YA Sci-Fi/ Fantasy read in 1995 (Australia) — Girl wakes among kind forest people, discovers ruined city. Spoiler.
I read this book in 1995 in South Australia, so it's from that year or earlier. YA sci-fi/fantasy.
The main character is a pre-teen/young teen girl who wakes up somewhere she initially believes is another planet. The people there are all kind, gentle, and live in harmony with nature — lots of forest setting. She befriends a local girl. All her memories are of life on Earth in the 1990s.
As she investigates, she finds evidence of decayed, ruined cities — including one she recognizes, with landmarks she knows, in another country (not Australia). She realizes she must have somehow travelled forward in time from the 1990s to this future.
The twist: she's actually one of the local people all along. The community had deliberately implanted false memories of a 1990s-ish Earth childhood into her mind. The reason: there's a computer/AI that can access people's minds, and because these people are naturally so open and trusting, it's able to invade and damage their minds easily. They gave her the "past" memories to make her more wary and self-protective, so that when she eventually had to confront the computer, she'd have the mental defenses to protect herself.
I have a vague feeling the word "Labyrinth" was part of the title, but I'm not fully sure.
I have checked the following authors and none of their books match:
Monica Hughes
Pamela Sargent
Louise Lawrence
Peter Dickinson
Gillian Rubinstein (Australia)
Victor Kelleher (Australia)
John Christopher
William Sleator
Louise Lawrence
Victor Kelleher
Jan Mark
Margaret Mahy
Robert Westall
Isobelle Carmody
Patricia Wrightson
Caroline Macdonald
Jenny Wagner
Lee Harding
John Marsden
Gillian Cross
I read Scatterlings by Isobelle Carmody this last weekend. The main character is almost exactly the person i remember and the whole concept is the same but i felt like i was reading a new book. Nothing was familiar. None of the characters names or the rest of the story. Not even the ending.
The book i'm looking for, i used in my Year 12 English Comparative novel study. I had to read three books and write about themes, similarities, differences etc. You had to fill at least 75 pages of a 96 page exercise book. That was a lot of time spent thinking and writing so i would think i would at least recognise something other than the telepathy thing.