Ness, Patrick
Entry updated 10 June 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1971- ) US author, in UK from 1999; though his work has mostly been designed for relatively mature Young Adult readers, two at least are not. His first novel, The Crash of Hennington (2003), imports a herd of rhinos to an American seaside town, where they take up long-term residence, and strange events ensue (see Equipoise; Magic Realism). The Crane Wife (2013) features a Shapeshifter who, rescued in bird form, enters humanly into a romance with the protagonist.
Ness is of sf interest for a Young Adult sequence – the Chaos Walking series beginning with Chaos Walking, Book One: The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008), which won the James Tiptree Jr Award and was filmed as Chaos Walking (2021) directed by Doug Liman – set on a colony planet (see Colonization of Other Worlds) defined by the apparent absence of all females, seemingly caused by an Alien Pandemic, and by a phenomenon whose source is mysterious, an inescapable "Noise" whose effect is the involuntary broadcasting of men's thoughts (see Telepathy) with an effect of something like malign chaos, something like a Media Landscape which means to do that. The young protagonist, after discovering a quiet Zone which he traces to an inexplicable young woman who has survived the crash of her Starship lander, flees with her from his provincial Dystopian culture, but is captured and forced to take part in internecine Wars that threaten to end life on the planet. The ending resolves the plot but does not clear away a Feminism-inflected sense that Homo sapiens is a hugely dangerous species. The third volume of the sequence, Chaos Walking, Book Three: Monsters of Men (2010), won the Carnegie Medal in 2011.
In 2012 Ness received a second Carnegie Medal for his standalone children's novel A Monster Calls (2011), a Fabulation whose young hero's interaction with the titular tree-Monster illuminates the real-world nightmare of his mother's struggle with cancer; this book also won the Carnegie's sister prize the Kate Greenaway Medal (the first such double win) for its black-and-white illustrations by Jim Kay. The young protagonist of More Than This (2014), after drowning in America, awakens in a Ruined Earth UK, unable at first to determine if he is there in the flesh, or inhabiting an Avatar. [JC/DRL]
Patrick Ness
born Fort Belvoir, Virginia: 17 October 1971
works
series
Chaos Walking
- Chaos Walking, Book One: The Knife of Never Letting Go (London: Walker Books, 2008) [Chaos Walking: hb/]
- Chaos Walking, Book Two: The Ask and the Answer (London: Walker Books, 2009) [Chaos Walking: hb/]
- Chaos Walking (New York: Science Fiction Book Club, 2010) [omni of the above two: Chaos Walking: hb/Pierre Perrin and Julio Lopez Saguar]
- Chaos Walking, Book Three: Monsters of Men (London: Walker Books, 2010) [Chaos Walking: hb/]
- Chaos Walking: The Complete Trilogy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2018) [omni of the above three: pb/]
individual titles
- The Crash of Hennington (London: Flamingo, 2003) [hb/]
- A Monster Calls (London: Walker Books, 2011) [from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd, credited thus on title page: illus/hb/Jim Kay]
- A Monster Calls: The Play (London: Walker Books, 2018) [play: chap: adapted by Adam Peck and Sally Cookson from the above: pb/]
- The Crane Wife (Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate Books, 2013) [hb/]
- More Than This (London: Walker Books, 2013) [hb/nonpictorial]
- The Rest of Us Just Live Here (London: Walker Books, 2015) [hb/]
- Release (London: Walker Books, 2017) [pb/Levente Szabo]
- And The Ocean Was Our Sky (London: Walker Books, 2018) [hb/Rovina Cai]
- Burn (London: Walker Books, 2020) [hb/]
links
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