Featured Interview With Jule Owen
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in the North of England, in a small Merseyside town nestled between Snowdonia, the Irish Sea and the Pennines. I now lives in London, but miss the wild places and the warm-hearted Northern folk. I don’t miss the weather!
I have three cats, which I know is too many. I try herding them regularly. Two are Tonkinese and one is a Bengal. They actually own me.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
One of my earliest and happiest memories is learning to read using those old white cards with big black type. I loved those cards. The words fascinated me. My first book loves were about animals. I loved Charlotte’s Web and I was so into The One Hundred and One Dalmatians that I wrote the sequel, when I was seven and a half. (No one told me one already existed). So my first literary creation was fan fiction. My first original story was science fiction, but it was largely based on Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Right now I’m very into Chuck Wendig and Ann Leckie. Chuck writes these generous, humane, profane, really wonderful books for teenagers, with huge hearts. Ann has created this mind-bending universes and can make you love artificial intelligences inhabiting a dead human body. That’s some feat!
I read a lot of science fiction and speculative fiction, I love Philip K Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Iain M Banks and Margaret Atwood. I also love fantasy. But I read very widely. Some of my favourite books are classics, like Wuthering Heights, Gulliver’s Travels or Orlando.
I’m also inspired by non-fiction, so writers like Michio Kaku, Martin Rees, K Eric Drexler, George Friedman, Alan Weisman, James Lovelock and James Hansen. I read The New Scientist once a week and follow anything to do with futurology or scientific developments.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
“The Boy Who Fell from the Sky” is the first of a mind-twisting new YA dystopian series, set in a near future world
The world is falling apart in 2055. Another flood has devastated London and it’s the eve of the First Space War. With the city locked down, sixteen-year-old Mathew Erlang is confined to his house with only his cat, his robot and his holographic dragons for company.
Desperate for a distraction from the chaos around him, Mathew becomes fascinated by his peculiar and reclusive neighbour, August Lestrange. Mathew begins to investigate Mr. Lestrange, turning to the virtual world of the Nexus and Blackweb for answers. But as he digs deeper, Mathew realises that Mr. Lestrange doesn’t seem quite human.
When Mathew accidentally finds himself trapped in Lestrange’s house, he opens a door and falls four hundred years into the future. Unwittingly, he starts to destabilise the course of human history.
A 1984 for a new generation, The Boy Who Fell from the Sky delves into a future where climate change and technology have transformed the world. It is the first book in The House Next Door trilogy, a young adult dystopian science fiction action adventure.
“The Boy Who Fell from the Sky” is the first of three books in the “House Next Door” trilogy.
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