'Is it because hope is scary?' my father asked. All the wide open spaces we'd have, all the new people we'd meet when we woke them up, ignoring completely what happened to the original settlers, super-confident that we were so much better equipped that nothing bad could possibly happen to us.Īll this hope, and here I was, right at the very edge of it, looking out into the darkness, the first to see it coming, the first to greet it when we found out what it really looked like. Real gravity, instead of the fake kind that broke every now and then (even though no one over 15 would admit that it was actually really fun when it did). Fresh air, whatever that's supposed to mean. Or, 'I hope the natives are friendly.' This always said with a laugh because there aren't supposed to be any natives, at least according to the deep space probes.Įverybody was hoping for something, talking about our new life to come and all that they hoped from it. 10,000 frozen sheep and cow embryos didn't count.

Or, 'I hope there's interesting wildlife.' From people who'd only ever met Scampus and Bumpus, the ship's cats on the Delta. Hope, hope, hope.Īs in, 'I hope the weather's good.' This from people who'd never actually experienced weather except in immersive vids. That's all anyone ever talked about on the convoy, especially as we got closer. We've got the first 400 words – read the rest on the Booktrust site on Monday. Ness has written a spin-off Chaos Walking short story that explains how Viola crash-lands on the planet in The Knife of Never Letting Go. The second book in the series, The Ask and the Answer, which came out in May, gets even darker, as Todd and Viola find themselves on opposite sides of a brutal and terrifying power struggle in the town in which they thought they had found a haven. The book's hero, Todd, accompanied by his chatty dog, Manchee, and new friend, Viola, must flee the town where he grew up and discover the secrets behind its facade. It burst on to the young adult's book scene in 2008 with its tale of a dystopian world in which women are banished and men can hear each other's thoughts (the 'Noise'). Patrick Ness, Booktrust's first-ever writer-in-residence, is the winner of the Guardian children's book prize and the Booktrust teenage book award for The Knife of Never Letting Go, his first novel in the Chaos Walking series.

The new world patrick ness