Now, obviously, this mere blimp isn’t as cool as a dirigible. Blimps are just big, cigar-shaped balloons, while the airships in Leviathan and the Zeppelin I rode in Germany have frames to keep their shape. (That’s why they can be so much bigger.)

But still, it’s cool to see that classic airship silhouette among the cranes, water towers, and skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline. There’s nothing to make me grab my camera like a future that didn’t happen intruding politely on a weekday afternoon (or evening).

So enjoy, and by all means click to enlarge:

Photos by Scott Westerfeld. Steal them—steal them all!

Most of you will remember the anthology I edited about Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Since then the same publisher (Teen Libris) has done a number of these collections, including this recent one about Stephenie Meyer’s Twlight series:

Lately, Teen Libris and I have been discussing a similar project for yours truly—a book about the Uglies series.

Of course, this is very different from Bubbly to Bogus, which is a behind-the-scenes guide to Tally’s world, with maps, diagrams, and such. This anthology will be a dozen or so other YA authors writing essays about the series, with subjects like:

“David vs. Zane”
“Shay: Evil Antagonist or Secret Hero?”
“Why do people get plastic surgery?”
“The dangers of technology and conformity”
“Slang and language use in the series”
“Radical Honesty versus being Pretty: are they the same thing?”
“The idea of wilderness in the series”

This is just a random list, but it gives you the idea.

So my question is, What do we call this book? Here are few lame suggestions of mine:

The Color of Cat Vomit
Adventures in Special Circumstances
Facing the Future
Skin Deep
Ugly Truths
Pretty/Ugly
Turning Pretty
About Face

Some of these are okay. But we’d really like to have your help this.

So comment away, and give us some good titles!

Note: This book won’t come out until 2009, but Bubbly to Bogus comes out October 23, 2008, and you can pre-order it now from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Powells!

Of course, somebody’s always trying to reanimate Zeppelins, but so far all those attempts have ended in failure (except as tourist attractions). So why would anyone think that this time will be different?

Well, here’s the thing about airships: they float, so you don’t expend energy to keep them in the air. They move much slower than planes, but they eat less fuel per pound carried. As oil becomes more expensive—not to mention destructive to our planet and our foreign policy—that advantage becomes bigger, and bigger, and bigger . . .

So maybe airships aren’t viable right now. But does anyone think that in the long term, oil’s going to get cheaper? Sure! Because the middle east will stabilize, the Chinese will decide they don’t really want cars, and Americans are going to stop wasting fuel at every possible opportunity! But just in case that stuff doesn’t happen, we may find Zeppelins in our future. The French post office is already looking at them for freight transport, as is DARPA, the US military’s mad-scientist group.

There are lots of cool pictures in the article, but one really caught my eye. A French architect named Jean-Marie Massaud has designed a lighter-than-air hotel that looks a bit like a whale. As you might suspect from the title, so does the airship in Leviathan!

I’m still sworn to secrecy on Leviathan art, but here’s Massaud’s vision:

Courtesy Jean-Marie Massaud

Pretty cool, huh?

Here’s the slide show for the article.

Must write now. At 56,717 words, about 20,000 to go!

The crazy thing is how many of the technologies in the books are already here, or almost here. It seems like every time I open a newspaper, I get a little dose of Tally’s world.

But here’s a scary one for you. You’ll probably remember a plant in the books called “the white weed.” It was a genetically modified orchid that grew rampant in the post-Rusty-Crash world, choking other vegetation and leaving vast fields of arid land in its wake.

Well, a brain-rattling article in the NY Times today suggests that an age of weeds may be a lot closer than 300 years from now, and won’t even require any genetic engineering mishaps to occur.

Here’s why in a nutshell:

1) The crops we grow and eat these days have very little genetic diversity. Why? Because we’ve bred them that way. We want them to grow quickly and at exactly the same rate, so we can cut them all down and ship them at the same time. Commercial processes love sameness. (Modern-day crops are more like Pringles than old-school, random-looking potato chips.)

2) Weeds are not all the same. They’ve evolved tremendous variety while taking advantage of every little crack in the sidewalk. And as we attack them with herbicides, we actually increase that diversity. They evolve and adapt under our constant barrage.

3) The climate is changing. In 1957, the CO2 level in the atmosphere was 310ppm. These days it’s 385 ppm. (Yes, the climate has changed before, but in the geological record, swings like that usually take thousands of years. Our Rusty ways have managed it in 50 years. Last year alone, the carbon level went up almost 2.5ppm.)

4) Here’s where it gets freaky. Weeds thrive in changing climates, because they are a diverse population. Our food crops hate change, because they’re all the same. (Like, if you put Pringles in the wrong-shaped can, they’d all break. You can chuck those old-fashioned random chips in any old bag and they’re fine.)

5) So . . . if we change the climate quickly enough, the weeds win.

To test this hypothesis, a scientist named Lewis Ziska did an amazing controlled experiment. He transfered big blocks of the exact same soil to several locations and let them go fallow and weedy. Out in the country (with average 385ppm air) the weeds grew six to eight feet tall. But in downtown Baltimore (which, thanks to all the cars, has air with about 440ppm CO2) the same weed species grew ten to twelve feet tall!

The weeds love our Rusty ways.

Ziska’s weed lab, ganked from the NY Times. Photo by Rochard Barnes.

The most brilliant thing about this experiment is Ziska’s use of an urban center, with its hotter, CO2-laden air, as an analog for our planet 30-50 years in the future. Go hang out in downtown Baltimore sometime in August and you’ll see the world we’re leaving our grandchildren. (Oh, wait, only 30 years? I mean our children. Oh, wait . . . I mean you.)

The good news in the article is that weeds may be beneficial in some ways. Growing quickly means they suck up CO2, and maybe we can use them in biofuels, which would take some of the pressure off food prices. And the other good news is that although the funding for Ziska’s work (along with all climate change research) has been repeatedly cut over the last seven years, the folks who cut it are relinquishing power on January 20, 2009.

Bogus to Bubbly is available for pre-order from Amazon now.

Update: You can now pre-order from Barnes and Noble and Powells as well!

Let’s take a look at all three:

What I love about these interpretations is how they’re simultaneously literal and surreal. All three use scenes directly from the book, but they also have a trippiness about them: the close up on the raindrops, the huge moon, the distended human figures.

Also, I like how the key settings—suburban, urban, and wild—show up across the covers. Location is everything in Midnighters, where the differences between city and wild are even more extreme than those in Uglies. So it’s nice to see those geographies reflected here.

And best of all are the odd touches of a different culture, like the water tower on the book 2 cover. Maybe it’s just me, but that tower seems more Okinawan than Oklahoman.

Altogether satisfying.

Photo by El Rebelde

There’s something about the sinuous, elegantly mathematical lines of roller coasters mixed with the chaos of nature that’s just gorgeous. I can see Tally and Shay zipping around in there, getting whacked by tree branches and laughing it up. (Good times.)

Click here for the rest of the Flickr stream.

In other news, Terri Brown posted this interview of her by me in celebration of her debut novel. Read My Lips is about a deaf girl who is co-opted by a popular clique for her lip-reading abilities. A really interesting point-of-view character in a classic YA plot of gossip, acceptance, and what we’re willing to pay for the promise of popularity.

Note my puffy hair. At the very last second—literally as behind-the-camera guy was counting down with his fingers—I reached up and puffed my hair. What was I thinking?

Luckily, it’s not a lot of hair.

Click here to watch.

Some notes:
A) Getting up at 7:30AM sucks, even if it’s to be on TV.
B) I am vastly taller than MAC and Jane O’Connor.
C) One minute is shorter than you think.
D) The cameras for TV news shows are robots now! Like, they move around on their own like frickin’ Daleks. Did anyone else know that?
E) My voice isn’t usually that low. Must have been head-cold related, but it sounds kind of cool. (I wonder if anyone will ever engineer a virus that doesn’t make you feel like crap, but gives you perpetual sexy-cold voice.)
F) My hand gestures are weird when zoomed in on. Next time, must wear wrist weights.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes shot, as taken by Justine.

Thanks for watching, and have a great week.

Yes, that’s a TV show. Which means that I am going to be on TV.

Update: To watch, Click here and select segment 3 of 15.

Joining me will be Jane O’Connor, author of the Fancy Nancy books for littlies, and comic maven MAC, who’s just come out with a non-graphic novel, Anna Smudge: Professional Shrink, which looks really cool.

TRAGIC NOTE: This is a local NYC show, so my apologies to fans from other states and other lands. My guess is that most of you in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (one of America’s many “tri-state” areas) should be able to see it. But I’m not sure. I didn’t even know they had a 9AM on Sunday. Is that new?

Check your local listings for Weekend with Michelle Charlesworth. It should be on Channel 7.

This is my first time on TV since my debut on the Bozo the Clown Show when I was . . . like, eight? (I was called out of the audience to do something and I won something. It’s all very hazy.) So I hope I don’t look stupid.

Preparations include:
New shirt (check)
Haircut (check)
Hyper-distilled plot synopsis of Uglies memorized (check)
Raging head cold and cough (check)
Witty banter (um . . . huh?)

Now if one of you tri-staters would Tivo and Youtube this, it would be fawesome. (Unless, of course, I totally suck. In which case, I think my humiliation should be shared with millions. Millions!)

Update: Again, Click here and select segment 3 of 15 to watch.

That familiar face is, of course, the model from the Uglies cover. In fact, it’s a photo from the same shoot, which almost made it onto the book. But at the last minute, the powers that be decided to switch to the cover we all know and love.

Fascinating factoids like this are what Bogus to Bubbly is all about: tons of background info on how the series came to be conceived, researched, written, and produced. It’s sort of a giant FAQ, in which I try to answer the thousand-or-so most common questions that I’ve been asked by fans over the years.

Among its many sections are the following:
Research notes on the science behind the series;
A massive history of the world (including the Rusty Crash and recovery);
Maps of Tally’s city and the greater continent;
Illustrations of various gadgets from the books;
A complete glossary, plus an essay on slang generation;
Mini-histories of all the cliques and derivations of the character names;
The definitive essay on the inspiration for the books;
An illustrated hoverboard manual!

Bogus to Bubbly doesn’t come out till October 21, and at the moment it can be pre-ordered only on Amazon, but I’m sure the other online booksellers will be listing it soon. And, of course, come October your friendly local bricks-and-mortar bookstore will be stocking them in quantity.

As that date gets closer, watch this space for sneak previews of Bogus content.

Did I mention the hoverboard manual?

Justine and I are headed to the mountains this week, for my niece’s graduation and a short writing holiday. Have a fun long weekend (and beginning of summer).

In the meantime, there’s an article in the NY Times this weekend that seems to come right from the world of Extras. It’s a memoir by a young blogger about being briefly internet-famous, being slammed, having your life over-exposed, and ultimately falling apart.

It’s pretty long, and not happy-making. But it’s also incredibly interesting. You can read it here.

Many of the zillions of (often nasty) commenters point out that the best cure for over-exposure might not be further self-disclosure in the NY Times. But there’s something slightly hollow about that argument. There are different kinds of writing about yourself, after all. Long-form essays in a newspaper aren’t really the same as posting every minute on a gossip blog. In any case, the article has a lot of interesting things to say about the risks of celebrity, and of putting too much of yourself online.

So what about you guys? Have you ever blogged something you shouldn’t have? Or has a friend ever broken a trust, revealing something private about you online?

In short: has the internet ever come back to bite you?