The Wild Unknown by Emily Gale

Title: The Wild Unknown

Author: Emily Gale

Genre: Science Fiction/Dystopia

Publisher: Text Publishing

Published: 28^th April 2026

Format: Paperback

Pages: 240

Price: $16.99

Synopsis: It’s 2045 and the world is full of tech. Eddie has a bot in his ear giving him advice all day, a bathroom scale that identifies illnesses, and classroom bots keeping track of him at school. The streets are full of delivery bots and game tech is amazing.

But tech can’t help the police find a missing boy called Theo, who was last seen at the river. When they abandon the search, Eddie and his friends sneak down to the river to look for clues. What they find doesn’t make any sense.

Then strange things start happening to Eddie. He’s never been sporty but suddenly he’s a brilliant runner. When a friend is caught in the bottom of the pool, Eddie rescues her from drowning by holding his breath for a suspiciously long amount of time. He has excellent night vision – and there are hair-like feathers growing out of his skin.

It’s exciting. It’s terrifying. How can it be both?

And what do the changes in Eddie have to do with Theo’s disappearance?

The Wild Unknown is a gripping adventure set in a near-future world where the truth can be difficult to find and where real friends will always be better than the smartest tech.

~*~

It’s 2045, and Eddie lives in a world with drones, bots in ears, and where technology and robots rule everything, just about. Nobody seems to need to think for themselves that much, AI and computers are everywhere, and the bots track everything. Your health, your sleep…everything. Literally.

Technology in this version of Melbourne, or Naarm, can’t solve everything. The police bots and their robot police dogs can’t find the missing boy, Theo. It’s falling apart, because there are barriers in place and the bots are only doing what feels like a surface investigation. So when they stop, Eddie and kit sneak down to the river to see if they can find out what is really going on. And that’s when things change.

Not only is Eddie sprouting wings, able to save a drowning classmate, and suddenly very god at sports, he’d much rather be awake at night. The clues they find don’t make sense, and soon enough, Eddie and his friends find out there is something sinister going on. So why is the tech trying to stop them? Why is the tech trying to take over, and who is behind trying to turn kids into human-animal hybrids?

This unnerving book shows what could happen if we become reliant on technology and put trust into AI, and it doesn’t look good. Investigations could be potentially corrupted or run to suit an agenda. Being fed information that suits a narrative. Constant surveillance, and the idea that AI and technology can make us question what we know, what we have experienced is scary. And what Emily Gale’s new book does is it explores this concept, and how some people just accept it, whilst others, like Luke, Eddie and Jude’s dad, question it and see what does work, what doesn’t work and sees that there needs to be some kind of balance.

Which is hard in a world like this one where it is so embedded in culture and society, it feels like change would be too difficult, even when there are people fighting the good fight, and trying to prove that AI is being taken advantage of and used to manipulate things and people in extremely dangerous ways. This books had me questioning whether all these advances are going to help or hinder society, or what will happen if everything becomes like this and humans are left without jobs. How do we afford food or necessities if we don’t have money from jobs? What are the solutions for this going to be?

As I said, it’s unsettling, yet a compelling mystery that reminds us that human connection, using our own smarts and working together is better and more effective than the most up-to-date technology. It shows that we need a balance, to save humanity, to keep the world safe, and to make sure we don’t destroy the environment. This is in part a warning, and in part an examination of what could happen if gene modification and manipulation become weapons against humanity. Emily Gale has done a wonderful job of exploring this, departing from her usual historical fiction which I adore. A great example of not letting technology rule our lives.