LoveReading4Kids Says
YA - NOT SUITABLE FOR YOUNGER READERS
Part of the Ruled Britannia series, and set in the same world as Melvin Burgess’ Three Bullets, Peter Kalu’s One Drop is a punch-packing, thought-provoking dystopian novel. Written in urgent style, this thrusts readers into an unforgettable journey through the worst of humanity, with Britain governed by the white supremacist Bloods.
When Black Radicals Axel and Dune are arrested for being part of the Resistance, they’re taken to an Evangelical Realignment Centre and implanted with SIM chips designed to brainwash recipients with the Bloods’ ideology of a “brave new world” that’s “Clean. White. Beautiful.”
When the chips take effect, “they start rewriting people’s memories, their sense of who they are, what they believe in. They drip-feed Bloods propaganda till it takes over their minds.” The chips can “make a Muslim into a Christian. Have black folk believing they’re white. LGBT declare they’re straight.”
In the light of the current cultural climate — a world in which institutional and individual racism continues to cause deaths, a world in which women’s reproductive rights are being eroded — the description of the Bloods’ steady coming-to-power is especially pertinent and makes One Drop something of an electrifying, challenging wake-up call, with the love and resistance of its main characters driving an unforgettable story.
Joanne Owen
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One Drop Synopsis
In war-torn Britain, inseparable Black Radicals Axel and Dune are arrested. With SIMs implanted in their heads, they are placed in a prison camp for those who defy the Bloods' white supremacist government.
The SIMs brainwash them with the Bloods' evil philosophy, and drones constantly monitor their movements and thoughts.
In this living nightmare, the couple battle to keep their love alive and to break free. The odds on survival are long. Dune and Axel have very different takes on how to escape. But when things come to a head, will their love hold them together and set them free, or will it tear them apart?
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781839132063 |
| Publication date: |
4th August 2022 |
| Author: |
Peter Kalu |
| Publisher: |
Andersen Press Ltd |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
323 pages |
| Series: |
Ruled Britannia |
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A letter from the author;
One Drop is a letter sprig of hope and a piece of phantasmagoria. I carried the end scene in my imagination for a decade. A young person emerges from a bleak future England landscape carrying in their hands a physical tech object on which the future of their world rests. They’re exhausted, scarred, but unbroken. And they pick their head up ask: Are you with me? That was the end scene. And it’s the end scene of One Drop.
Like all my YA books, One Drop is also a letter to my youngest daughter in case I kick the bucket. There are three messages in it.
1. Defiance. Be who you are. Don’t bother trying to fit in with other people’s ideas of who you should be – that ‘s exhausting and no fun at all. You are brilliant as you. You are the best you on this planet. Live it. Love it.
2. Choose Love. It is possible to live your entire life without love, without a bond with a special other person, but, despite all its difficulties, love is a thing that is worth choosing. It’s often a rocky road, but when that other person has got your back, you can take on the world and win.
3. The more dull one. Embrace tech. The emerging world will be full of technological marvels. They are double-edged, for sure. But they won’t be un-invented. Learn how to use them to advantage.
I have often felt an affinity with the black guy in the TV show, The IT Squad, Maurice Moss (played by Richard Ayoade). There are so few black geeks with any profile in the UK. So, I’m repping them here by writing One Drop. As research, I did a deep dive into artificial intelligence and inference engines and AI’s use of Markoov Blankets and… am I boring you? I’ll stop.
There are a lot of semi-hidden references to historical black cultural phenomena in One Drop. Like hip hop sayings, hair styles, music, Angela Davies, CLR James, Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad, Malcolm X, Gil Scott Heron, Martin Luther King, Toni Morrison, Marvin Gaye, the Black Power Movement, the Northern Soul dance movement, the US color bar’s Paper Bag Test and the Tuskegee Experiment, to list a few.. There are also links to Melvin Burgess’ book, Three Bullets – some of his characters ghost in and out of One Drop. We spent many nights working out those links. Hopefully, readers of both books will spot them too.
One Drop is part of a storyworld jointly created with the marvellous, award-winning (add any number of adjectives here) writers, Melvin Burgess and Tariq Mehmood. It started as our ‘Ruled Britannia’ trilogy which we were all writing in tandem, and now keeps expanding with more writers ever-expanding the world we created. We have an RPG Game called Bullet that is in development right now with a Tech company. It looks a bit like Fortnite. The storyworld keeps throwing out ripples into the literary universe - new stories and games.
Back to the phantasmagoria. Yes, the landscape is bleak, both the psychological mess being created by the Bloods through their A.I. and the physical destruction. I hope the book’s positive endnote blasts through all that. It’s the note that says, seeds of hope will grow, even in the most apocalyptic of situations: be that seed.
- Peter Kalu
