Anyone out there worrying about the birth of Skynet [if you're not a Terminator fan insert the name of your favorite evil world-dominating supercomputer here]?

Because, you guys? Um, I think the time is now:

(From io9)
A group of scientists is building the world’s most evil computer program. This isn't a B-movie setup: A team at Rensselaer Institute’s AI & Reasoning Lab is bringing personified evil to virtual life in the hope that they'll unlock the secrets of human morality. The researchers have given their creation a face and a name, and quiz it daily, using its answers to further blacken its hideous character. Selmer Bringsjord, director of the AI lab and chairman of RPI’s Department of Cognitive Science, has created “E,” a computer-generated character programmed according to his own definition of evil. E must, according to Bringsjord, be willing to carry out premeditated acts that are immoral and would cause harm to others. And, when E analyzes its reasons for wanting to commit such acts, it must either develop a logically incoherent argument or conclude that it desired to see people harmed.

I'm just saying...

Tired.

Oh, I am so very tired this morning.  This could be because I'm in the closing days of finishing a draft (like the end is so close that I can almost see it, though the perfect last line is still eluding me, which gives me the shivers, as I'm extremely superstitious about this kind of thing and feel that if I don't come up with the perfect first and last line in my first try, it must mean that everything in between is destined to be terrible -- note to aspiring writers, this is insane logic that you should not embrace for yourselves). It could be because in the middle of scrambling to get my book done, I have to deal with things like the construction workers next door (who start hammering and drilling and sawing at 8 am every day) accidentally BUSTING A GIANT HOLE IN MY BATHROOM WALL.

(Longtime readers of this blog may remember it was exactly this time last year that I had a giant hole in my roof.  Those readers may be wondering why I haven't MOVED yet.  Trust me, you're not the only ones.)

In all fairness, this morning's bleary eyed exhaustion is probably due to the fact that I was out way too late last night, reliving a bit of my college years (and accidentally dipping my trusty laptop bag in a big pile of ketchup, which is maybe the universe's way of paying me back for staying up late when I have so much homework to do).

Here are two other things currently buzzing around in my foggy head:

This weekend's Baltimore Book Festival, where I will be appearing on my first ever panel, trying not to embarrass myself! I'll be appearing with fellow YA authors Brad Barkley, Suzanne Supplee, and Diana Rodriguez Wallach, talking about the challenges of writing young adult fiction.  The panel is sponsored by the awesome gang over at Book Divas, and so promises to be pretty excellent. Not to mention, the festival is FREE and features a ton of other authors (Michael Ian Black, Walter Mosley, Avi, Laura Schlitz, Megan McCafferty, Jennifer Holm, etc). And did I mention it's FREE?

Here's the info -- I'll be signing copies of SKINNED afterwards, so if you're in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello!

Baltimore Book Festival
Mount Vernon Place, 600 Block North Charles Street, Baltimore
Book Divas YA Panel (featuring me): Saturday, 12 pm, Festival Stage


Other happy-making (if not awake-making) thing of the morning, an interview with me on Sci-Fi Wire, the official news website of the Sci Fi Channel (which you can tell because the article about Skinned is right above an article about Battlestar Galactica! It's like imaginary boyfriend Billy Keikeya and I are on an imaginary date together. Or, um, something like that).

I'm pretty freaking excited about this, since I feel like if I'm featured on a Sci-Fi Channel website, it must mean I'm now officially a sci-fi author, thus fulfilling the dream I've had ever since elementary school when I came across Isaac Asimov's I Robot for the first time (and then never read anything but sci-fi again for the next nine years).

There's an interesting article in the Baltimore city paper speculating about why teens and science fiction go together like pretzels and ice cream.  I think for me, at the time, it was much less about the characters and plotlines than it was about the Big Idea behind any given book -- a bizarre new possibility for the way the world worked. I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked.  Reading science fiction wasn't about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.

A lot of sci-fi books (like the one I wrote, I suppose) explore the question of "what if X happens someday?" But as a reader, I always preferred the ones that asked, "What if X is happening RIGHT NOW and no one knows it?" (L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Heinlein's The Number of the Beast, Jones's Homeward Bounders, Sleator's House of Stairs and pretty much everything else he ever wrote. For you Westerfeld fans, this is also why even though I'm probably a bigger fan of the Uglies story and characters, I find the Midnighters world a lot more interesting.)

Whether they were set in the future or the present, the sci-fi books I loved all posited a world I desperately wished would come to life.  Books that made me turn the final page and think, Not only is this how the world could work, it's how the world should work.

Now, if I had the power to make this happen -- and I've actually spent an unusual amount of time thinking about this over the years -- I'd probably stick us in a universe resembling (and yes, I'm aware that this is technically more fantasy than science fiction, but bear with me) Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series, in which all the constants of the universe -- death, war, time, fate, etc -- are actually personified by mortals lucky or unlucky enough to be plucked out of their normal lives and turned into immortal forces. (Second choice, the universe depicted in Defending Your Life, a movie no one saw, but I've seen enough times to make up for it, where it turns out that when you die, you only get to move on to the next dimension if you can prove that you've faced up to enough of your fears in this one. Plus there's a bunch of stuff about getting to eat all the spaghetti you could ever want.)

Question -- if you had to live in a world from some sci-fi or fantasy book, which would it be? (Or are you happy to just stay in this one?)

A great article in The New Republic speculates about the possibility of an "aviation apocalpyse," asking what happens when cheap oil runs out.  Most airlines were struggling to stay solvent even when oil was affordable -- some experts speculate that if things keep going the way they're going, we could see the death of commercial air travel. (Apparently it's much harder to make alternative fuel cars than alternative fuel planes.)

The doomsday scenario:

"No longer would air travel be like the Internet or television--a cheap technology available to virtually anyone, shaping our world in countless little ways. If that happened, the result would mean more than just the end of easy weekend jaunts to Bermuda or annual Christmas visits home. It could mean major shifts in the economy, changes in immigration patterns across the world, and perhaps even a remapping of the planet as we know it."

I'm an absurd optimist when it comes to human ingenuity, so I personally think we'll come up with a solution before things come to this. (And I suppose when I say "we" I mean "people who chose to major in engineering and science rather than liberal arts and thus can make a concrete contribution to such things rather than just talk about them.")

But it's good to keep in mind the alternative.

I've been waiting for my jetpack a long time. (We won't even discuss my disappointment over the much hyped Segway which, before its debut, was hyped as the biggest revolution in transportation since the wheel -- you have no idea how certain I was that baby would fly.)

It seems that soon, I'll get my wish.  For the low, low price of $100,000. (Mom & dad, take note: only 304 days until my next birthday...)



True, it's not the sleekest device ever made, but neither was the Model T.

Hopefully this means there's also someone out there hard at work on that hoverboard technology I've been waiting for ever since Michael J. Fox successfully avoided the giant truck of manure. 

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if your interest lies in the slightly more affordable aspects of the future, make sure you catch this Times article about whether or not reading online counts as reading. (Specifically, for teenagers.). I've long believed that the dawn of email, IM, facebook, etc has created a whole generation of compulsive writers, but it's only recently (when I read this article about the internet giving us all ADD) that I'v really started wondering about the reading end.

Apparently some fear "that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books."  Others have countered that the internet creates a new kind of reading,

That's the intriguing part.  The novel just isn't that old, and while I know people have been speculating about its death almost since the day it was born, it makes you wonder...combine the inevitability of successful e-book technology with a generation reared on internet reading and writing, and what do you get?* (In more than ten years, but less than 100?) Some kind of hyperlinked, communally generated, frequently updated literary hybrid?

Weirdly (since I hate change), I can't wait to find out.

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*Yes, yes, I know we're in the middle of a YA reading boom, so it may seem kind of strange to speculate about the death of teen reading inclination and skill.  On one hand, the novel-readers are a distinct minority...on the other hand, you could point out that readers are always a minority, so what's the difference? (I guess I would suggest that the difference is that, for the first time, the majority of non-readers are reading compulsively as well, just in a different medium.)