The Tomorrow Series

The Tomorrow Series was a series of books aimed at young adults by Australian author John Marsden. They are written from the perspective of rural teenager Ellie Linton. She and a small group of friends head into an unexplored area of bush for a week-long holiday, and return to find that their houses are abandoned and their animals are dead or dying. They soon realise that Australia was invaded on Commemoration Day, and they are among the very small number of people who have avoided being taken prisoner.

The original series is usually refered to as The Tomorrow Series and consisted of seven books published between 1994 and 1999. These are:

• Tomorrow, When The War Began
• The Dead of the Night
• The Third Day, The Frost
• Darkness, Be My Friend
• Burning For Revenge
• The Night Is For Hunting
• The Other Side of Dawn

The Ellie Chronicles was a follow-up series, set in the aftermath of the invasion and subsequent war, which began publication in 2003 and finished in 2006. The titles in this series are:

• While I Live
• Incurable
• Circle of Flight

A |movie premiered on August 8, 2010, and got a wide release in Australia on September 2, 2010. It was successful enough that the rest of the series is also being adapted. No word on an American release, although given the books' failure to catch on in America, we're not getting our hopes up. The trailer is up here.

By the way, this series is totally not Red Dawn in the outback. Honest.

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Tropes used in The Tomorrow Series include:

• Adults Are Useless: As Ellie and her friends are among such a select few to escape imprisonment, there are no adults to lead them. Those adults that they do meet are either not in a position to help them, or, particularly in the case of Harvey's Heroes, are completely incompetent.
• Anyone Can Die: Although audiences were certainly shocked by Corrie, Chris and Robyn's deaths, the Anyone Can Die feel was cemented after seven year old Davina dies in The Night Is For Hunting.
• Apocalyptic Log: When the group returns to find everything abandoned, Corrie finds a letter from her father reading, in part, "...I'm sending this anyway, then tearing it up so no one'll know what an idiot I've been. But Corrie, if you do get this, go bush. Take great care. Don't come out till you know it's safe."
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In The Third Day, The Frost, Ellie's list of injuries includes "shock, cracked vertebrae, fractured patella, malnutrition, cuts and abrasions, acute anxiety state, head lice".
• Band of Brothers / Nakama The main characters form one.
• Bittersweet Ending: At the end of the main series, the war is over... but Australia's apparently lost a lot of its territory to the invaders permanently, and several of Ellie's Nakama are dead, along with one of the feral children.
• Break the Cutie: Fi's coping with the war, and her parents being prisoners, and having to live in the bush, but then she has to blow up her own house...
• Child Soldiers
• Click. "Hello.": Subverted in Tomorrow, When The War Began. Ellie hears the click and first panics because she thinks it's an enemy soldier - then realises that she knows that gun, and that it's a friend.
• Contrived Coincidence: In Burning For Revenge Ellie and her friends hide in an enemy truck, which just happens to take them to the airbase they failed to destroy in Darkness, Be My Friend.
• Convenient Slow Dance: Mentioned. Back before the war, Lee asked Ellie to dance at a school dance during a nice slow song, but it ended up taking him a while to ask her, and they end up dancing to Convicted of Love instead. When told this story, Ellie admits she doesn't even remember the incident.
• Crazy Enough to Work
• A Date with Rosie Palms: Ellie and Fi discuss in one book whether they think the guys do this when the girls aren't around. Ellie reveals that she once walked in on Homer doing it and decided not to mention it to avoid awkwardness.
  • Later, in The Ellie Chronicles, Ellie also walks in on Gavin (who is deaf, and so wouldn't have heard her knock). Ellie leaves quickly before he can see her, and makes a mental note to tell Homer to have a talk with him.
• Death Seeker: Ellie suspects that this is Lee's motivation after he finds out his parents have been killed, and he embarks on a series of solo guerilla missions.
• Drives Like Crazy: Ellie. Comes in handy when on the run.
• Easy Logistics: The "enemy"'s assault on Australia would require this in order to work, especially since the geography of Wirrawee and environs suggest it is on the east coast, thousands of kilometres from the more accessible north coast of Australia. This page does a good job of explaining why such an attack on Australia would be logistically impossible. But this is also subverted in that about half of the heroes' missions are specifically targeting the enemy's logistics (convoys, bridges, ports, railways).
• Enfant Terrible: Gavin in both Tomorrow Series' and Ellie Chronicles.
• Evil Brit: Reflecting on the duplicity of the New Zealand colonel who helped in Darkness, Be My Friend. Ellie remarks that she probably should have noted his obvious English accent.
• Faking the Dead: Rescuing Kevin from a prisoner of war camp.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The "Enemy", of (most probably) Indonesia.
• Five-Man Band: Although the characters shift somewhat between books, the most prominent band is as follows:

The Hero - Ellie
The Lancer - Homer
The Big Guy - Kevin
The Smart Guy - Lee
The Chick - Fi

• • Robyn tends to float between The Big Guy, The Smart Guy, and The Chick before she died.
• Girls with Guns
• Good Guns, Bad Guns: Averted. The bad guys use M-16s too.
• Hollywood Tactics: Most notably in Darkness, Be My Friend, when they try to take down the airfield by putting sugar in the gas tanks of planes. It doesn't work, but due to the tank being padlocked.
  • Interestingly, there was a Real Life incident of sabotage involving foresting equipment where exactly this happened, and it worked (due to the substance sparking a chemical reaction).
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Most of the enemy seem to be honorary graduates.
• Hammer and Sickle Removed For Your Protection: The "Enemy" is fairly obviously an expy of Indonesia, but is diplomatically never named, and shares several notable differences from RL Indonesia.
  • YMMV on that. Some saw the Enemy as China, North or South Korea or even India. Marsden deliberately kept it ambiguous as to who the Enemy was, as to prevent readers claiming that they knew they couldn't trust Country X.
• Hero-Tracking Failure: The farmhouse kitchen scene in The Night is for Hunting.
• Infant Immortality: Averted. Brutally. See Anyone Can Die above.
• Inspirationally Disadvantaged: Averted. In another YA series the deaf child might serve as a foil of sweetness and light and inspiration to all, as well as a Load in times of crisis. Not so here. Gavin averts all the usual conventions that occur when a disabled child is thrown into the narrative mix.
• In the Back: Corrie is shot in the back at the end of Tomorrow, When The War Began.
• It Got Worse: To put it mildly...
• Just Plane Wrong: The most egregious examples can be found in Burning For Revenge "All [the Jet Fighters'] fabric had been burnt away and you could only see black ribs, like a balsawood framework of a plane." Aside from the fact that the use of "fabric" in aircraft was largely obsolete by 1930, the skins and framework on modern aircraft are usually made of the same alloy and would have melted at the same temperature.
  • Followed a few pages later by: "I don't know whether those things [Jet Fighters] are turbo-charged or what..."
• Kangaroo Court: Ellie and her friends face these a couple of times after capture. Even though they are guilty, being tried in a foreign language by one's enemies is not generally considered the fairest possible procedure.
• Let's Get Out of Here: The line is used a few times, followed by Lee (and later other characters) remarking that it's used in, "like, 60% of movies or something."
• Line-of-Sight Name: Ellie poses as 'Amber Faulding', from the sound of ambulances and a word she saw on a bottle of pills, when she's taken prisoner in The Other Side of Dawn.
• Literary Agent Hypothesis: The series is Ellie's written record of the things they do. During the Ellie Chronicles, she confirms that she did publish the stories after the war.
  • Who Would Want to Watch Us?: They apparently sold poorly, and only the first three were published, which may be a Take That to the series' poor US sales in the mid 90s that caused only the first three books to be released initially. The full series was not released in mass-market form until 2008, after the Ellie Chronicles had already begun in Australia, and the final book in the Ellie Chronicles has still not been released.
• Literary Allusion Title: The Third Day, The Frost / A Killing Frost. (King Henry VIII, Shakespeare).
• Made of Explodium: Pretty much any petrol tank will act as a bomb when the plot requires it. Even a lawnmower set alight maimed or killed a couple of soldiers. They destroyed a bridge by igniting a petrol tanker under it - which admittedly would probably work, but not with an explosion. And if you think petrol is impressive, wait til you see what half a container full of fertilizer and diesel will do. It destroyed one ship and caused major damage to the adjacent wharf.
  • Homer makes a point of explaining that this is not due to any actual explosion but rather the buildup of pressure (which would work).
• No Export for You: Only the first three books were released as part of the series' first American print run, with the other four being held back due to poor sales. The full series got a full American release in 2008, but poor sales again prevented the release of The Ellie Chronicles stateside. And who knows if we're ever gonna get the movie...
• No Periods, Period: After almost a year out in the bush, Ellie mentions that she is down to her last tampon. Note that this is the only time 'that time of the month' is mentioned throughout the series.
  • It can almost be justified in that after almost a year with little food and high physical and emotional stress that her periods were very weak and far apart.
    • Or Ellie just didn't feel like writing about her periods.
    • There's also a mention, when Ellie is reminiscing about Corrie, about the two trying (and failing) to synchronise their periods after reading about it in a magazine.
  • In the movie, Ellie finds Chris sleeping on watch and starts yelling at him. He mutters 'it must be that time of the month' and quickly finds out that this is NOT a smart thing to say to a woman who is justifiably very annoyed with you and HOLDING A LOADED ASSAULT RIFLE.
• Occupiers Out of Our Country!
• One Sided Battle: Applied liberally throughout the series.
• Primal Scene: Robin mentions in The Dead of the Night that this was the last time she saw her parents.
• The Quisling: Major Harvey
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: The gun that Homer takes with him in The Dead of the Night, after they've agreed not to carry weapons.
• Shoot the Fuel Tank: Played straight and often.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The final book, The Other Side Of Dawn ends with the enemy nation being allowed to keep a large portion of the land they have invaded, so while the survivors can move back to Wirrawee, they are now right on the border, and the whole group had effectively been fighting (and dying) for very little.
• Their First Time: Ellie and Lee in The Dead of the Night. They discuss it at length earlier in the book, and she tells him that she's not comfortable with it, but she changes her mind after some steamy foreplay.
  • Sleeping Single: Even after they become sexually active, Ellie 'likes her privacy too much' to sleep together. Of course, in this case, 'together' is difficult, as double beds are scarce in the bush.
• The Film of the Book
• Taking You with Me: The climax of The Third Day, The Frost.
  • Put Down Your Gun and Step Away: Ditto.
  • Arguably a Stupid Sacrifice.
• There Are No Coincidences: Robyn's belief that coincidences are "God's way of telling you to wake up".
• There Are No Therapists: Averted; while obviously, there are no therapists available to them while they are out in the bush, when they are airlifted to New Zealand, one of the first things that happens is that each of them, independently, see therapists.
• Took a Level in Badass: All the main characters; they start out as fairly boringly-normal Australian rural teenagers, and end up as guerrillas with an international reputation...and some of the other side's most wanted enemies.
• Traintop Battle: In The Other Side Of Dawn.
• Trilogy Creep: It was originally a tightly-written trilogy, ending with the group being airlifted to New Zealand at the end of The Third Day, The Frost.
• War Is Hell
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Averted. In the books Ellie frequently reflects on how the enemy soldiers she variously mows down or blows up or hits with big vehicles are people just like her, with hopes and dreams and families who'll miss them. In the film a short scene occurs where Ellie looks at a dying enemy soldier and sees the soldier is a teenage girl just like her.
• You Always Hear the Bullet: Ellie reflects on this after Corrie is shot in Tomorrow, When The War Began.
• You Know the One: The name of the country that invaded Australia is never mentioned, for obvious pragmatic reasons. They are referred to as 'the enemy' or 'them' throughout. This becomes quite awkward as the characters have no in-story reason for dancing around the name, and are quite willing to name friendly countries such as New Zealand, the United States and Japan.
  • John Marsden gave a Shrug of God explanation that he didn't know who the invading country was, and in any case, did not want to name them for fear of provoking a racist response from people who "knew they couldn't trust" that country.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Ellie and her group are considered terrorists, and convicted of it several times, by the enemy. And in some ways, like fighting out of uniform, not having a clear chain of command and targeting civilians, they do fit the bill quite well. Of course, Australians see it differently...

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The Ellie Chronicles contains examples of:

• Adults Are Useless
• Amoral Attorney: Mr Sale is the small-country-town version.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: The identity of the Scarlet Pimple.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Interesting variation. In While I Live a grieving Ellie goes through a litany of memories of her parents. It goes without a beat from the sound of her mother's laugh and the way her father fixed a truck to the texture of her mother's pubic hair and the shape of her father's penis.
• Dead Little Brother: Bronte's backstory.
• Demoted to Extra: Fiona appears only briefly in a couple of books, and Kevin is referred to as being in New Zealand but never appears in person. Justified in that one of the themes of the Ellie Chronicles is the way that life marches on and how things are different once the war is over.
• Department of Child Disservices: Debatable; while Ellie is far from the best caretaker for Gavin, their unique circumstances are overlooked by the investigator, who criticizes Ellie for having a pile of dog doings on her lawn, and for having more soda than milk in her fridge.
• Drugs Are Bad: They will get a bogged cow out of a dam though, apparently.
• Enfant Terrible: Gavin.
• Five-Man Band

The Hero - Ellie
The Lancer - Homer
The Big Guy - Gavin
The Smart Guy - Jeremy / Lee (depending on the book)
The Chick - Jess

• Growing Up Sucks: Especially when you've just been orphaned.
• I Have Your Adopted Little Brother: Gavin is kidnapped in Circle of Flight.
• La Résistance: Liberation in The Ellie Chronicles, an covert-ops organisation involving civilians with the unspoken consent of the military, who carry out missions across the border. The Wirrawee faction is headed by the mysterious Scarlet Pimple.
• Mama Bear: Ellie goes throuh hell to keep Gavin.
• Parental Abandonment: Not voluntary.
• Police Are Useless
• Real Estate Scam: In While I Live Ellie discovers a plot to force her to sell the farm so the land can be used to develop a holiday lodge for rich tourists.
• Stuffed Into the Fridge: Ellie is brutally orphaned in chapter one of the first book. Ellie suspects and the narrative strongly implies that the attack was intended specifically as a reprisal for her activities during the war.