Earth calling… Rachel Delahaye on why ‘Last Hope Highway’ is a path to optimism
Rachel Delahaye’s latest novel Last Hope Highway is a page-turner of an adventure in which Kip Robertson’s family have managed to escape our dying planet - while he’s been left behind. Here, Rachel tells us what inspired the story and why she’d like it to be a call for not only hope, but also action. Over to Rachel…
Six years ago, my son played me his electronic music composition entitled ‘Starlight Highway’. It entertained me and, surprisingly, it also evoked some strong feelings. I didn’t know what these feeling were exactly – only that that the piece seemed to conjure a sense of vast space, of being untethered and lost. But there was excitement in it too; a retro sci-fi sound that reminded me of old video games.
Pantsing - and abandoning planet Earth
The music continued to affect me and so, to make sense of it, I knew I had to write a story, and write blind – no plot, just movement. The beauty of writing this way (known as ‘pantsing’ - creating a story ‘by the seat of your pants’!) is that thoughts and emotions lurking beneath the surface make their way into characters and storylines; you end up writing what’s important to you. In a way, it’s like therapy. As I listened to ‘Starlight Highway’ and allowed the story to evolve on the page, I began to understand why I had been so moved. The music had unearthed my deep, lingering worry that we’re becoming increasingly disconnected to planet Earth.
And that’s the background to the story: people are leaving Earth, abandoning it to mercenaries and miners in favour of safe, shiny colonies in outer space. This is a well-used sci-fi theme in fiction, but it has recently been brought into a seriously proposed reality by the likes of Elon Musk. The seduction of space exploration and scientific discovery is one thing, but when it steals attention away from what we already have… it’s dangerous. A wave of shock-and-awe world events, screen addiction, multiple distractions and short attention spans are severing our individual and collective umbilical cords - and it’s not just us who are losing out. Our abdication of responsibility when it comes to the environment means that we’re not making healthy decisions, for nature or for us. We’re instead accelerating the decline, thereby making those proposed space colonies appear more necessary as we look at future human survival.
It's time to fight for what we have
How ridiculous we are. We’ve been given a rock that’s abundant with food, colour, creatures and entertainment. Waterfalls, sunsets, beaches, mountains. It’s a larder and a playground. We just need to see it. Fight for it.
Of course, there are many groups that do. The Greenstays – the story’s group of eco warriors – reflect some of the real-life missions of Greenpeace, and there are many organisations like it. But the fact that these activists are still in the minority is extraordinary. We should all be involved in the conservation of our planet. We should care as if our lives were on the line - because they are!
Sometimes it’s hard to encourage action when we look at this from an angle of ‘protecting what we have’ – it’s far less glamorous than ‘look what we could have’. So I really wanted to twist this story to fit that more tempting narrative. Fourteen-year-old Kip Robertson is convinced that the only way he can feel happy is to get a shuttle to an off-planet city – it’s where everyone wants to be; but when he meets a group of secretive Greenstays who show him the rewards right under his feet, he begins to see what he’d be missing out on if he followed the masses and left. He sees what he could have if he stayed.
An epic adventure – with a message
I’m fully aware that big messages and facts don’t always change opinions, which is why Last Hope Highway is essentially an epic adventure. But the rewards are there, and my hope is that children reading this story will put the book down and look around them with fresh eyes, and seek out the real prizes of living on beautiful planet Earth. While we still can…