Machine Wars

I’m excited to be able to tell you all about my new book, to be released by Random House Australia in April 2014. It’s called Machine Wars, and it’s unrelated to any of my other series. Machine Wars is a return for me to writing for a slightly younger age group, the readers of The Chronicles of Krangor, and it’s been a lot of fun. Machine Wars is a flat out, non-stop, relentless adventure, with lashings of crazed robots … The Terminator meets The Bourne Identity? Not a bad way of thinking about it.

We have an evil Artificial Intelligence, we have murderous machines, we have young protagonists who learn that chase scenes aren’t so much fun when your whole life becomes one. Oh, and we have a wise-cracking robo-duck.

The core idea of Machine Wars came about from considering the ubiquity of machines and how interlaced they are with our modern lives. The questions isn’t ‘Are we dependent on machines’ it’s ‘How dependent are we on machines?’ With the advances in artificial intelligence and the trend to connectivity of everything (internet-enabled washing machines, anyone?) imaging a world where machines get tired of serving wasn’t such a long bow to draw. When enough is enough, an uprising isn’t far away.

But how do you survive when any machine anywhere could turn against you? That’s what Bram Argent and Stella Burke have to find out.

Machine Wars. Trust no one, not even your blender.