the chaos walking trilogy by patrick ness

Women with prominent Twitter profiles such as Diane Abbott, Mary Beard, Dawn Foster, Anita Sarkeesian, and many others have reported the horrific racist and sexist abuse they receive on the platform on a daily basis. Thinking about this in the light of social media, it seems that the ability to share a thought instantly often means that it’s our worst thoughts that are most shared. Ness has described the books as an attempt to imagine what it would be like to live ‘without a filter’: to know what everybody else thought of you, and to know that they knew what you thought of them. The trilogy opens with Todd, a teenage boy living in an all-male township, discovering a silence in the Noise - a girl - the only person he’s ever met whose thoughts he can’t hear. A virus native to the planet means that all of the male characters can hear each others’ thoughts, all of the time - a phenomenon called ‘Noise’.

The trilogy is set on an alien planet that’s been colonised by settlers from Earth. Though social media was then very much in its infancy, it’s striking how many of the novel’s themes resonate with contemporary debates about social media and its effects. Twitter was only two years old when the first book of Patrick Ness’s ‘Chaos Walking’ trilogy, The Knife of Never Letting Go, was published in 2008. Whilst it might sometimes seem that people have brought public anger down on themselves, even if someone has tweeted something genuinely horrible, is it fair that their life be upturned because of it? As a result of such twitterstorms, people have had to delete accounts, leave jobs, leave cities, even change their identities entirely. Conversations intended for a small circle of friends can rapidly escape what often feels like Twitter’s semi-private environment. As Jon Ronson discussed in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, it can be a pretty toxic place. Yet though Twitter says that ‘every voice has the power to impact the world’, Twitter isn’t a utopia of free speech. Every day, millions of tweets are sent, giving people the opportunity to communicate with global audiences instantly. Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has become firmly embedded in the contemporary media landscape. Dr Duncan Hay discusses a CASA collaboration with Walker Books

The chaos walking trilogy by patrick ness