VBT# Equinox - Lara Morgan

Today's VBT# is Australian author Lara Morgan and her new book in the series "The Rosie Black Chronicles" - Equinox Book #2.

It seems like only yesterday , I had an interview with Lara Morgan on my Blog with the release of her then debut novel "Genesis" the first book in The Rosie Black Chronicles starring on The Phantom Paragrapher - http://thephantomparagrapher.blogspot.com/2010/11/rosie-black-chronicles-genesis-lara.html

Want to know something funny ,maybe it was destiny and fate that Im a day late in posting this as It has been exactly One year since Lara Morgan was on my site with her first book :)

Synopsis: Equinox - The Rosie Black Chronicles Book #2 - Lara Morgan- 2011

The second book on the brand-new hit series The Rosie Black Chronicles by Lara Morgan. Rosie’s dad is locked away, Pip has abandoned her, and Riley isn’t telling her the full story. Bent on revenge, Rosie is still working in secret to try and take down the evil Helios group. But what sacrifices is she prepared to make to destroy Helios?

It’s Rosie’s seventeenth year and she’s starting her first year at Orbitcorp Academy, but it’s not going to be all parties and pilot training. Helios hasn’t forgotten her – and she certainly hasn’t forgotten them. Bent on revenge Rosie is still working in secret to try to take them down.

But a terrible miscalculation will send Rosie once more on the run, this time into the unknown lands of the north, Gondwana Nation, where word has it Helios is building something big.

There will be a new friend and a new boy – the handsome and wealthy Dalton Curtis – who will surprise Rosie with a secret she can’t begin to guess. And Pip will return, but how does he feel about Rosie, and where has he been?

Pursued again and on the run, Rosie might not have time to find out all the answers, but what she will learn is that a capacity for evil can be equalled by a capacity for good - and she will be forced to make a choice that will change her future forever.

Author Guest Post - Lara Morgan

A Dystopian World:

Welcome to my nightmare…..

I carry this picture in my head of one of the first times I ever saw an imagined dystopian world and it’s one that always stays with me. It’s the city from the movie Blade Runner, miserable with rain, crowded and glimmering with lights, and Harrison Ford peering from a hovering car window as it floats through the air past enormous buildings. It’s an iconic image of dystopia and one that has been echoed many times since. It’s probably also one of the images at the back of my mind when I created the city of Newperth, but for me the city and its people is just part of the world building puzzle. I’m even more interested in exploring how the planet might change from the constant pressure of humans messing with it.

I was a teenager in the 1980s (teased hair and crucifixes and all, how embarrassing) so I was surrounded by the fear of a possible nuclear war, of a future that could be profoundly desolated by our own actions. As a result I’ve always aligned dystopian worlds not just with overcrowded cities but also with a devastated natural world. So when I came to writing my own dystopian story I was compelled to look at what our concerns are today for our planet and incorporate them into an imagined future.

Rosie’s world became very much my predictions for what may happen if we don’t do enough to arrest global warming, or climate change, whichever you want to call it. I was struck especially with just how high our sea levels could rise if the entire Greenland ice sheet melts. A rise of 7m was a possibility put forward in 2005 by a symposium in the UK. A rise like that would inundate most of Earth’s coastal cities. And then there was the threat of new diseases, the variation in our weather patterns and of course the issue of water. Unless we come up with solutions, scientists have been saying there’s a very real possibility we are facing a future water crisis. Some would say our situation is already critical.

It was these predictions that really fired up my imagination, so in creating the world of Rosie Black I included some future casting given those conditions. I flooded the world, screwed up the weather and made pure water more precious than gold and I did it because I really do believe that unless we act now it’s a future we might face.

And I think being able to portray those themes as background to a story is one of the great strengths of dystopia. Dystopia can make you think about what we’re doing now, it can hold a mirror to our fears for the future, and it can do it while still telling a good story. Or at least that’s what I hope people make of it. It always works for me.