Bookaholics book club: UK appreciation month: Janet Edwards

Walking Between Worlds

For UK Appreciation Month, I felt I had to write about the UK countryside, specifically the area of English countryside where I go walking. For the last couple of years, these walks have been an especial delight to me on two levels. Firstly, as a person who hadn’t been able to get out in the countryside for several years and is deeply glad to be back there. Secondly, as a writer thinking about the world of her novel.
My Earth Girl series is set in the 28th century, in a future where people can portal between hundreds of inhabited worlds. The only ones still living on Earth are the one in a thousand born with a faulty immune system that can’t cope with any other planet, so large areas of the Earth have been abandoned for centuries. When I go walking, I’m imagining that future world, looking at the scenery around me and thinking how it would change without us.
The English countryside may look wild in places, but is very much nature managed by people. The signs of our control are everywhere. Houses, paths, roads, and bridges. Fields of crops bordered by neatly trimmed hedges or fences. Even the meadows would look very different, and have very different plants and wildlife, if they weren’t mown each autumn. The world of my series would be a much wilder place, where the sprawling cities are in ruins and nature is back in command.
There’s a path I’ve walked regularly through the different seasons of the year. Along the river, crossing a shallow stream with a wooden bridge that would have rotted to dust in my future Earth. Today is a damp autumn day with a fine mist in the air. There’s mud underfoot, scattered with the yellow of the first fallen leaves.
I pass areas of trees on my walk. Well managed trees, where broken branches are removed and excess trees are thinned to leave space for the others to grow properly. There’d be far more trees in my future Earth, as saplings spread out from our current hedges and small woods, starting to recreate the ancient forests. They’d be tangled forests, with trees fighting for space, and fallen trees left to rot.
There’s the intrusive hum of cars and lorries when I near a major road. There’d be little traffic in my future Earth. If people travel by portal, the few vehicles they have would make only short journeys. This road would be overgrown by grass, the signposts rusted away, and the elevated section would have fallen. The isolated house by the side of it would be just empty, roofless, crumbling walls. The elements and vegetation unite to wage a relentless war on empty dwellings.
There’s a rabbit running for cover in the bushes, and a formation of geese, necks outstretched, gliding down to land on the nearby lake. In my future Earth, some birds and animals would have benefited from the return of old habitats, but others, the ones whose lives are closely entwined with ours, would have suffered. There’d be no more fields of grazing cattle or sheep, but the deer would have flourished.
It was a wet summer this year, with floodwater sprawling across the countryside. I think there’d be many scenes like that in my future Earth. All the drainage systems that people have carved into the landscape for centuries would gradually silt up, be blocked by fallen branches, and fail. The lake I’m looking at now would be much bigger and the river would often break its bounds.
The tamed countryside around me is beautiful, but I have to admit I find my imaginary version of it appealing as well. I think it’s because that future, mostly deserted landscape is very like a comfortingly familiar one from the past. It’s the landscape of the bronze and iron ages, of the days of fortified hilltops and Stonehenge.

Earth girl

2788. Only the handicapped live on Earth. While everyone else portals between worlds, 18-year-old Jarra is among the one in a thousand people born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Sent to Earth at birth to save her life, she has been abandoned by her parents. She can’t travel to other worlds, but she can watch their vids, and she knows all the jokes they make. She’s an ‘ape’, a ‘throwback’, but this is one ape girl who won’t give in.

Jarra invents a fake background for herself – as a normal child of Military parents – and joins a class of norms that is on Earth to excavate the ruins of the old cities. When an ancient skyscraper collapses, burying another research team, Jarra’s role in their rescue puts her in the spotlight. No hiding at back of class now. To make life more complicated, she finds herself falling in love with one of her classmates – a norm from another planet. Somehow, she has to keep the deception going.

A freak solar storm strikes the atmosphere, and the class is ordered to portal off-world for safety – no problem for a real child of military parents, but fatal for Jarra. The storm is so bad that the crews of the orbiting solar arrays have to escape to planet below: the first landing from space in 600 years. And one is on collision course with their shelter.

Author bio

Janet Edwards lives in England. As a child, she read everything she could get her hands on, including a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy. She studied Maths at Oxford, and went on to suffer years of writing unbearably complicated technical documents before deciding to write something that was fun for a change. She has a husband, a son, a lot of books, and an aversion to housework.

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