About City Of Rust:
Railey is a drone racer. Her gran has trained her every day to be the best and to win the biggest races. Railey also has a secret: she isn’t really flying a drone at all but a craft piloted by her bio-robotic gecko-friend Atti. When the race goes wrong and the craft crashes, Railey finds herself chased by Junkers who want one thing – Atti.
They are rescued by a fallen Junker clan who live in a spherecraft that hovers above the mountains. Railey learns that there is something far worse to come than being chased. A huge junk bomb made up of rubbish left on the earth by humans is about to hit her home city and destroy the world. Railey and Atti are the only hope of stopping it, but can they get there on time?
Guest Post by author Gemma Fowler:
Why my new book is a load of (space) rubbish.
For me, the spark of inspiration for a story always comes from real life science, something I’ve experienced or read about. In my first book, Moondust, I tackled the Earth’s impending energy crisis, and this time I was desperate to write about the Earth’s rubbish problem, but didn’t have an original, sci fi twist – until I began to research space debris.
Space Debris (or space pollution) is becoming a big problem. When it comes to space, everything that goes up doesn’t always come down, in fact, most of it doesn’t. Every rocket or satellite we’ve ever launched from the Earth (or car, Elon Musk, you massive, intergalactic fly-tipper) is still up there, spinning in orbit above our heads at seven times the speed of a bullet. And with more rockets and satellites being launched than ever before, the amount of detritus left in orbit around the Earth is getting out of control.
There are seventeen thousand large items in orbit now – mainly old, broken satellites and capsules that are no longer in use – but anyone that’s seen the film Gravity will understand what a piece of junk as small as a coin can do to a space station (if you haven’t seen it, the answer is, it completely destroys it).
There are over 128 million pieces of small debris (from coin-sized to as tiny as flecks of paint) whizzing around us right now. It’s getting pretty overcrowded up there, and eventually, the risk of debris strike will be so high that it will threaten future space missions.
Whenever I thought about all that space junk spinning around up there, I imagined great, floating junk yards filled with crumpled solar cells and burnt out rocket boosters, and scary, masked Junkers breaking it all apart with laser cutters spitting orange sparks. Like the huge ship breaking yards you see in Gujarat, India, but on an even bigger, galactic scale. These images were my starting point for the world of City of Rust – a scorched land overflowing with rubbish, with an impenetrable ring of waste orbiting the Earth that is so thick in places it blots out the stars. The more I delved into space pollution, the more my new world grew.
It was when I discovered Kessler Syndrome that I knew I had a proper story on my hands. Kessler Syndrome is the theory that when objects collide in orbit they create more debris, which in turn is more likely to collide with other debris, eventually creating an unstoppable cascading effect.
With some (quite heavy) creative licence, this gave me the idea for the Cascade, the nightly light show over Boxville created by junk re-entering and burning up in the atmosphere, and the Junk Bomb (or maneteorite as I called it, until my editor said it was too much of a mouthful. She was probably right).
I researched the real efforts to clean up the junk in orbit (powerful debris harpoons and great spring-loaded nets) and they helped me create the Junker’s ships and weaponry.
Then, importantly, I set my research aside and concentrated on creating the most exciting, fun and imaginative story I could. I want science to inspire my stories but not dictate them. My job as an author is to sweep my readers away into another world, one full of adventure and danger and colourful characters. If it inspires them to learn more about space debris and the rubbish problem, then that’s just a brilliant bonus.
CITY OF RUST by Gemma Fowler is out now in paperback (£6.99, Chicken House)
Follow Gemma on Twitter: @gemmarfowler | Find out more: gemmarfowler.com
