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

 

Serendipity Strikes

By JULIE BERTAGNA

It was still dark across London. 

I hauled myself off the pre-dawn flight from Glasgow onto the dinky little Docklands Light Railway for a meeting with my publishers. I’d barely slept and spent the short flight in a hazy, waking dream of the futuristic novel I was writing and I still felt deep inside that world. I was at a crucial point in the story. My teenage heroine had just fought her way through a world of death and despair, up into a spectacular ‘sky city’ that rose out of the ruins of a flooded Earth. I was building up that world in my head - to survive in it, Mara had to absorb all of its strangeness, fast, and the reader too.

I’d imagined an empire of cloud-high cities with towers linked by sky trains, where people lived liked gods, by their wits, trading ideas, inventions and stunning technologies while the forgotten world outside rotted and drowned. 

The docklands train swerved around a bend and I jolted wide awake. For a stricken second I felt I’d slipped through a crack in reality into the sleek futuristic city of my imagination.

There, through the window, was my sky city. Giant glass towers soared up out of the dockland waters. Global market data flashed in reels around the skyscrapers, above processions of early traders walking to work through luxurious shopping arcades and entertainment malls. It was as if the plane from Glasgow had landed in my own book.

Global market data flashed around the skyscrapers

It was Canary Wharf. As the train wormed right through the heart of that exclusive trading bubble, my fictional cityscape burst to life in my head. It was a crucial part of the story that would become the Exodus trilogy and sell around the world. Somehow, in that half-dream state, the writing gods had gifted me just what I needed, exactly when I needed it.   

Serendipity strikes when you least expect. It’s like a tap on the shoulder of the creative subconscious from some unfathomable force. Suzanne Collins was half-asleep, channel-hopping between newsreels of the Iraq war and reality TV shows when the idea of The Hunger Games burst upon her. Jo Rowling was trapped on a broken-down train with no book, pen or notebook, nothing but her thoughts, when Harry Potter zapped into her head. 

It’s harder than ever amid the cacophony of social media, deadlines and deal-making, and the echo of your own voice selling your wares, to find a calm space to rummage around in your dreams, wander through doors in your subconscious, triggering impulses and inspirations we don’t really understand. Often it’s in those half-awake moments when your subconscious runs free that serendipity drops you a gift from the universe you can never quite explain. 

When writing my YA novel Soundtrack, a sea-drenched coming-of-age story, I remembered Bobby, a second cousin. He'd seemed godlike to us younger teenage girls; a good-looking charmer and, most amazingly of all, he was a guitarist in a band. He’d punkified his bedroom with cascades of netting hung with iconic album covers and posters. To an impressionable 14 year old from suburbia, it was a rockstar den. I don’t know why I remembered it decades later, but I gave my music-mad character, Finn, a bedroom just like Bobby’s. I also gave Finn a beautiful song, Walk The Last Mile by Scots band Love and Money, to leave to the girl he loves at the end of the novel. 

And this is where the story behind the story turns strange. 

Families fracture. I hadn’t seen Bobby since my early teens. Love and Money are one of my favourite bands and when I'd asked my relatives if their bassist, Bobby Paterson, was our Bobby, the family grapevine said no, couldn’t be, he’d gone off the rails, never got a proper job, fallen in with a bad crowd, got himself in debt... so I didn’t think any more about it. Moody-looking guitarists were ten a penny in Glasgow. Reader, I married one.

Tragically, Love and Money’s Bobby Paterson died, far too young, a few years ago and when I read his press obituary I was doubly gutted. It was our Bobby. The one whose bedroom I’d enshrined in my book. Old-fashioned Scottish values, the family rumour-mill and no doubt a bit of sheer green envy had twisted the truth. No, he hadn’t got a proper job, he’d fallen in with a bunch of musicians and run up music company debts - in one of Scotland’s best-ever bands. And the opening bass line that pulses goosebumps of soul through Walk The Last Mile, the song I’d given to Finn in Soundtrack, was Bobby’s...

How did Bobby’s bedroom and his song end up so strangely entwined in my novel twenty years on? I’ll never know. 

Orion Nebula, NASA image

Serendipity struck again a couple of weeks ago. Unhappy with my day’s writing, I began rummaging through books and websites, following trails (wasting time, but totally engrossed by my own curiosity.) It was like following a faint, unknown scent. My tracks led me to NASA and I made a mind-bending discovery, one that’s thoroughly discombobulated me. Somehow the universe itself, via NASA, seems to have gifted me the most extraordinary surprise in the exact spot of the cosmos that I need it to be in my new book. 

‘It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.’ Virginia Woolf

I don’t understand the hows or whys. I’ll just thank my lucky stars, keep following the scent of my unconscious and see what else serendipity brings. 

How about you?

METAWARS 1: Fight For The Future by Jeff Norton - review by Julienne Durber

As regular readers of Demention will know, my book reviews normally feature an interview with the author followed by a short round-up and opinion from me.

This week's review of METAWARS 1: Fight For The Future by Jeff Norton is different - because METAWARS is different.

As usual, leave me a comment to be entered into the prize draw for a pristine copy of METAWARS 1: Fight For The Future, tweet and repost on FB to be entered twice more (you know the deal.)

Giveaway closes on 1st October. Winner's name will be posted here.

For a full review of METAWARS, its place within the Demention boys vs girls debate, and its potential as book one of a series ... read on.

METAWARS 1: Fight For The Future is part one of the story of Jonah Delacroix who is drawn into a battle for control of the Metasphere - the virtual world that the internet has become, where your avatar is your identity and you aren't restricted by the laws of gravity or geography from the physical world.  He has to struggle against both real-world and virtual dangers as he searches for the truth about his allies, his enemies, and even his own father.

Its basic premise - the hardships of an ecologically corrupt real world forcing the masses into a bleak existence where their only escape from poverty and hardship is to spend what little they have entering a virtual world - isn't ground breaking.  But from the front cover, with its Bansky-esque figure sandwiched between militaristic decay and gleaming future-fantasy, it is clear that METAWARS is precisely, almost achingly, up-to-the-minute.

Jeff Norton

Despite superficial similarities to The Matrix films, the world Norton has created for METAWARS owes far more to early William Gibson (never a bad thing), but the technology feels pin-sharp and is an entirely believable development of where the world currently stands.  And this is what worries me.  The book is tagged as 'The first in an awesome new series', and if the others follow on as I expect, there will probably be another three.  Technology can move a long way in three years, and I wonder whether the devices and methods used will quickly seem dated.

Don't get me wrong, this is a cracking adventure story - a sort of 'Young James Bond in The Matrix'.  Packed with action and danger, it is the most boy-friendly, popcorn-munching thing I have read in ages.  I devoured it with glee as it ticked every boy's-own box in my head.  I even struggled to complete my own personal review game of 'spot when something convenient happens to allow a dodgy plan to work'.

And the emotional content is high - no real romantic involvement, but some heart-plucking moments surrounding Jonah's family both outside and inside the Metasphere add a layer of warmth and up the girl-friendliness quota.

(For first-time visitors to Demention - I have to repeat the point I made in a previous post that I know many girls who like action and boys who appreciate strong emotional content in their stories.  One of the themes we return to at Demention is whether dystopia is sci-fi for girls and vice versa.  See Teri's original post and my response if you want to know more.)

The idea of literally plugging yourself directly into a virtual world has been around for quite a time, and I would have liked to see something fresher.  (Five years ago, the idea of waving a games controller around to play tennis on your tv was ground-breaking, now it's run-of-the-mill.)

But perhaps I am being unfair.  This is a book for right now, a well-constructed world with a crackling plot.  And an ideal entry point into a genre of future worlds, dark technologies and thrilling action.  I really enjoyed it and I want to read the rest soon - while they are still futuristic.

The question I'll leave hanging is: when science fact is advancing so quickly, how far does science-fiction have to go to remain truly futuristic?

All generic royalty free images provided by freedigitalphotos.net