Midnighters Spoiler Zone!

Posted on by scott

Okay, some people want to comment about the ending of the Midnighters trilogy, but they feel bad about spoiling the ending for others.

So I am decreeing this post to be the Blue Noon spoiler zone!

WARNING: DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS OF THIS POST
unless you have already read all three Midnighters books.

So how does it end? He dies on the bus!

No, wait. That’s Midnight Cowboy, which is totally different.

Heh, heh.

But seriously, click on comments and let the spoilage begin!

UPDATE: Most of the conversations here have moved over to westerboard.com, the forum for all things westerfeldian.

Stuff in My Cat

Posted on by scott

The Associated Press is reporting that H5N1—also known as “that avian flu that’s maybe gonna kill us all”—has a new vector*:

CATS!

As readers of Peeps will know, this is a sure sign of The End Times. Well, okay, not really. Unlike my vampirism-causing parasite, H5N1 hasn’t yet been proven to move from cats to people. Of course, no one’s saying that it can’t happen, either.

Felines are scarier carriers than birds, if only because most of us don’t have chickens in our house. Pigeons don’t sleep on our chests at night. Turkeys don’t wind around our ankles when we get home. How much contact do we have with cats? Well, half of all Americans are infected with toxoplasma, a cat-borne brain parasite that changes human personalities. (Biology is kewl.)

For those of you who haven’t read my novel Peeps, it’s about a parasite that causes vampirism. The parasite starts out in rats, moving in times of crisis to cats and through them into humans. It’s kind of disturbing to see such a strong parallel in the real world. Especially as H5N1 is worse than the peeps-parasite in two ways:

1) It starts out in bird reservoirs, which can spread the disease globally much faster than rats.
2) It doesn’t give you any super powers. No night vision, no super-hearing. Zip.

The AP report goes on to make these points:

”We know that mammals can be infected by H5N1, but we don’t know what this means for humans,” [Maria Cheng] said.

[Thomas] Mettenleiter said there are no known cases of the virus moving from cats to humans, but he still cautioned pet owners on Ruegen [a German island in the Baltic Sea] to keep their cats inside for now.

”An infection of humans, which theoretically cannot be ruled out, could probably only occur with very intimate contact to infected animals,” Mettenleiter said.

So don’t toss your kittens into the fire yet. But quit, you know, kissing them.

And here’s some appropriate fan art from Jade Lennox:


AHHHH! (thanks, Jade)

This all reminds me, the beautiful Australian edition of Peeps just arrived in my mailbox, and hits stores in April.

________
*Note that this is merely the first time that H5N1 has been discovered in mammals in Europe. In Asia, there have been earlier incidents of captive, poultry-fed tigers and leopards contracting the virus, and one case of transmission among house-cats. Sorry for being Euro-centric, but I didn’t catch this till now.

Midnighters Kirkused & Boingled

Posted on by scott

Blue Noon, the last book of the Midnighters series, comes out this week. In fact, I’m hearing that it’s in stores now. Unlike J.K. Rowling’s, the bookstores don’t sweat my lay-down dates too much, so check around and maybe you can find it. (Or you can order it here.)

That means that the trilogy is complete! Color me w00t!

This is my first wrap-up book of a trilogy. Of course, Specials has already been written (arrives on May 9), but this is my first chance to hear from you guys if I’ve figured out how to make anything, you know, END.

Cory Doctorow was kind enough to Boing Boing the whole series today with these kind words and more:

The Midnighters trilogy is about a small group of misfit teens in a conservative town who all share the ability to inhabit the secret hour between 12 midnight and 12:01 AM, a secret hour when time stands still for everyone but them, when the light turns blue, when they gain special powers — the power to run tirelessly and leap buildings, even to fly.

This is pure wish-fulfillment for the kids, who are picked-on losers in their straight-laced school, harassed by the law and stuck in bad home situations. But it turns out that the secret hour is also inhabited by Cthuluesque Old Ones — ancient monsters trapped forever in the darkness of the secret hour. And these ancient ones must escape.

The trilogy tells the story of the kids’ defense of the town that rejects them, and of the ancient, wicked secrets there. If Lovecraft had a sense of plot and character, he could have written these.

Much thanks to Cory for all his support! And for his more than kind suggestion that I write better characters than Lovecraft. (Heh, heh.)

The book also got a fantastic (and starred review) in Kirkus, in which medium-strength SPOILERS appear:

But lately, the blue time has been occurring without warning during the day. Worse, the frozen hour is fracturing, and normal humans will soon be in danger from the darkling monsters that roam at midnight. The midnighters` friendship might be splintering, as well: Melissa`s new abilities frighten her friends; Jonathan thinks the coming apocalypse might be worthwhile if he can use his midnighter powers more; and Rex, now half-darkling, hankers after human flesh. Dess, meanwhile, realizes the algebra of midnight is more complex than even her polymath powers can easily comprehend. Even if they prevent the destruction of humanity, life—and the midnighters themselves—will be forever changed.

A powerful climax smoothly ties together the complexities of this original and well-drawn world.

Sweet. I hereby officially take back everything mean thing I ever said about Kirkus. Yoink.

To those of you not into the series (yet), the arrival of Blue Noon also means that the paperback version of Touching Darkness is out.

Enjoy!

Octavia E. Butler

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I have much news to report, most of it good. But before I do, this piece of bad news needs its own entry.

SF writer Octavia Butler died this weekend at the age of 58. Way, way too young.

My first encounter with Butler was a novel called Wild Seed, and the experience still resonates in my head. The villian of the book, Doro, is a sort of psychic parasite who has lived for thousands of years in various hosts. He’s one of the most convincing immortals, most brutal characters, and most seductive antagonists I’ve ever read. He inflects every super-powered character I’ve ever written.

Butler won Hugos and Nebulas, and was the first sf writer to be awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. But I don’t think many in the field ever realized how transformative she was. Her focus on biology took a lot of what had happened to sf in the late 1960s and early 70s with regard to politics and gender, and turned it into something harder, in the scientific sense, and edgier in every other sense.

Whenever people run that line about the period “before cyberpunk” being fallow and tame, I shake my head and realize how much farther we have to go. When Butler wrote about the effects of misused power on individuals, she blew those boys out of the water on every single page. She could be truly scary, in a way that splendidly illuminated this truly scary world.

She will be sorely missed.

Two years ago, Butler published a story on scifiction. It’s not her best work by a long shot, but it makes for eerie reading at the moment. It’s an auto-biographical meditation on what it is to be a science fiction writer: what it means to create worlds and to map the future of humanity—to play god, in other words. But it’s bigger than that. It’s about what we as a species need to be thinking about right now.

It begins with these words:
“It’s difficult, isn’t it?” God said with a weary smile. “You’re truly free for the first time. What could be more difficult than that?”

You can read it here.

Hoverboard! +Blue Noon Countdown

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One more week till:

blue noon

That’s right! Seven more days until the Midnighters trilogy reaches its mighty climax. In honor of this last week, I’m doing a tridecalogism countdown.

Today’s word is: “nonattendance.”

As in, “Rex is having a very important meeting tonight,” Dess said. “Nonattendance is compulsory!”

In unrelated news, here’s how to build a hoverboard from a leaf blower. Alas, this hoverboard will be really loud and only hover about as high as an air hockey puck.

But still. Hoverboard!

From BoingBoing, and thanks Bill!

So Yesterday Audiobook

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So I forgot to mention last month that the audio version of my book So Yesterday has been released.

The guy who reads it, whose name is also Scott, has won all sorts of awards, including one for reading science fiction. (Man, they have awards for everything these days.) He’s been named a “Golden Voice” by Audiofile magazine, which is like being a Grandmaster at chess or something. He does about 50 titles a year, which sounds like an insane schedule. (Us Scotts are a driven people.)

Here’s a profile of Scott. And here’s what he looks like:

I haven’t bagged a copy yet, although I will when we get to New York. But I did hear a snippet at the iTunes Store. It’s very weird to hear someone else read my work aloud. Justine and I read to each other while we’re working on novels, and I’ve developed a definite style of delivery. So my first reaction was, “That’s not how I’d do it.”

That’s silly, of course. My guess is that over the long run (it’s six and a half hours!) my deadpan style would be deadly dull. He’s the award-winning pro, after all. There’s a good reason why authors mostly don’t do their own audiobooks, just like we don’t paint our own covers.

To hear it yourself, go to Audiobooks and search on “Westerfeld”.

You can buy it on iTunes, or here on Amazon.

And this is interesting. You can download an “MP3-like” version for only US $9.99!

The Ugly Face of Crime

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“I’m too ugly to get a job.”
—Daniel Gallagher, a Miami bank robber, after police captured him in 2003

Here’s a weird little article about a study that tracked 15,000 teenagers for four years, analyzing grades, income, and brushes with the law. The interviewers also rated the kids on their attractiveness, and when the numbers were crunched, the study found a correlation between being ugly and committing crimes.

The authors don’t miss the obvious point, though: “Other studies have shown that unattractive men and women are less likely to be hired, and that they earn less money, than the better-looking. Such inferior circumstances may steer some to crime, Mocan and Tekin suggest.”

Notice that the correlation wasn’t huge, but it was there. To state the obvious: not everyone who was rated unattractive was a crim, and a lot of the pretty kids had broken the law. But being ugly clearly leads to social stress, which can push human beings closer to anti-socal behavior. (Economic stress does, too. When unemployment goes up in a group, crime and divorce almost always go up.) This doesn’t excuse any individual’s behavior, but it does make this point:

There really is a social cost to the way we think about beauty, and to the way we treat each other based on looks.

It makes me feel like the Uglies universe really is a possibility. Maybe one day some society really will decide to get rid of the beauty problem once and for all.

(But in the meantime, it’s nice to know that TV and movies never lie.)

Last Days + Interview

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This is NOT going to be the cover of The Last Days (sort-of sequel to Peeps) but I thought you’d want to see it anyway.

You see, we’re still dithering about how to crop the image and how scary/pretty the vamp should be. Probably the skin tone will be made a bit less blue-ish, and a bit more of the picture revealed. (See here for the whole thing.)

But please, give your opinions here! The powers-that-be are watching . . .

Also, Cynthia Leitich Smith just posted an interview with me for the SCBWI conference in Bologna (see previous post). And here’s an equally riveting interview with Justine.

And one more also: I’m now finishing the re-rewrites on The Last Days, adding a layer of facty goodness to the story, much in the spirit of Peeps‘ parasite factoids. Except these are about extinctions.

Extinction is a very intriguing topic, it turns out. You’ve got your meteorites, your gamma-ray bursts, your supervolcanoes, and all manner of human-made apocalypses. So explodey.

World Tour!

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Justine and I are only three weeks away to heading off on what we’ve been calling the “round-the-world jaunt that ate March.” This trip may kill us, but for those of you who live in Brisbane, San Francisco, NYC, or Bologna, it will mean a chance to say hi and get books signed.

Here’s our appearance schedule, starting with a trip up the east coast of Australia:

Saturday 25 February 2006
Aurealis Awards Ceremony
Brisbane, Qld

First a short hop up to Bris-Vegas for the Aurealis Award Ceremony. We’re both up for best Young Adult SF or Fantasy novel of 2005! Me for Uglies and Peeps, Justine for Magic or Madness. (I hope she wins, so I don’t have to make a speech.)

A little more than a week later, we fly across the Big Pond to California. We’ll be staying with friends, doing an interview with Locus Magazine, and doing two appearances:

Tuesday 7 March 2006, 7PM
Borderland Books
866 Valencia St
San Francisco, California

I’ll be sitting next to a big stack of Midnighters 3: Blue Noon and Justine will be signing her sequel, Magic Lessons.

And the very next night, doing the same thing, except here:

Wednesday 8 March 2006, 6PM
Books Inc.
Laurel Village
3515 California St
San Francisco

Then it’s off to New York for two weeks of hanging out with friends and making sure the NYC apartment hasn’t burned down, exploded, or become infested with parasites of some kind. For those of you within spitting distance of Manhattah, there’s one public appearance (so far):

Saturday 18 March 2006, 12-2PM
Books of Wonder
18 W 18th Street
New York City

But you aren’t allowed to actually spit on us. It’s just a figure of speech.

Finally in late March, we fly over to Italy for two things in Bologna:

25-26 March, 2006
SCBWI Before Bologna Conference

SCBWI is the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Justine and I are teaching three workshops together about writing for kids. One about synopses, one about slang, and one about regional voices. (Hey, if you want to enroll, it’s cheaper if you do it before February 15.)

And then the Fair itself starts:

27-30 March, 2006
Bologna Children’s Book Fair
Bologna Fair Centre – Piazza Costituzione Entrance

This is an annual event where pretty much every publisher in the young readers’ world comes together to schmooze, eat, drink, schmooze, and buy foreign rights. Justine and I will get to meet all the cool people who’ve translated our works into Italian, German, Japanese, Thai, Swedish, Chinese, Polish, Russian, Finnish, Hebrew, Spanish, and Slovene*. It promises to be full of multi-lingual conversations and good meals, because you can’t beat Italian cities with food named after them. (And that’s no baloney. Hah! . . . sort of.)

And at last there’s the mega-flight from Bologna, to Frankfurt, to Singapore, to Sydney. Followed by sweet, sweet death. (By which I mean, of course, sleep.)

*By the way, did I mention that So Yesterday sold in Slovene? You know, the language of Slovenia. The country Slovenia, next to Italy and stuff . . . Hey, Slovene is the new black, dude.

Peeps Is Unshelved

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How kewl is this?

Unshelved a daily comic strip set in a library, which every Sunday becomes a book review in comic form. This is a fantastic idea, on top of which, Peeps is their book of the week! Color me very pleased.

Check it out:

Ah, if only they’d spelled my name right. But you can’t have everything.

For the full-size version, and the rest of this excellent strip, (and to see my name spelled right! thanks guys), go here.

I will take this opportunity to tell you all that Peeps has been on a winning streak lately:

Top Ten Book for the 2006 ALA Best Books YA Awards

Top 40 Children’s Books for 2005 in Kirkus Reviews

Best Books of the Year in 2005 in School Library Journal
(Justine’s Magic or Madness is on there too!)

Awarded a 2005 Blue Ribbon by the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

Locus Recommended Reading List for 2005.
(Again! Magic or Madness is there in First Novels!)

Cool, huh? So thanks to all the librarians, reviewers, and editors out there who slave to read dozens (even hundreds) of books every year and then bother to write them up. Without you, us readers wouldn’t find nearly as much of the cool stuff there is to read.

And us writers? Well, we’d just starve.

(Feeling an impulse purchase coming on? Just click here. Or here!)

PS Thanks to John, Joe, and Kendall for alerting me to the Unshelved strip.