Five Cities that inspired Union in Zombie Girl: Dead Awakened

The Adventures of the Everyday Fangirl welcomes author Pippa Jay as a guest today to tell us about the five cities that inspired Union in her story, Zombie Girl: Dead Awakened.

Take it away Pippa…

Five Cities that inspired Union in Zombie Girl: Dead Awakened

Hi, I’m Pippa Jay, author of scifi and supernatural stories designed to engage the emotions. My latest release – Zombie Girl: Dead Awakened – is a near future YA dystopia…which is set in utopia. Confused yet? While the world has undergone a kind of apocalypse, the city in which it takes place is still a functioning, apparently perfect self-maintaining machine that continues to thrive despite the demise of most of its inhabitants. So I thought I’d take you on a short tour of the five scifi cities that helped inspire mine.

1. The Great City of the Exxilons (Doctor Who and Death to the Daleks). In this story, the city is a living, thinking, self-sustaining entity in its own rights, which has left the rest of the planet barren and its creators living as savage primitives. Draining all energy from its own world, and from any ship foolish enough to approach, it also defends itself with ‘roots’ capable of destroying even the Daleks. This is self-sufficiency gone a bit mad!

2. The Domed City (Logan’s Run). Here, the city is a utopia where a computer runs every aspect of its inhabitants’ lives, including reproduction. There’s just one catch in this paradise. In order to maintain equilibrium, everyone must die when they reach 30 years of age, and the computer follows this plan to extremes.

3. New York City, 2263 (The Fifth Element). My favourite element here is the little cleaning bots in Zorg’s office that emerge when he breaks a glass to demonstrate the circle of life.

4. The Ruins of Utopia in HG Wells’ The Time Machine (the 1960s film version). Unfortunately, the time travelling narrator speeds past the time of the cities into a post-apocalyptic paradise, where humans are at peace (almost catatonic because everything is provided for them and so the need or even desire to fight for more or achieve it through the use of intelligence and technology is replaced by apathy). The humans live in the remains of futuristic buildings and have no need to work for anything. The downside is the underground society of Morlocks who provide for their every and simple needs also harvest them for food!

5. Dark City. Though this isn’t a utopia as such (in fact it comes across as a rather dark dystopia), once again everything is provided and the inhabitants have no compulsion to venture outside the city, despite some very gruesome murders taking place. In fact, for the most part it doesn’t even seem to occur to them that there is an outside (in fact there isn’t – the entire city is an artificial construct out in space).

I hope you enjoyed your brief tour of these five very different and yet related scifi cities. Now, are you brave enough to step into mine?

Imagine waking up to find the world has ended, but unfortunately you’re not alone…

For Connor Innis, awakening from a year-long coma with no memories, no ability to move, and unable to speak was bad enough. Then he learns that a bioweapon set off a zombie apocalypse—for real—while he was sleeping, and the world he can’t even remember no longer exists.

Rehabilitation might be torture, but far worse awaits him outside. All too soon, the hospital Mentor declares him fit to leave with nothing to go home to except a city full of mindless, flesh-eating monsters. That is, until he forms a strange relationship with the one he nicknames ‘Zombie Girl’.

Zombie Girl: Dead Awakened is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Omnilit and Smashwords

For more information on Zombie Girl: Dead Awakened and other stories by Pippa Jay, you can check out this interview with her, visit her Web page or sign up for her no-spam newsletter! You can also stalk Pippa on Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ or Wattpad

About Pippa Jay:

After spending twelve years working as an Analytical Chemist in a Metals and Minerals laboratory, Pippa Jay is now a stay-at-home mum who writes scifi and the supernatural. Somewhere along the way a touch of romance crept into her work and refused to leave. In between torturing her plethora of characters, she spends the odd free moment playing guitar very badly, punishing herself with freestyle street dance, and studying the Dark Side of the Force. Although happily settled in the historical town of Colchester in the UK with her husband of 22 years and three little monsters, she continues to roam the rest of the Universe in her head.

Pippa also regularly posts on these Blogs: Adventures in Scifi, Spacefreighters Lounge, Romancing the Genres and SFR Brigade.

Her works include YA and adult stories crossing a multitude of subgenres from scifi to the paranormal, often with romance, and she’s one of eight authors included in a science fiction romance anthology—Tales from the SFR Brigade. She’s also a double SFR Galaxy Award winner, been a finalist in the Heart of Denver RWA Aspen Gold Contest (3rd place), the 2015 EPIC eBook awards, the 2015 RWA LERA Rebecca (2nd place), and the GCC RWA Silken Sands Star Awards (2nd place)