Nightpeople

"When you have nowhere left to run, sometimes the only place is the sky...Saria is the last of her kind, the final child to be born in the Darklands, a quarantined expanse of outback desert, contaminated generations earlier by the remote and mysterious Nightpeople. Spirited away at her birth before the Nightpeople could remove her from the genetic pool, Saria, now in her early teens, is called before the Council of Dreamers to be used as a bargaining chip. There she discovers the truth about her own past, and that of her people. Nightpeople explores a society turned in upon itself and a future which readers will find both alien and disturbingly familiar.'This is an outstanding novel, the best work to date from a writer who has already won the Premier's Award: superb writing, a thoroughly engrossing story, and utterly credible characters trapped in a future world that is as fascinating as it is dangerous. A page-turner if ever there was one!' - Van Ikin"

Novel: Nightpeople: Nightpeople is a speculative fiction novel, the first of a trilogy that attempts to pull together a number of distinct threads and goals into one overarching narrative. A major objective of this project was to produce a work of speculative fiction that has a specifically Australian flavour to it. It can be argued that much writing in the speculative fiction genres utilises worlds that are either completely 'other', or are based to varying degrees upon northern hemisphere cultures. Nightpeople is intended to evoke a specifically Antipodean feel and it achieves this through both the selection of atmospherics and language the extrapolation of Australian idiom out to a foreseeable future form, for example, and through selection of its driving themes and ideas. Issues of race, land, belonging, identity, and paternalism in government are all touched upon in the apocalyptic desert landscape of this novel. Another key objective was to produce a work of fiction with equal appeal to both teenage and adult readers. Stylistically, this is achieved through the use of the speculative fiction style of narrative, which is widely read by a broad demographic. Thesis: "Young Adult Friction: The Blurring of Adolescence and Adulthood as Reflected in Australian Young Adult Literature 1982 2006". This is a broad study of current directions in the publishing and awarding of 'Young Adult' fiction within the Australian marketplace. The dissertation suggests that this particular area of writing is currently undergoing a fundamental shift in the way it is perceived by both those practicing within it, and also by the wider community, making it increasingly acceptable for writers in this area to write to an older, more sophisticated readership than previously. The dissertation draws upon a broad statistical analysis of this field over the course of the last twenty years to determine the current trends in style and content being published, and upon a critical/analytical component, which examines several key contemporary writers and texts in more detail.

Teenager Larinan Mann finds that he does not fit into the conformist society he lives in. Set in a post-apocalyptic Australia, where people have adapted to climate change by building domes attached to massive towers sheltered from the sun's rays. This world is now under threat of collapse. Suggested level: secondary.