Awesome Week of Goodness: The Cover Revelation

[karenhealey]

Internets, we are nearing the end of the Awesome Week of Goodness! I know, so sad.

Yesterday, I gave you a snippet of my forthcoming novel, When We Wake. The day before that, you got to read my short story, "The Unicorn Bell". The day before that I showed you the cover of Wilful Impropriety, the anthology in which my short story "Mrs Beeton's Book of Magickal Management" will be appearing.

And today I am revealing to you the cover of When We Wake.

This book is a Sleeping Beauty story. The question that has always bothered me is what happened to the Sleeping Beauty after she woke up? She was asleep for a hundred years! In some stories, her family and household slept with her. In some, she slept alone. The methods of her waking range from romantic (true love's kiss!) to totally creepy (the twins she'd been impregnated with in her sleep were born and sucked the spindle/thorn out of her, breaking the curse).

But however the story ends, for me, it ends in the wrong place. A hundred years is a very long time, and humans can do an awful lot in it. They can invent new social forms and adopt new religions. They can obliterate languages, and peoples, and a few thousand species. They can come up with technologies that permanently alter the way people make food, and war, and babies. They can tear down ancient monuments, and rearrange political boundaries.

In a hundred years, what is "normal" can be drastically revised. We don't tend to notice just how incredible these alterations are, because we're living through them.

But to the Sleeping Beauty, this all happened in an instant. How did those changes affect her? What did she think of the world? "And they lived happily ever after" didn't satisfy me. I wanted to know what really happened next.

And I was itching to write a sci-fi adventure, so I set the book in the not-too-distant future. Also I think my agent said something about my body count, so I told him that next time I was going to kill the protagonist in the first chapter. (SPOILER! Except not really. Come on, it's in the first chapter.)

Tegan Oglietti is preserved in frozen death for a hundred years, and wakes to a world both frighteningly familiar and incredibly different. And while the existence of that long sleep informs her journey through the narrative, and complicates a lot of what people think about her, what was really interesting to me - and to Tegan - is what she sees and says and does when she wakes.

And that is why I love the crap out of my cover:



Tegan Oglietti has woken up. And she's going to kick some ass.


Cover copy:

My name is Tegan Oglietti, and on the last day of my first lifetime, I was so, so happy.

Sixteen-year-old Tegn is just like every other girl living in 2027 - she's happiest when playing the guitar, she's falling in love for the first time, and she's joining her friends to protest the wrongs of the world: environmental collapse, social discrimination, and political injustice.

But on what should have been the best day of Tegan's life, she dies - and wakes up a hundred years in the future, locked in a government facility with no idea what happened.

Tegan is the first government guinea pig to be cryonically frozen and successfully revived, which makes her an instant celebrity - even though all she wants to do is try to rebuild some semblance of a normal life. But the future isn't all she hoped it would be, and when appalling secrets come to light, Tegan must make a choice: Does she keep her head down and survive, or fight for a better future?

Award-winning author Karen Healey has created a haunting, cautionary tale of an inspiring protagonist living in a not-so-distant future that could easily be our own.



AND NOW, A PRIZEGIVING. Oh yes!

I will give away ONE shiny ARC of When We Wake. To enter, comment, and tell me the single thing you want most to have happened, a hundred years from now.

Comments

[trouble]

A single thing I want to have happened 100 years from now? I want us to have invented a way to eliminate the stores of nuclear waste.

[marina]

100 years from now I want there to finally be at least the prototype of a functional teleportation device.

[meloukhia]

Two awesomes, one post! I love this cover. And ARCs!

I want many, many things to have happened 100 years from now, and it's hard to choose just one! But, given that Tegan needs a world to wake up TO, I'm going to go with the hope that the international community has committed to addressing the environment cooperatively, and has found a way to halt anthropogenic climate change.

[mystic_rhythms]

For humanity to finally friggin' get along without regard to race, sexual orientation, cis/trans status, disability, economic status, etc.

[mystic_rhythms]

...can't believe I stuck "gender" in the et cetera, but I plead no coffee yet. Should've just said, "An end to privilege."

[recessional]

A cheap, readily available, non-harmful-side-effects-ful, generally-effective way to deal with pain. And all of those adjectives are important: I want anyone who is in pain to be able to easily get hold of something that will stop it, effectively and without harming them. Because I hold the personal intuitive belief that a lot of human unpleasantness comes from people being in actual, physical pain that they think of as so normal that they don't even register it - but personal experience says that pain makes people tired, grumpy, less prone to empathy, massively impatient, short, and interferes intensely with cognitive processes, and that the more deprived a person is, the more likely they are to be continually in pain that they've backgrounded so that it's merely part of their landscape.

It's a small thing. And it's a thing I think might be broadly possible. And I'd like to see a world where with something simple and safe we could say to everyone, here, stop being in pain.

[via_ostiense]

To enter, comment, and tell me the single thing you want most to have happened, a hundred years from now.

Rehabilitative rather than punitive prison system, and along with that, an end to de facto slave labor in prisons and disenfranchisement of prisoners (I'm thinking specifically of U.S. prison practices, because they're the only ones I know anything about).

[umadoshi]

Everyone has good answers!

Hmm. I'm going to say that I'd like climate change to no longer be a concern (specifically due to humanity learning to treat the environment well and also developing some way to effectively deal with the damage, as opposed to "no longer a concern due to humanity having perfected domed habitats").

[qian]

This is pretty narrow in focus, but hope starts at home, so -- I want Malaysia to be a developed country with a reasonably non-corrupt government, healthy and viable alternatives to whatever political party/ies are in government, efficient public transport systems, good schools, a noisy press, honest history textbooks, and a society that recognises the rights and humanity of marginalised communities.

[starlady]

A hundred years from now? That I want most? Where to start?

Let's go with, for women worldwide to earn 100% as much as men do.

[editormum]

A bit personally at the moment - eradication of cancer, in all its insidious forms.

This looks brilliant Karen - looking forward to it!