Stephen King has written one of my favorite books ever (The Stand) in addition to one of my favorite psychic kids books (Firestarter) and also lots of books that I just like a lot, or are worth reading even if I didn't love them ( Read more... )

What I've read: Re-reads of "Liavek" and Agatha Christie.

What I didn't finish: Legend
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A conversation on Goodreads gave rise to a brilliant idea for a new YA dystopia. Just watch, someone will actually write it some day.

Sane. In a terrifyingly plausible near-future, sanity is banned and the government controls mental illness. Taylor, a 17-year-old privileged Mad with social anxiety, has never imagined that the world could be any ( Read more... )

I have often had this book recommended to me as a small classic of YA sf in the subcategories of post-apocalyptic, psychic kids, and Australian. It was written in 1987, when there wasn't quite such a glut of psychic kid and post-apocalyptic YA as accumulated later on. But it was still unimpressive ( Read more... )

In an alternate future America, everyone is born with two souls in a single body. They are given two names, like the novel’s protagonists, Eva and Addie. But by about age five, one of the personalities fades away-effectively, it dies. The rare “hybrid” children, who grow older with both personalities intact, are considered a menace to society and ( Read more... )

I found a fascinating blog entry by Rahul Kanakia, the guy who wrote the bedbugs-and-squatters story, with a gay teenage Indian hero (yay!), for Diverse Energies. (I see elsewhere on the site that "I'm currently shopping a gay-themed YA novel -- set in a dystopian Washington, D.C. -- to agents." I hope it sells. Depressing or not, I would read it ( Read more... )

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Incarceron is a computerized prison, a closed system which has been self-sustaining for generations. People are born there and die there, and occasionally someone new is imprisoned in it, but always with their memories wiped first. “Outside” is a legend, and only one man (maybe) has ever escaped. It’s a total hellhole where any scrap of human ( Read more... )