Vulture's Gate

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GIRLS ARE EXTINCT. CHAOS RULES. WELCOME TO THE FUTURE.

• The How and Why of Vulture's Gate
• What the critics wrote
• Links

One Girl
- Could she be the last girl alive?
One Boy
- Kidnapped by ruthless men.

When Bo Rescues Callum from death in the burning desert, she is forced to leaver her underground home. In search of Callum’s fathers, they journey across a dangerous continent, escaping outstationers, street gangs and terrorists, but nothing can prepare them for the world that awaits in Vulture’s Gate.

AN ACTION-PACKED ADVENTURE WITH A CHILLING SOCIAL TWIST.

The How and Why of VULTURE'S GATE

Ever since I wrote my first time-travel novel, Market Blues, I’ve wanted to write more books that experiment with ideas about time. For the past seven years, writing historical fiction has given me that opportunity but time is a continuum. The past and the future are two sides of the same coin. If you send the coin spinning, it’s as likely to land on one side as the other.

Vulture’s Gate was a natural extension of all the ideas I’d been playing with as I worked my way through the Children of the Wind series. Yet, in a way, it’s also a story that ambushed me when I was working on another big work of historical fiction.

The idea for the novel grew from disparate threads. The first thread revealed itself to me at a meeting with my publisher at Allen & Unwin, Rosalind Price. We were scrolling through images from various digital photo libraries to find a new cover for the republication of my first novel Zarconi’s Magic Flying Fish. Rosalind found an amazing image of a boy acrobat flying through the air between two Harley-Davidson motorcycles in a small circus ring. Even though we knew it didn’t suit Zarconi’s, we were both intrigued by the image – the boy’s body arched and lithe, the two powerful motorbikes and their burly drivers made a striking composition. As soon as I saw it, I knew there was a whole different story lurking behind the photo. Ros jokingly said if I wrote a book about the boy, she’d publish it. Later that night, I wrote a vignette called ‘Motorcycle Boy’ and tucked it away in a file of scrappy ideas.

On a summer evening some months later, I was sitting on my front verandah with an old friend talking about the sort of future our children would inherit. My thirteen-year-old goddaughter, Roxane, came out onto the verandah and the light from inside streamed around her, framing her, shining on her bright, beautiful face. She looked like a young Amazonian. I love that mixture of strength and sweetness that adolescent girls encapsulate. In that moment, Roxane and the Motorcycle boy became inextricably entwined with a story of the future.

Alongside the historical fiction I was writing and researching, I began to work on Vulture’s Gate. The characters of Bo and Callum were so strong that the story instantly came to life. It felt liberating to be cut free from the constraints of writing about the past and eventually I had to put my historical novel to one side so I could focus on the future world. What had been a diversion became an absorbing, complicated novel with so many layers that I drafted and redrafted it many times over.

Speculative fiction asks the ultimate ‘what if’ question. By drawing on all sorts of existing technologies and environmental dilemmas, I gave myself plenty of material to play with. I wanted Vulture’s Gate to be scary yet lively, to explore aspects of a future world where our actions have resulted in worst-case-scenarios but also to celebrate the resilience of our species.

I’ve been a fan of science writing for a long time and I followed the coverage of the avian flu virus, advances in reproductive technologies and robotics, and theories about the future of gender relationships, using the information to underpin the ideas in the novel.

Bare Branches by Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer was one of the many books I read that influenced the science of Vulture’s Gate. Bare Branches is a scholarly work of non-fiction that examines the security implications of Asia’s surplus male population. Because of a preference for sons, there are a disproportionate number of low-status, young adult males in the world, called "bare branches" by the Chinese. Too often, daughters are aborted, killed in infancy or die of neglect. Worldwide, there are estimated to be up to 100 million ‘missing girls’ – girls who should have survived to adulthood.

Historically, high male-to-female ratios often trigger domestic and international violence. Governments sometimes respond to this problem by enlisting young surplus males in military campaigns and high-risk public works projects. The Shaolin monasteries and their famous order of warrior monks were formed during a time when there were high numbers of excess males in China. Throughout history, many military campaigns, like the Crusades, have been instigated as a way of channeling the energies of excess mercenary soldiers. Countries with high male-to-female ratios also tend to develop authoritarian political systems.

Although commentators have focused their concern on Asia, I believe this is a problem for the world and a reflection of ancient and deeply held fears and beliefs. Without human intervention, nature ordains that there should be slightly more adult women than men yet there are over 50 million more men in the world than women.

So I started to think about what would happen if nature began imitating culture. What if nature followed our lead and generated a virus that resulted in all female foetuses spontaneously aborting?

But for all the influences of science and the research that I did into biotechnologies, pandemics, robotics, permaculture, and future technologies, it was the characters of Bo and Callum that propelled the story forward from the first chapter. Their youthful energy, optimism and strength made it possible to explore a darker reality without producing a book that was bleak and depressing.

Sometimes people who talk about what’s appropriate fiction for younger readers act as if children live in a parallel universe, as if they shouldn’t share our concerns and our understanding of the world. But kids own the future and should be party to discussions about how it will be shaped.

I want to read books that provoke me and for the action and ideas to draw me on through the story. Vulture’s Gate was shaped by those priorities. I write the kind of books I want to read.

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What the critics wrote about VULTURE'S GATE

"I absolutely loved it! I was intrigued after the very first page and remained so until the last word."

Jasmine