EARTH GIRL (Earth Girl Trilogy 1)
Available now from Pyr in the USA and Harper Voyager in the rest of the world.
HARPER VOYAGER PAPERBACK
HARPER VOYAGER AUDIOBOOK Narrated by NURA NASH
2788. Only the handicapped live on Earth. Eighteen-year-old Jarra is among the one in a thousand people born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Sent to Earth at birth to save her life, she has been abandoned by her parents. She can’t travel to other worlds, but she can watch their vids, and she knows all the jokes they make. She’s an “ape,” a “throwback,” but this is one ape girl who won’t give in.
PYR HARDCOVER (C) Himitsuhana Cover Design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht
Jarra makes up a fake military background for herself and joins a class of norms who are on Earth for a year of practical history studies excavating the dangerous ruins of the old cities. She wants to see their faces when they find out they’ve been fooled into thinking an ape girl was a norm. She isn’t expecting to make friends with the enemy, to risk her life to save norms, or to fall in love.
See reviews here
EARTH GIRL:-
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- Voted a Teens’ Top Ten title 2014.
- A Tayshas 2014 choice.
- Kirkus starred review for a book of exceptional merit.
- A Kirkus best book of 2013.
- Booklist starred review for being outstanding in its genre.
- Booklist Editors’ Choice: Books for Youth, 2013.
- An Amazon.co.uk best Young Adult book of 2012.
- A Kobobooks.com best Young Adult book of 2012.
BUY USA HARDCOVER (ISBN 9781616147655) at:- Pyr – Barnes and Noble – Powells – Booksamillion – Indiebound – Amazon.com – Walmart.com – Bookdepository – Fishpond
BUY USA EBOOK at:- Kindle – Nook – BooksamillionEpub
BUY REST OF WORLD PAPERBACK (ISBN 9780007443499) at:- Waterstones – WH Smith – Blackwell’s – Foyles – Hive – Amazon.co.uk – Amazon.ca – Chapters.Indigo – The Book Depository – Fishpond
BUY REST OF WORLD EBOOK:- HarperCollins – Kindle – Kobo – iTunes – Hive
BUY REST OF WORLD AUDIOBOOK (NOT AVAILABLE USA):- HarperCollins – Amazon.co.uk – Amazon.de – iTunes – Audible.co.uk
Janet Edwards Author Site 
I just discovered that the audiobook is going to be released in November 2nd. I am so happy! I hope the others will follow soon.
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Yes, this is the HarperCollins audiobook so it may not be available in the USA. I knew they were aiming to release the audiobook in November. I haven’t been screaming about it in case there were last minute delays, but I think the release date must be pretty solid by now. Initially it’s just the audiobook for Earth Girl but hopefully the others will follow.
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I was hoping that Amazon UK had a CD version of Earth Girl so I could get it shipped to me in the US. sad grump… Do you have any suggestions for contact people at Pyr for me to heckle… ahem… ask..! for a US version?
Thanks!
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There is a contact page on their website, though it isn’t exactly up to date. If you are a twitter person, then you could tweet them @Pyr_Books.
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I love this series!
I have a question that I think might be unanswered.
What colour is Jarra’s impact suit?
Thanks!
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Great to hear that you love the books. The domes are equipped with standard, black impact suits. Jarra’s initially using one of those. The gift impact suit is the default metallic silver in colour. It can be sprayed to customise the colour but Jarra doesn’t get round to doing that. Partly because there’s a lot happening. Partly because her appearance isn’t high on her priority list. Later she has a Military blue suit.
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Have you ever thought about selling merchandise such as pins or shirts?
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That’s on the maybe in the future list, but I’d have to check legal stuff like contractual and image licensing issues to work out what would be possible.
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Thank you so much for all you books! They’re absolutely the best books ever!!
Do you think there will ever be a Earth Girl movie? Or a Hive Mind movie? That would be totaly zan!
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There has been some interest in the past. As in the vast majority of cases, that didn’t end up making it to the screen, but it’s not totally impossible that something will happen again in future. It would be fun if it did.
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I was thinking of rereading the series (for the 3rd or 4th time, lol) and was wondering if you had a recommendation for reading order (chronologucal, release order, or other) for all the books, short stories, and novellas?
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If you click on the books tab of my website, there’s a full list of books with some comments on reading order, but those are really intended for people reading the books for the first time.
If you’ve already read the books, then you may well like to go for the chronological sequence starting with Scavenger Alliance. The Portal Future is a long sequence of events. There are currently massive holes in that sequence, so the more gaps I fill, the better the chronological reading approach will work.
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I think you need to read “Alien Moons” in “Scientic America – March 2021”. It may affect your world building in the portal universe. It suggests that large moon may be required for life on planets.
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I’ve already seen that, but I was assuming from the start that all colony world’s would have at least one significantly sized moon for multiple reasons. While I obviously don’t comment on the moon or moons of every world, there shouldn’t be any references implying a colony world has no moon.
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I was thinking about the statement in chapter 4 of “Earth Girl”, ‘the moon is too big’.
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Oh yes. You mean the bit where Playdon says Earth’s moon is too large for the Planet First criteria. Apologies that the explanation is a bit long and technical.
While Playdon is in essence correct, he’s a historian not a physicist, so that statement is terminologically wrong. Jarra, due to her dreadful school physics teacher, doesn’t have the knowledge to correct him. Fian obviously does, but wouldn’t argue technicalities with Playdon, and anyway is distracted at that moment staring at Jarra.
Some of the basic Planet First criteria for colony worlds date back to before humanity actually developed drop portal technology and reached other star systems. For example, to avoid health issues, scientists felt that the gravity of colony worlds should ideally not be higher than Earth’s gravity or more than a few per cent lower. Playdon is referring to a rule about moons that’s related to concerns about tidal forces. While tidal forces are generally beneficial, scientists were worried that a planet subjected to too strong a tidal force could have issues with things like excessive volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. An extreme example in our own solar system is Jupiter’s moon, Io.
Scientists therefore put a limit on both the tidal force exerted on the colony world by its moon or moons, and the total tidal force exerted by all bodies in the star system in every possible alignment. Tidal force technically isn’t related to the size of a moon, but its mass and how close it is to the colony world. As a non-scientist, Playdon doesn’t think of Earth’s moon being too massive for its close orbit, but just too large.
Fun fact. The limit of tidal forces exerted by moons was originally based on Earth’s moon, but crucially used the mass of Earth’s moon before the invention of portal technology. As Tad mentions in Scavenger Blood, once portal technology improved to the point that the moon was accessible, there was some mining and dumping of hazardous waste. That both changed the surface appearance of Earth’s moon, and increased its mass by a tiny amount. so it became technically illegal under Planet First rules.
Given the number of habitable worlds available when you can portal massive interstellar distances, Planet First criteria have generally grown stricter rather than more relaxed over the centuries, so Earth’s moon remains technically illegal.
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I have all of your books in the eBook versions, and all but Earth Girl, Earth Star and Earth Flight in paperback. I really want to complete the collection, but all of your books are slightly larger than the usual book size and I can’t find copies of Earth Girl, Earth Star and Earth Flight that match that size. Are they available in that slightly larger size?
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I’m afraid that there are several different sizes of physical books, and Earth Girl, Earth Star, and Earth Flight are distributed by publishing houses who make the decision on the format. I’ve more control of the formats for the other books, and opted to go for the larger trade paperback size rather than mass-market paperbacks. My reasoning was that this format was very close to hardbacks, the larger pages would allow me to have a more readable font size, and I could publish longer books without having an unmanageably thick spine. Books the length of Borderline and Earth Prime would be a real problem if I had the smaller page size.
So I’m afraid there aren’t copies of Earth Girl, Earth Star, and Earth Flight in that size. If I’m ever in a position to release matching editions of them then I will.
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Mar/Apr 2022 Discovery magazine has an article about Coronal Mass Ejections. It mentions the Carrington Event.
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Hi Janet,
First of all, thanks for writing this awesome book! I enjoyed reading it a lot, and just started “earth star”. When I read, I always “see” everything happening in my head. So there is one thing that I have been wondering the whole time, and has really bugged me 😅. What does Jarra look like? Hair/eyes… I just don’t know how to picture her… thanks for reading, and I hope to find out the answer ☺☺
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Hi Raven. I avoided giving too specific descriptions of Jarra in the Earth Girl trilogy for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted the reader to strongly identify with her so let them picture her as they wanted. Secondly, the Earth Girl trilogy is set in 2789, by which time realistically most people including Jarra will have ancestors from a lot of different regions of Earth. (Jarra comments multiple times about Fian’s fair skin and blond hair because that’s relatively unusual.)
Since the trilogy is very much centred on an invented prejudice that doesn’t exist in our time, I didn’t want anyone confused into thinking that prejucide had anything to do with Jarra’s appearance. It does however get mentioned that Jarra has untidy short, dark, curly hair.
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Just wondering if anyone knows what the publishing dates are for all the books
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Do you mean the publishing dates for all the existing 20 books or for the Earth Girl trilogy? You can see them on Amazon, but the publishing dates for the Earth Girl trilogy were earlier in the UK than the USA, so you’d need to check both Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com for those. If you want to be utterly precise about these things, Amazon puts up the publishing date for all the others as the day before they were actually published.
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Ooooooo thank you!!! I’ll have to go look that up then. I wanna do a complete re-read but I wanna try something new and read them in published order to get a sense of how your storybuilding and writing has grown over the years
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