Update!
I’ve added my signing times below. I’ll be signing three times during Comic Con. Sorry I forgot!

I’m headed to Leaky-Con tomorrow, and will be on panels all of YA Lit Day, also known as Wednesday. That schedule is right here. (It’s been sold out for ages.)

Next week, July 20-25, I’ll be at Comic Con in San Diego! (Also sold out.) For those of you coming, here’s what I’m doing:

Thursday, July 21
4:30-5:30 Comics for Teens— Comics creators Cecil Castelluci (Plain Janes), Hope Larson (Mercury), Nate Powell (Swallow Me Whole), and Gene Luen Yang (Level Up) come together for a discussion of what makes a comic fit a teen audience. Do books for teens have something special that books for kids and adults don’t have? Moderated by Scott Westerfeld (New York Times bestselling teen author). Room 26AB

Saturday, July 23
1:00 – 1:50 Saturday, July 23
Signing at the Mysterious Galaxy booth, #1119.

Sunday, July 24
11:15-12:15 Building the World of Leviathan, an Illustrated Steampunk Series— Bestselling YA author and Comic-Con special guest Scott Westerfeld (Uglies, Midnighters) discusses how illustrated adventure novels disappeared in the early 20th century and how he worked with artist Keith Thompson to create one for the 21st, Leviathan, a steampunk reimagining of WWI. Lots of visuals (and some secret news about Uglies). Room 6DE

Signing after Scott Westerfeld Spotlight
Smart Pop will be handing out free copies of Mind-Rain at this signing.
Comic-Con Autograph Area
AA18 12:45 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.

2:45-3:45 High School Bites— Let’s face it: High school sucks enough without having to add a constant thirst for blood, going all furry under a full moon, or being hunted by all of the above. But for these YA authors, going back to high school was the best decision they ever made. Scott Westerfeld (The Uglies series), Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke and Bone), Margaret Stohl and Kami Garcia (Beautiful Creatures, Beautiful Darkness), Debbie Viguie (Once Upon a Time series), Anna Carey (Eve), and Heather Brewer (The Vlad Tod series) discuss their characters’ formative years with moderator Maryelizabeth Hart of Mysterious Galaxy. Room 5AB

Signing after High School Bites
Comic-Con Autograph Area
AA3 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Also you might want to check this out:

Thursday, July 21
7:00-8:00 The Scoop at Simon & Schuster!— Get the inside word on Simon & Schuster’s upcoming books and the chance to win exclusive prizes! Lucille Rettino (marketing director), Elke Villa (senior marketing manager), Carolyn Swerdloff (associate marketing manager), and Anna McKean (publicity manager) give you the scoop on upcoming books from exciting authors, including Cassandra Clare, Scott Westerfeld, Orson Scott Card, and Becca Fitzpatrick. Hear what is going on with S&S’s hot properties — Star Trek and The Smurfs — and get a chance to win exclusive giveaways. All attendees will receive a limited edition T-shirt for Cassandra Clare’s Clockwork Prince. Room 9

That’s it. I hope I get to see some of you while I’m on the road the next two weeks!

(I will be getting Fan Art Friday up this week, though, even if I’m not at home.)

From November 10-14 I was in attendance at the Utopiales Festival in Nantes, France. As usual for a conference, I was on a lot of panels, discussing subjects like alternative history (uchronie, as the French say) and the ethics of plastic surgery (with a real surgeon as my co-panelist). As I have about zero French, so all of this was done with headphones on, a simultaneous translator slaving away in my (and my audience’s) ears. That in itself was kind of science fictional.

But perhaps the coolest (and certainly the most photogenic) experience happened outside the festival, when a cohort of sf writers and I visisted les Machines de l’ÃŽle à Nantes.

Nantes was the birthplace of Jules Verne. As such, the city has a historical connection to science fiction in general, and steampunk-y type stuff more specifically. The city leaders are cognizant of this, and about five years ago handed over a disused dock area to a totally Clanker-tastic workshop of street theater mad scientists, who created the Machines of the Isle of Nantes.

Here are two shots of the island’s most famous inhabitant, a mechanical elephant that was an inspiration for the Ottoman walkers in Behemoth.

It’s made of wood, not metal, which is quite trippy. You can actually ride this thing around, though it had a broken leg when we visited. (Sad face. Feel better, elephant.)

Click on this one for a closer look.

But there’s much more on the island than just the elephant. The Machines group is currently working on a huge carousel of sea creatures, including this awesome steampunk grouper!

This one also needs a closer look. Click!

All this stuff moves, of course. Behold the steamgrouper in action:

Go to Youtube to watch this bigger.

And, of course, no self-respecting steamgrouper would be caught dead without its own personal steamsquid!

Again, click for the largeness. You know you want to

Needless to say, seeing these creations in the flesh (um, the metal?) was amazing. It impressed on me how alive machines can seem, even when their movements are strange and otherworldly, or aggressive and disturbing. You can see how people from Jules Verne all the way to Mark Pauline have fallen in love with things mechanical, and how a whole clanker culture might have come into being.

It was a total education. Vive les Machines de l’ÃŽle à Nantes! (For more photos from our visit, check out the blog of sf writer Petes Watts.)

If you know any French and want to read about my visit there, check out this link.

And one last thing! There’s an auction on right now to support SpecFaction NSW, a sf and fantasy group in New South Wales, Australia. Check out all the stuff for sale, including many cool signed books and an otherwise unavailable print from Leviathan signed by both me and Keith. This is a one-of-a-kind in the world thing.

Note that the auction is in Australian dollars, which are a bit smaller than US ones. Also, the shipping is listed as being from Australia, but the work is currently in the US, so the shipping won’t cost as much as you’d think if bought by a USian.

So I go on tour, where I get to see loads of kids who are full of awesome, and who build crazy stuff like this for me:

But then I come home to discover that the internet got stupid while I was gone. And not just regular internet stupid about cats or politics, but stupid about steampunk!

Perhaps the prime example is this post from the normally incisive Charles Stross, surely the most banal thing he’s ever typed. I mean, pointing out that the Victorian era was imperialistic? Racist? Sexist? Had lousy labor laws and no class mobility? Like no one in the steampunk world was considering this?

News flash: the online world of steampunk is constantly engaged in exactly those issues:
Check out
these
articles
for a
start.
(Just added this one.)

Stross then challenges the world to write a “mundane steampunk” novel that would reflect the true nightmarishness of the long 19th century.

Um, we might begin with the book most associated with the current wave of steampunk, Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker:

The Blight gas had poisoned the natural systems until the creeks and streams flowed almost yellow with contagion. Even the near-constant patter of rain could not be trusted. The clouds that dropped it may have gusted past the walled up city and absorbed enough toxin to wash skin raw and bleach paint.
But the Blight could be boiled away; it could be filtered and steamed and filtered again. And after seventeen hours of treatment, the water could be safely consumed… But first, it had to be processed. It had to go through the Waterworks facility, where Briar Wilkes and several hundred others spent ten or fifteen hours a day, hooking and unhooking brass cylinders and tanks, and moving them from station to station, filter to filter.

Yes, the current emblematic book of steampunk is totally Dickensian, but no one pays attention to that because it’s got zombies and airships, and therefore must be a madcap lark. Because this whole conversation has been about flap copy, not actual texts.

By the way, I think I’m the first person in this whole internet kerfuffle to quote text from AN ACTUAL STEAMPUNK BOOK. And thus I win.

No wait. I win because the awesome kids who read my books built me a frickin’ Tesla cannon:

Now, agreed, many steampunk cosplayers aren’t engaging with the greater questions inherent in the subgenre. Some even dare to dress up as aristocracy, and inherited titles are a bad thing.

But, dude, in mainline SF the single most popular costume is an imperial stormtrooper. And imperial storm trooping is RATHER MORE BAD than inheriting titles.

Not to go flat out into Sturgeon’s Law mode here, but space opera is a subgenre of which an astonishing percentage is crap, both aesthetically and politically, and which gluts the bookshelves far more than steampunk. But no one will be declaring how much they hate it, because it’s been around long enough that old people aren’t bothered by it.

And yes, this is about YOU being OLD, steampunk-haters. (In spirit, not in years.)

THIS is why I don’t write for adults. Their heads are all full of genre cooties and “Taj Mahal? Nah, don’t like tombs.” Whereas a kid will come home from the library with a mystery, an sf novel, an autobiography, and three books about sharks. That’s how kids read, and when something’s cool and fun and awesome (or weird and gnarly and thought-provoking), they don’t worry about how many times it’s been mentioned on io9, or whether it’s that-genre-Fortnight on Tor.com.

In a word, they’re way cooler than you are. Deal.

And here’s a great story: At the school where they built the contraptions pictured above, a bunch of kids were dressed Edwardian. So at the end of my presentation I asked, “How’re you finding those clothes?” Of course, the middle schoolers hated them, and we went from a few simple observations about clothing to a free-ranging discussion of classism, sexism—the girls hated the clothes a lot—and much more. When you’re doing steampunk right, it’s all there in the details.

Anyway, thanks to all my fans who came out. You’re awesome. Sorry to bore you with this rant, but certain adults needed a Teslashing.