I’m super excited to have the sequel to the award-winning Zambies! out into the world.
Get set to rev up your retro rides and burn rubber into the blood-red dawn with a cast of out-of-their-depth strangers, who are almost as much danger to each other as the existential threats that threaten to erase them from this mortal coil. Zambies (AI zombies), robots, drones, AI and a whole lot more.
It’s just so much fun to write this series. And with readers having super strong opinions on some of the characters (Colin and Suede say hi), I couldn’t wait to jump back into the action and stir the pot a little more.
And with book one recently winning a bronze medal at the Wishing Shelf Book Awards for Adult Fiction, and readers of book one expecting answers to who was behind the global threat, well, there was nowhere to hide with this manuscript. Ride or die!
What a great space to play – horror meets comedy, with some epic action and a large lathering of sci-fi themes. It’s also a story of generational differences and significant change in a world where tech is evolving so rapidly.
We last left our Grace and Suede, Donna and Ava, as well as Colin, somehow surviving hordes of zambies, and a contingent of super-intelligent robots, dogbots and drones at the end of the line on the Fleurieu peninsula.
Their only direction – perhaps their only hope of survival – was an invitation to join a guerilla force with the one human they knew was still alive – Kane. At least he was living a few days ago.
It leads our crew back to the big city, closer to the heart of danger, closer to answers and into the centre of a battle for the 21st century.
I’ve been working overtime to imagine what that world might be like – to construct a believable near-future scenario behind this catastrophe… and hopefully one that was too obvious for the readers. Not just Kane’s world, but the threat true threat humanity faced, how it all came to be and the powers pulling the strings.
Challenging – yes. Exciting thought experiment – completely. Am I happy with the result – yes! I hope you are too. It took me some rewriting right turns to get there, but that what you get when you set the bar high.
The challenge also extended to the greater series storytelling, as this book is set to be the second of a trilogy. So, expand the universe, increase the stakes, reveal the big bad, explain the backstory and history that led the end of the world as we knew it… and make space for our five leads to have their own journey of discovery, and ultimately epic challenges, amongst it all. Yeah, sure thing.
I really hope readers get as much thrill out of Getting Plutoed as I did writing it. I hope it’s full of surprises, takes you on a journey you perhaps weren’t expecting, gives you some tech understanding, more than a few laughs and has your heart racing in the epic conclusion. If I achieve most of those, well, mission accomplished!
Bring on the finale: Life on Twearth!