Emily Gale writes junior fiction, middle grade novels (novels for upper primary school), and young adult novels. Emily’s books have been published all over the world and shortlisted for a number of awards. Today we’re thrilled to be chatting with Emily about her latest novel: The Wild Unknown.
From the publisher:
It’s 2045 and the world is full of tech. Eddie has a bot in his ear giving him advice all day, a bathroom scale that identifies illnesses, and classroom bots keeping track of him at school. The streets are full of delivery bots and game tech is amazing. But tech can’t help the police find a missing boy called Theo, who was last seen at the river. Eddie and his friends sneak down to the river to look for clues. What they find doesn’t make any sense. Then strange things start happening to Eddie. The Wild Unknown is a gripping adventure set in a near-future world where the truth can be difficult to find and where real friends will always be better than the smartest tech.
Text Publishing provided Alphabet Soup with a reading copy of this book.
You wrote about the past and the present in your novels Elsewhere Girls and Outlaw Girls [both co-written with Nova Weetman]. What brought you to write about the near-future in The Wild Unknown?
I’ve always loved thinking about and writing about history. I like old things and sometimes feel nervous about new things. And that’s why I did it really: to step out of my comfort zone. I’d already decided on one part of the story, the transformation part (Eddie’s body changes in weird ways, for example he grows feather-like things on his arms), and I thought setting the story in the future would let me explore why that was happening using a mixture of my imagination and future predictions.
How did you go about imagining the technology that features in your 2045 world?
I made up anything I wanted to but I also did loads of research into the future, just the same as when I write about history. I had a research folder with subject headings that were important to my story. I looked into predictions of everyday things like food, architecture, home technology, medicine, school, and travel. That meant reading science articles and looking at what it’s like in other countries in terms of daily life and technology. For example, Japan has a lot more tech hardware than Australia, a lot of really cool stuff; China moves very fast in developing technology, and so does America which is home to a lot of the tech giants like Google and OpenAI. I wanted my story to feel Australian and be easy for readers here to picture themselves in. As the story is set twenty years in the future, I also looked back twenty years to see how much things have changed in that time. I had to make a lot of decisions, so I reminded myself that I am not a fortune-teller or psychic, and the future I was creating was for a story, so it didn’t matter if I got it “wrong”. In fact I hope I did get it wrong!
Is there any particular tech that you would love to see in your future? (Or that you’d hope wasn’t around?)
Something that would benefit me is supersonic flight because I live on the other side of the planet from most of my family and I get homesick for London. It would make me so happy to be able to get there faster! The trouble is that supersonic flight would be harmful to the planet, so I can’t wish for that.
That’s the difficulty we face with a lot of tech: weighing up whether it will do more harm than good. Sometimes that’s hard to work out.
I’d like tech that actually makes peoples lives better without any downside — like Eddie’s dad in The Wild Unknown having an amazing wheelchair. Maybe for myself I’d like a robot to free up my time for writing by doing boring household tasks. But I wouldn’t want it to look human or pretend to be my friend because I think that messes with our minds, which is part of my storyline in The Wild Unknown.
How do you think current tech is changing the way humans might behave in our future?
The main worry for me is that humans need to keep our brains in shape, just like our bodies, and we know now that using screens too much makes our brains slower and sadder, while using some kinds of AI can stop us from thinking for ourselves. At the same time, breakthroughs in technology will save lives, so it’s all about balance! I trust that the natural beauty and the extraordinary gifts of our planet mean more to us than any tech, but we have to keep reminding ourselves of that and protect what makes us human, while developing technology that fits with that thinking.
Can you tell us a bit about what you’re working on next?
My next book is very different and it’s for much younger readers. It’s a funny, sweet, illustrated set of stories for younger readers about two animal friends, Ted (a fox) and Tuppence (a cat), which is coming out in 2027. I’ve also started working on another story set in the past, during World War One, which has a magical element to it a bit like Elsewhere Girls and Outlaw Girls. That’s all I can say because it’s a new idea and I like to keep new ideas safe and warm in my brain for a long time.
The Wild Unknown is out now! Ask for it at your favourite bookshop or local library.
AWESOME EXTRAS:
Read the first chapter of The Wild Unknown at the publisher’s website
Read our 2024 interview with Emily Gale & Nova Weetman about Outlaw Girls
Download the Teachers’ Notes for The Wild Unknown
