6 Questions about OCULUM ECHO answered ...

OCULUM ECHO, (DCB Young Readers, 2022), is my dystopia  for kids, about war, climate change, and community. What we can do now to support future generations on the planet? Can we choose technology that supports and sustains us?

With every new book, I do a Q&A here to answer the top questions I think readers will want to ask. Enjoy ...

Q1. What is OCULUM ECHO about?

OCULUM ECHO is book two in the Children of Oculum series, and is the sequel to OCULUM (2018, DCB). It starts where book one ends and continues the themes of climate collapse, pandemic, and adds the theme of war.

The story focuses on three main characters: Miranda1, Mannfred and Echo1, a new character and an AI from the past whose purpose is to check on "earth, the children, humanity and the Oculum domes." When the UnRuly show up with their bombs, the children scatter. Echo1 must find them.

This story is really a road story: one group of children heads north to safety, one group heads south to spy on the UnRuly, and one robot wanders the wasteland looking for all of them. What is the book about? Suffering I suppose, but also love, and how we are always better together.

Q2.  The story has climate collapse, revolution, and war in it. What was it like to write a speculative book for younger readers, which reflects reality?

Well, in many ways both the books are prescient. In OCULUM, which came out in 2018 but was written in 2015, I wrote a middle-grade dystopia which included pandemic and climate collapse. In OCULUM ECHO, I have also added war with a group called the UnRuly. The manuscript was delivered to my publisher in 2019, months before the latest war in Ukraine.

To be honest, it IS a little unsettling to write a book that starts out as speculative fiction, then pierces the veil of reality. But any writer paying even a tiny bit of attention to the world and historical events could see the climate was in crisis (even decades ago), and that humanity was way past due for the next pandemic. And sadly, as a species we are never far from war.

Plenty of writers wrote their "pandemic" book pre-COVID, only to have a real pandemic land in our laps. American author/pundit Chuck Wendig (Wanderers, 2019), wrote about that very thing: So You Wrote About A Pandemic. Canadian author Hilary St. John Mandel wrote about pandemic and society collapse, in Station Eleven (2014). Ken Oppel released his cli-fi children's series Bloom during the pandemic. There are other examples.

But an author's job is to point toward truth. To stay awake, watching, reading, throwing the bones, seeing the signs. Writers are nothing if not futurists. And as a children's author, it's my job to provide thinking about the world around us in an age-appropriate way, although in a slightly gentler form than Wendig and St. John Mandel provide it, plus with a dash more agency and hope. I think the next generation needs these speculative stories more than ever.

Q3: What are some of your influences for this story?

When I was a little kid, Mr. Spock from Star Trek (the original series) was my hero. He wasn't just a television character, he was alive for me (find out why here: Spocktoberfest).

I also loved Mr. Data in Star Trek/The Next Generation. The battle between Data and Lor, the "originator" story of Dr. Noonien Soong ... all so inspired by Mary Shelley and her delicious, heartbroken, flawed creation in Frankenstein. I also love Martha Wells' latest books about the self-actuated Murderbot (if you haven't discovered this series, it's pretty great). 

So I've always loved science fiction, and as a student of English Literature (two university degrees worth) I'm particularly fascinated with stories about self-realization, our responsibility to ourselves and to future generations. We are forever fascinated with our creations, right back to Prometheus. And the whole exploding world of AI, the question of sentience, is taking off right now. As an author (see #2 above) watching the signs, it's fascinating to see how we interact with our creations. 

Where will it all go? What IS the point of all our technology, anyway? 

Some early books that influenced me: The White Mountains trilogy by John Christopher (a dystopia I read at age 11); The Chrysalids by John Wyndham; The Hobbit/Tolkien; The Giver/Lowry; The Left Hand of Darkness/Le Guin; Paradise Lost/Milton; 1984/Orwell; The Handmaid's Tale/Atwood ... and so on. Lots of movies too, from 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) to I am Mother (Sputore), and everything in between.

My influences land on the science fiction and fantasy side, with questions of humanity, what makes us human, what are our responsibilities to ourselves, to our creations, to the next generation, at the core. 

Q4: Which character in the book is your favourite?

Well, after the information dump above in Question 3, I guess I have to say that I really love Echo1, my newest creation! Echo1 is a culmination of all the reading I've ever done, all the science fiction robots I've ever been intrigued by, all the books and movies that have ever moved me to tears or made me think deeply about what makes us human. What does being almost-human feel like (cue Mr. Spock and Mr. Data and Murderbot and Hal and so on)? 

Ultimately I wonder: what makes us us? Who or what are we?

Echo1 wonders the same thing on page 4 of the book and asks Guide (Echo1's inner voice), "What am I?" Guide answers: "You are a creation, but what you become is up to you Echo1. You will learn as you go. I will help you."

Echo1 then asks, "Am I alive?" And Guide says, "You have free will, Echo1. You decide what a life is, and what to do with yours." Pretty succinctly existential. I hope you love Echo1, too.

Q5: What is the main message you want this book to leave with young readers?

There are so many big themes in this book: climate collapse, pandemic, war, how technology can be a tool for both destruction AND survival (a big one). 

But the message that I really want to stay with readers long after finishing the book comes in the form of a question that Miranda1 asks Grannie: "I ask Grannie, what do we become? How do we grow? Why do we live? Grannie tells me much, about family, about protecting one another, about trying to be content and endure hardship together. There will be sorrow, but we should also welcome joy. And love too. She talks about how we must learn all that we can, to pass wisdom from one generation to the next, to live for each other." p. 78, Oculum Echo.

Author at Book City Toronto, 2022

More existential love. As I say above, the main message of the book is that we must love each other, and live for each other too. We're better together.

Q6: Final question, will there be more books in the Children of Oculum series?

I'm working on the third book, OCULUM SCRIBE right now. Thank you to my amazing publisher, DCB, for letting me tell the rest of the story. Stay tuned!

All posts about OCULUM ECHO and OCULUM on this blog.

INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS:

5-Star CM Review, Oct 2022

Guest Blogger, KickButt-Kidlit

"rich world-building and determined characters give it an originality that sets it apart" Quill & Quire

Writing for children on the subject of war ...

Bomber Command Memorial
London, 2023

 

My current Work in Progress (WIP), is a middle-grade story set in England in World War II, inspired by lived experience of family members.

I have travelled to England to research this story, thank you to the Canada Council for their generous Research and Creation grant which allowed me to visit archives in London, Yate, Gloucester, Bristol, Chipping Sodbury, and elsewhere. I have written in this space about my research trip.

I have also recently visited the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, Ontario, where I received a very intense tour of a Lancaster Bomber. Thank you to them for their time and expertise.

It was quite an experience, being inside a Lancaster. 

It was much narrower, less sturdy, harder to move around in, more claustrophobic, than I had imagined. It was like being inside a metal dragonfly: all powerful wings, and a slender, long, paper-thin sheaf of a body. It really brought WAR home to me, the pinnacle of human technology at the time (1941), the Lancaster Bomber was death from above and was also the final end for over 55,000 allied airmen, most of them barely out of their teens. I visited the Bomber Command Memorial at Hyde Park in London UK too, more than once, incredibly moved.

Lancaster Bomber,
Hamilton, Ontario

During the course of research for this book, not one but two wars have taken hold in the world. It would be easy to stop writing this book because frankly it's overwhelming, all the death and destruction right now and the horrible terrors of WWII. But I can't stop, because I think children today may need age-appropriate books about war more than ever, which is also incredibly sad. In the 80 years since the end of WWII, very little has changed.

One promise to myself, the next book I write is going to be about something sweet and funny! (More soon!)

Also, please note that my book OCULUM ECHO (available now), is also about children surviving a war, as well as climate collapse. It has had fabulous reviews and sadly timely, I feel it may be another important war read for kids.

Spitfire and V2 rocket,
Imperial War Museum, London

So, here are 6 things I've learned about writing for children (ages 10+) on the subject of war:

1. Less gore, more helpers. I have avoided graphic details about the dead and dying, but have not left out the fact that people die, or the fact that there are helpers even in the worst situations.

2. First person narrative can help control the fear. My main characters tell their story in first person, which gives readers the sense that the characters CAN cope, they DO cope, and we as readers can and do cope along with them.

3. One best buddy who lives. Not everyone dies.

4. Balance. No one wins in this story, but there are many connections and similarities between the characters, borne out through research. We are all more similar than we are different. As E.M Forster said, only connect.

At the Archives
in Gloucester

5. Historical technology is cool. Specifics are better than generalizations. I haven't shied away from using the exact WWII term for things. Old technology shows us how far we've come, too.

6. Old patterns of speech don't age well! Old terminology seems fine, but language and idiom gets old fast, both writing and reading it. As much as possible, I try to keep my language timeless, neutral, with very few (or no) period-specific or accent-imitating touches. I would choose "Bye" to " Cheerio", or "Hello" to " 'ello." There are enough barriers to reading, why make it harder?

Hope you find this helpful. I'll try to do more "writing things I've learned" this year. Go forth and write, uncover the truth as you see it, and tell those stories. One day soon perhaps the last war story will have been told. 

The Whales of August, in September

This month, my father would have turned 99. I recently completed a manuscript about his war experiences, more to come on that. 

So today, the last day of September 2024, I repost a poem from September 2011. That year, I looked through the books his wife sent me after he died. I came across a 1987 play he was in: The Whales of August, by David Berry.

The pages smelled faintly of dad's pipe smoke, all these years later. His stage notes were scrawled all over the copy in his large, uppercase hand. I knew he loved this play, he loved playing the part of Maranov the Russian, but I never asked him if he played it with a Russian accent. I wish I knew. 

The Whales of August, in September

I find this book among your things

which your wife sent and

I thought I didn’t want.

A play, which I’ve never read:

The Whales of August

Then all is not lost, dear lady...

It is one of your favourites,

which I never saw you perform.

Imagine.

Yes, imagine...to dine and be flooded by moonlight...

Your pipe tobacco hits me before I even open

the cover,

then your uppercase, manly handwriting hits me,

when I do

And you held this book,

you broke this spine, smoked your pipe as you read

and marked these lines, your lines, with green pen

You loved this play. I remember now.

But then, a thing of beauty is never fully at rest...

I begin, and you are Maranov the faded Russian noble,

right from the start:

Maranov appears on porch boardwalk. Unbowed by his years, he moves with grace and dignity. He wears woolen knickers, a rather worn, dark tweed, stout boots and heavy socks, a blue shirt, and a roomy, old navy blue cardigan, all rather comfortably gone to seed. He sports a Panama hat and carries a bamboo fishing pole along with his burlap-bagged catch of sea perch. The women don’t notice him as he approaches the screen door...

It’s unspeakably sweet, this stage image of you,

aged, gentle, gracious,

a vagabond with great manners and a mysterious past

coming up from the beach with dinner, discreet and worldly

We have the promise of moonrise, and whales...

We spent years on the beach:

you flew kites,

you buried me in sand,

we ate “crisps” and drank wine,

we canoed,

in your later years you wore a crazy-man muumuu and

a tea cozy hat that really set you apart,

along with the zinc oxide nose cream

but not once did I see you fish

Art lies to us, once again.

Let us not speak of sad things...

And yet art tells us the truth, too, since I know

you would have loved delivering your last line...

Do you see how the moon casts silver coins along the shore?

There is a treasure, my dear, that can never be spent...

PD, Sept 14/2011
With thanks to David Berry!

Sauble Beach in September

 

Sauble Beach Sunset, September 3rd, 2024

The end of summer, she came quickly this year. It's always a time for reflection, which for me usually means a balance of melancholy and joy, in perfect flux. Maybe it's the same for you? 

Stuart Little said it best: "Remember your summertimes, sweethearts."

This year, I watched middle-aged parents dropping their first-year students off at U of T (I happened to be walking through campus), and remembered that time of change with a pang. The end of the family unit that was, the first steps into real adulthood for the next generation. 

But what is it that my September holds, this year? Quiet reflection at a friend's cottage in Sauble Beach (on Lake Huron, Ontario side), a look over a manuscript I've been polishing, and thinking about what it means to be part of a family, and to have friends you've known for over 50 years. Honestly, this year I'm just glad to be able to walk the beach without pain!

And oh yes, my son IS going back to university, he's doing a Masters in Engineering, so we're not entirely finished with that time of life. Super proud of him, and realizing that this year for the first time, I don't have to pack him up and drive him. He can do that himself. That's progress, too!

Remember your summertimes, sweethearts.

Another blog post about summer 2022.