Ally Condie: Inspired by paradise tempered by pollution

Ally Condie, author of Atlantia, shares how she got the idea for her new release …

Ally:

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in." ― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

Atlantia came about, in part, because I live in an almost impossibly beautiful place, almost a paradise. My home is in a valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains that harbor some of the best skiing, hiking, and fly-fishing in the world. Every day I look up and draw in my breath at how beautiful it is — except in the winter, when I try not to breathe at all.

In a scenario that is rather too much like a dystopia for my taste, the winter brings with it something called an inversion — when polluted air becomes trapped in our valley for weeks and sometimes months. The air quality is the worst in the USA in those times, and our children are not allowed to play outside because the pollution is so hard on their lungs.

It was, in part, because of the inversion that I had the idea for the city of Atlantia, an underwater refuge built when the earth above became too polluted for humans to survive for long. And it is also a story about sisters, families, falling in love, mystery, and of course, about Rio — a girl who has been raised in a place where she has never been given the chance to breathe — or speak — fully.

More than anything else, Rio wants to see the Above, the ruined world that she has heard so much about. In the opening scene of Atlantia, she says:

"Why would anyone choose to go Above if you die so young and have to work so hard?" the children of the Below used to ask each other when we were smaller. And I never answered, but I kept a long list at home of all the reasons I could think of to go Above: You could see the stars. You could feel the sun on your face. You could touch a tree that had roots in the ground. You could walk for miles and never come across the edge of your world."

Part of Rio's work in her city is to put the leaves back on the trees. In the city of Atlantia, the trees are made of metal and so are the leaves. This task must be performed every day. I think I wrote this, in part, because it often feels like what we do to save our world is pointless, that we must do it again and again and again. And it also connects to the very hard work we do of becoming our true selves. We struggle with the same things again and again; we perform the same rituals, hoping to at last overcome ourselves. But this work we do, both to take care of the beauty around us and to attend to the beauty in our own souls, is some of the most important business of living.

Find out more about Ally and her books at allycondie.com.