Planet Ripple: Minnow's World Vol. 3

Planet Ripple #3

by Nicholas Anderson (author, illustrator)

For thousands of years the world has been completely flooded. The survivors have made a meager living trapped aboard their ships. Some don't even believe there ever was any land, but the earth is always changing and a great new shift is underway.

When new land emerges for the first time in millennia, the prospect of humanity returning to their true home may be too good to be true. The powers that be have hired Barrakuda, the notorious Pirate Queen and her vast army of cyborg warriors shaped in the image of terrifying sea creatures, to keep the new land untouched.

The pirates cannot be defeated through force or numbers. It may fall upon Minnow, a girl with multiple disabilities to find another way to secure a future for the people of a world turning itself inside out. Every encounter weighs on her heavily and brings more of her painful past to the surface as she deals with the new struggles that come with each day. In spite of it all, she refuses to let go of the hope for things to become better in an ocean bearing down on her.

172 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 22, 2018

About the author

Hello. I'm Nicholas Anderson, the creator of Planet Ripple. I am also on the autism spectrum. I see a lot of talk going around about the "dangers" of normalizing the condition and giving people "false hopes," and I wanted to make something that represents people with autism (and other disabilities) in a better light. I believe it's not only important that this group be positively represented so they can aspire to be like the characters they see in media, but that non-autistic people understand them through works like this. Planet Ripple is a project I've been working on for years, and I'm pretty passionate about it. Minnow, the lead protagonist of Planet Ripple, is my ambassador. Like me she is at a point in her life where she's made it through enough of the struggles that can come with autism that in most conversations people may not even pick up on it, and no one in the story ever outright calls out what her condition is by name, but there are enough flashbacks to her youth and other, more current scenes where her quirks manifest, things that people who have seen these symptoms before in real life or know someone who has them or even have these symptoms themselves will notice and realize, "Oh. She's autistic. Okay, neat." That said, I don't want to market this as "just" an autistic person story, because autistic people are not just their condition. It is not their entire personality. They have tastes, interests, desires and dreams like anyone else. Yes, Minnow's journey is the emotional core of Planet Ripple but if that was its only selling point, it may not be interesting enough to catch on, feeling more like a patronizing, gimmicky PSA than a story with growth and resolution and a world that feels alive. I want Minnow to go places. I want her to succeed. In the contents of the Planet Ripple series of books, I've developed a whole world for Minnow to live in and I hope readers find it to be compelling stuff, because there is very little Minnow does in this story that any high functioning autistic person could not also accomplish. If you've made it this far, I hope you enjoy the journey to come. Thank you. - Amazon bio