarantee will make you cry at the end!  MetaWars 3.0: Battle Of The Immortal publishes 1^stMay, 2013 from Orchard Books.

I’m currently writing the fourth and final book now and it’s called The Freedom Frontier.  It’s about survival and sacrifice. I don’t want to give too much away, but when the world suddenly changes on Jonah and Sam, they find themselves alone in a terrifying new reality.  The book explores the nature of their relationship against the backdrop of a threat they never saw coming.

Jeff Norton, thank you very much.

Thank you! It’s been a real pleasure to catch up.

To find more information about Jeff Norton visit www.jeffnorton.com

find him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/thejeffnorton
and Facebook: www.facebook.com/thejeffnorton

And my review: Metawars 2.0: The Dead are Rising follows directly on from book 1, Fight for the Future, but Norton takes the story to a new level.  Jonah Delacroix is still embroiled in the battle for control of the Metasphere - the virtual world that the internet has become - but his journey takes him to emotionally dark places where he has to question both the consequences of decisions made in the first book and the motivations of both his allies and his enemies.

As well as expanding the characters established in Fight for the Future, The Dead are Rising draws us much further into the real world that Norton has created and seeds planted in the first book begin to blossom.  This extremely believable world provides a realistic, three dimensional anchor for the Metasphere that was perhaps lacking in Fight for the Future.

I only liked Fight for the Future, but I love The Dead are Rising and can't wait for MetaWars 3.0: Battle Of The Immortal.

Don't forget to leave a comment for your chance to win a signed copy of Metawars 2.0: The Dead are Rising

 

A Fractured book birthday!

by Teri Terry

Today is the official publication date of Fractured in the UK, the sequel to Slated: time for some more happy dancing!

Isn't it pretty? (in a dystopian kind of way :O)

To celebrate, over on my website you can enter for a chance to have a character in the third book named after you; there are also copies of Fractured up for grabs. This is on teriterry.com here.

I've also blogged on book 2 trials and tribulations, and celebrations, too, over on Notes from the Slushpile. This one is here. 

BEACONS:stories for our not so distant future

                                  Review by Julie Bertagna

Basking in last spring's unexpected heatwave, we joked that global warming wasn’t so bad, after all. This year, a dramatic Arctic ice melt has exported a long, bitter cold that feels like Narnia’s endless winter, where Christmas never comes. And now Arran has plunged into a mini Ice age as the jet stream that gives the UK a relatively mild climate, and makes Arran’s island climate mild enough for palm trees to line Brodick Bay, has gone awol. An email from the wonderful children’s author Alison Prince describes a snowed-in community, with emergency generators breaking down if too many washing machines are switched on at once, a scenario uncannily like a scene from post-apocalyptic fiction. Even the bees are in trouble, thanks to us, and that means we’re in big trouble too.

Having written a popular YA ‘climate change’ trilogy, I’ve been struck by the reluctance of mainstream adult publishing to explore such an urgent, imaginatively rich theme. There seems to be a nervousness about how to tackle such a big idea, how adult readers would react. So I couldn’t wait to get my hands on BEACONS, an anthology of ‘for our not so distant future’ with stories from some of my very favourite authors - Joanne Harris, AL Kennedy, Alastair Gray, Janice Galloway, Lawrence Norfolk and many more talents.  

BEACONS is an unsettling read in these times - a kaleidoscope of visions, flights of fancy and warnings; poignant, tragic, bleakly comic. In every story, urgent undercurrents tug, dislocate or rudely shove us beyond the lie that our lives are immune from the vast global changes that are already happening. Many end with the feeling of standing on a precipice - and a sense of a powerful story’s unique ability to simultaneously fire the imagination and emotions, while sparking exciting new interconnections in the neural pathways of the brain.   

These are ‘real’ horror stories about the biggest issue of our age by some of our very best writers, and for that reason BEACONS deserves to be on the shelves of every bookshop, secondary school and public library in the land; to be read, reviewed and debated widely. Yet that seems unlikely. In the same week reports suggest schools in England will have to downgrade/ erase discussion of climate change in the curriculum (though thankfully not in Scotland), Beacons' editor Gregory Norminton tweeted that no one at the BBC will touch the anthology. Has climate change literally become too hot to handle, censored, too controversial for debate? 

A few years ago, I wrote a story called The Imagineers for a 2020 project, inspired by think-tank workshops where business executives and creatives met to brainstorm future challenges. Already, in 2013, my vision of Arctic Scotland, with icebergs in the Clyde, feels all too scarily real... but what stayed with me most of all was a sense that imagineering a brave new future needs all our talents, and that stories can help us to see where we are and envision a way forward. 

Carpe diem is the old saying: seize the day. But that’s only the first part. Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero is the full quote - seize the day, putting as little trust as possible in the ones to come. 

The future is unforeseen so do not leave it to chance, is what the ancient warning means. Seize the day and do everything in your power to make your future better. 

Grab a copy of BEACONS. Slip one to a young person. In the age of social media, censorship is a fence we can all slip under. Let’s all seize the debate about our future.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think... 

*You can read my 2020 story, THE IMAGINEERS, and others, here. 

*BEACONS is edited by Gregory Norminton (Twitter @GDRNorminton). Buy it in your local bookshop or on Amazon here.

Cover Reveal 'The Fall' and Giveaway!

by Claire Merle

THE FALL has a cover!

Finally, I can show you the cover for THE FALL - the second and final part in my Dystopian thriller, The Glimpse Duet.


To celebrate, my publishers have organised a special offer for The Glimpse on Amazon Kindle! 

For a limited time only (2 weeks I think, but it may be shorter) you can purchase The Glimpse for only 99 pence, HERE.

As an added celebration, I'm giving away the FIRST advanced copy of The Fall! Actually, this hasn't even come off the print yet so you will be the first to read it. As soon as I receive advanced copies, I'll be sending it to the winner!
The giveaway is international. To enter to win the signed copy of The Fall all you have to do is tweet:

THE GLIMPSE is on special offer on Amazon Kindle! @ClaireMerle http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Glimpse-ebook/dp/B007TVAOCM/ref=tmm_kin_title_0

The giveaway will run until Thursday 4th APRIL 2013. So feel free to tweet any time between now and then! On the 4th April, I'll pick a winner at random from all the tweets that have @ClaireMerle in them, so please don't leave that out. (If you are the winner and you would prefer a signed copy of The Glimpse, that can be arranged!)

AND HERE'S THE COVER BLURB FOR 'THE FALL':

In the not-so-distant future, society has been divided into Pures and Crazies according to the results of a DNA test. But Ana has uncovered dangerous evidence that the tests are fake.

Determined to expose the lies, Ana escapes her Pure Community and makes it to the Enlightenment Project. Back in the arms of Cole, nothing is simple. Some believe her presence in the protest camp jeopardises their safety, others believe she is the Angel from their prophetic Writings . . .

As Ana struggles with her past and her identity, she must take greater and greater risks for the truth. Threatened with losing everyone she cares about, can she finish what she’s started?

Hope you like the cover!