Today marks the launch of Spill Zone, a graphic novel from Uglies creator Scott Westerfeld (previously) and Alex Puvilland: the tale of a brave photographer who ventures into strange, uncanny lands created by a mysterious catastrophe, and returns with images of those worlds that she sells to keep her scarred little sister whole.
Scott Westerfeld's latest novel, Afterworlds is a book about a teenager who's just sold her first book. It's a story-within-a-story, and it works brilliantly. Cory Doctorow unpacks the nesting tales of Darcy Patel and Elizabeth Scofield.
Scott Westerfeld's steampunk young adult series, begun with last year's Leviathan, continues now in the newly released Behemoth, a worthy sequel to one of the most fun, subversive and exciting kids' series around.
In Leviathan, we were introduced to a world on the brink of World War One, with an alternate history twist: the allied powers are all "Darwinists," living in societies where Charles Darwin's theories have given birth to a menagerie of engineered lifeforms, from blimp-sized flying war whales to the tiny flechette bats who eat sharp, plane-wrecking steel missiles and crap them on command at enemy airscraft; on the other side are the "Clankers," who use German precision engineering to create a range of terrifying steam-driven mecha and war-machines. — Read the rest
Here's the book-trailer for Leviathan, the first volume of YA superstar Scott Westerfeld's kick-ass new steampunk alternate WWI series, featuring chimera-splicing Darwinist Brits fighting the clanking steam-mecha of the German side. Total gilliamfab!
(Thanks, Scott!)
YA author Scott Westerfeld's next novel is Leviathan, a remarkable YA steampunk adventure story that pits Darwinists (the English side, with their evolved war-machines created by splicing and dicing various animals' genomes to make zeppelins) against the Machinists (the German side, who use enormous, precision-made, steam-driven mecha and the like) in an alternate WWI. — Read the rest
Scott Westerfeld writes in with the astounding news that his publisher, Simon and Shuster, have agreed to distribute his bestselling novel Uglies as a free, DRM-free PDF. The series has sold more than a million copies, and it's one of my favorite YA series of all time. — Read the rest
Scott Westerfeld's Extras is the latest volume of the series that includes Uglies, Pretties and Specials, picking up the story with a new cast of characters who are even more likable, and a premise that is even more gripping, than those of the original books (and that's saying something!). — Read the rest
On Slate Star Codex (previously), Scott Alexander breaks down Invisible Designers: Brain Evolution Through the Lens of Parasite Manipulation, Marco Del Giudice's Quarterly Review of Biology paper that examines the measures that parasites take to influence their hosts' behaviors, and the countermeasures that hosts evolve to combat them.
Locus Magazine has published its annual Locus Award finalists, a shortlist of the best science fiction and fantasy of the past calendar year. I rely on this list to find the books I've overlooked (so. many. books.). This year's looks like a bumper crop.
In 2015, Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti published Zeroes, a wonderful, intricately plotted YA thriller about the discovery by a group of teens (all born in the year 2000) that they have a variety of extremely millennial supernatural powers, which grow in strength in social situations; in the years since, the authors have finished the trilogy with two more excellent volumes: 2016's Swarm, which introduces out-of-town powered teens and raises the stakes to life or death for the Zeroes' whole hometown; and 2018's Nexus, which sends the Zeroes off into conflict with the US government, and a massive army of not-exactly-but-sorta-evil powered teens who have all the crowd magic of Mardi Gras to work with, in a battle over the fate of the human race itself.
I'm one of the "special guests" at this year's San Diego Comic-Con! If you're attending, I hope you'll come by and see some of my programming items, especially my spotlight interview with Cecil Castellucci (Friday, July 20, 1330h-1430h, Room 24ABC), where I'll be making an exciting announcement.
William Gibson's 2014 novel The Peripheral was the first futuristic book he published in the 21st century, and it showed us a distant future in which some event, "The Jackpot," had killed nearly everyone on Earth, leaving behind a class of ruthless oligarchs and their bootlickers; in the 2018 sequel, Agency, we're promised a closer look at the events of The Jackpot. Between then and now is Archangel, a time-traveling, alt-history, dieselpunk story of power-mad leaders and nuclear armageddon that will be in stores on October 3.
Bruce Sterling: *THEY DON'T LOOK countercultural cliche-dramatic, they don't have beatnik berets or bongos. You wouldn't look at them twice in New York City, but there's still something subtly off about them. I think it's that plethora of pens in Ginsberg's untucked shirt."
There are three more stops on my tour for Walkaway: tomorrow at San Diego Comic-Con, next weekend at Defcon 25 in Las Vegas, and August 10th at the Burbank Public Library.
Fantastic Fiction at KGB is a monthly reading series hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel, held on the third Wednesday of every month at the famous KGB Bar in Manhattan. They are looking to fund several more years of their popular reading series via a Kickstarter fundraiser, running from May 17th through June 14th, 2017.
In Spill Zone, YA superstar Scott "Uglies" Westerfeld and artist Alex Puvilland tell the spooky, action-packed tale of Addison, one of the few survivors of the mysterious events that destroyed Poughkeepsie, New York, turning it into a spooky, Night-Vale-ish place where mutant animals, floating living corpses, and people trapped in two-dimensional planes live amid strange permanent winds that create funnels of old electronics and medical waste.
In Like Clockwork: Steampunk Pasts, Presents, and Futures , Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall present a lively, engaging collection of essays about the past, present, future (and alternate versions thereof) of steampunk culture, literature and meaning, ranging from disability and queerness to ethos and digital humanities. We're proud to present this long excerpt from the book's introduction.
From Scott Westerfeld, (currently touring for his new, brilliant book "Zeroes"): "Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies."
Scott Westerfeld's YA canon is huge and varied, from the Uglies books to the excellent vampire parasitology book Peeps to the dieselpunk Clankers trilogy, and the new one, Zeroes, breaks new ground still: it's a collaboration with Margo Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti about teens with powers.
