The New World

The New World is Patrick Ness’s short story prequel to his Chaos Walking trilogy, the dystopian young adult science fiction series that began with The Knife of Never Letting Go in 2008. The story is set on the colony planet of New World before the events of the trilogy and provides background on the original colonization that the main novels reference but do not directly depict.

The Chaos Walking trilogy is built around a colony planet where everyone can hear everyone else’s thoughts as a constant audible Noise. The main novels follow Todd Hewitt, a teenage boy in the small settlement of Prentisstown, and Viola Eade, the girl whose arrival from a second colony ship transforms his life and the wider conflict on the planet. The trilogy’s wider history involves the original Spackle inhabitants of the planet, the long conflict between the human colonists and the Spackle, and the various political and military situations that the colonists have created among themselves in the years since arrival.

The New World short story takes place during or shortly after the original colonization and provides a glimpse into the lives of the early settlers as they began to figure out what kind of world they had actually arrived on. The Noise affects men but not women, the original colonists discover. The Spackle, originally encountered as the indigenous inhabitants of the planet, become the central counter party in the slowly developing conflict. And the various political and religious dynamics among the colonists themselves begin to take the shape that the main trilogy will eventually inherit.

Patrick Ness writes literary young adult fiction at a level few other writers in the category attempt. The Chaos Walking books are some of the most acclaimed young adult science fiction of the early twenty first century, and the Noise as a literary device gives the prose its distinctive texture through unusual typography and structural experimentation. The New World short story works in the same general voice as the main trilogy and offers Patrick Ness fans the chance to spend a little more time in the world that the main books resolved.

For longtime Chaos Walking fans, The New World is essential supplementary reading. The story illuminates a corner of the wider history that the main trilogy could not directly address. For new readers, this is not the place to start. Begin with The Knife of Never Letting Go and read the trilogy in order before returning to the prequel material.