Terra Electra by
Can you imagine a world without electricity? Or a world where electricity is more dangerous than you can think? Check out Antonia Maxwell’s guest blog about her book, Terra Electra!
Lights out! A world without electricity?
As a child of the 1970s, I remember not only cheesecloth shirts, Spangle sweets and denim flares – there was also the winter of discontent and long periods of industrial action with early evening ‘blackouts’ – chunks of the evening when households would be without power for a few hours. Of course this was a serious situation – issues of fair pay and working conditions were at stake – but as a child it meant being thrown out of the daily routine and plunged into darkness, where candle light picnic dinners, baths in front of the fire and boardgames were on offer. It was exciting.
A recent power cut started me thinking about how our dependency on electricity has grown over the years – and how much less exciting this interruption in my life is today. I was working from home, when the house filled with beeps and the whirring sound of machines shutting down – an unexpected outage. I instinctively went to my phone to find out what was going on. Of course it was useless – the internet was down. I couldn’t work – the document I was working on was on a shared platform. Ah well, I’ll have a cup of tea. No kettle. No electric hob. Watch the news? No telly. Sorry. I felt pretty helpless.
My debut novel for children Terra Electrica imagines a world without electricity – or rather a world where electricity has become a dangerous and deadly force. A virus has been released that feeds on electricity (this is based on research – there is such a virus!). No one is safe. There has been a worldwide Switch Off as society works out what to do.
As I developed this idea, I started to get an insight into how much we depend on electricity – not just in terms of our gizmos and gadgets, but more worryingly how much we have sacrificed our individual knowledge and skills and allowed them to be packed up and boxed into these little electronic devices we carry round in our pockets. We have apps for maps, weather, health, transport, communications. The list goes on – and is growing. Our need to know stuff is diminishing. And of course, while AI is in many ways a miracle tool which will enable us to make huge leaps in the fields of medicine, science and technology, it is also making it possible for us to stop using our grey matter altogether – we can ask our polite robot friends to think for us, and they are more than willing to oblige.
I didn’t set out to write about our dependency on electricity – initially I was searching for a sense of jeopardy in the world that my heroine Mani would have to engage with and overcome. I was interested in the impact of the ice melting – and what we stand to lose both physically and culturally. I was writing before the pandemic. I had no experience of lockdowns – I was looking for something that could express where the world could end up when the ice has all melted. But as the Terra Electrica grew in my mind, I was drawn to thinking about exactly what losing electricity would mean for the way we live today. No more global communication, no more light in the dark, no more entertainment to while away the evenings. It really would mess up our too easy lives.
Are we really prepared or equipped to know what to do if the worst does happen and there is a global outage – think life support machines in hospitals, technology in our supply chains, agricultural machines that enable food production? Think of what our own experience of the recent lockdown would have been like without electricity – the only thing that connected us as we withdrew into our homes was the internet. What do we do when electricity is not available?
In book 2 I will explore electricity as a force in our world further – the Terra Electrica is an energy but it is not intrinsically ‘bad’. It is after all just energy. But it is more than that – electricity is the very force of life – the thing that starts the human heart beating in the embryo, the signal that fires messages through our brains – we are made of electricity. It is indifferent to us – but it makes us. It can destroy us too. That’s an interesting thought!
At the heart of both books is the idea of balance. Generally speaking, in terms of the environment, when balance is lost, things go wrong. Today, we are on the cusp of losing the balance in our world irrevocably. We burn fossil fuels to make electricity and our fragile earth is suffering. And as our dependency on electricity grows, so we are losing our knowledge and skills to survive without it. But as humans we are working together to make change happen – to return the balance. And as the second book in the Terra Electrica story plays out, there is hope and light – helped along by a trusty team of talking Arctic animals! I hope that this will give young readers a sense of optimism and purpose for the future – and lots to talk about!
Terra Electrica – The Guardians of the North by Antonia Maxwell – Published by Neem Tree Press. Out 4th July 2024
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.
