Scott Westerfeld (1963 - )

His Life

He grew up in several states due to his father's career as a computer programmer for Univac.

He attended Arts Magnet High School in Dallas, Texas and then received a BA in philosophy from Vassar in 1985. Before becoming a full time writer, he held several jobs including factory worker, software designer, editor, and substitute teacher.

He then began an early career as a composer whose musical compositions have been performed in dance productions both in the United States and in Europe. He the moved into writing as a ghostwriter and creator of educational software programs for children. As a fiction writer working primarily in the science-fiction genre,. he began by writing Science Fiction for adults.

He then turned to YA fiction, and has had tremendous success, and has publisher nine books since 2004.

In 2001, he married writer Justine Larbalestier and they have said that they have no plans for kids.. His favorite writer is Samuel R. Delany, and his favorite meal is breakfast and he says he never wears jeans, NEVER! He and his wife currently spend summer in New York and then spend a second summer in Sydney, Australia each year.

His Writings:

This is a sci-fi book that explores the effect of language on species differentiation. Set in the formalised world of the fine hunt where "hunters" use a knowledge of alien language to guide genetically engineered "mounts" in a blood hunt for equally engineered "prey" the plot traces the coming of age of Spider, a young Ayan language student, and the question is will she become a human, an ayan sycophant, or something else entirely?

The aliens are dragon like beings, who exude chemical which are toxic to humans. Students have to wear special suits to protect them from the aliens.

The Ayan language is peripheral and non-direct, making mastery of it elusive to straight talking humans.

In an interstellar empire of 80 human worlds, ruled by an emperor who lets selected humans cheat death, tensions between most humans and the resurrected elite, aka the Risen, are increasing. The Rix, a cult of cyborgs who worship compound AI minds, hunger to liberate the empire's worlds from mere human control. When a Rix raiding party captures the emperor's sister, Capt. Laurent Zai of the Imperial Navy must save her. Viewpoint rapidly shifts from character to character and from a vast perspective to an extremely small one-that of the intelligence scouts Zai sends ahead of the rescue mission, nano-machines smaller than insects. Keeping the reader constantly

off-balance, Westerfeld skillfully integrates extreme technologies with human characters.It doesn't take long for the Legis XV computers to become a compound mind a la the Rix and fight for survival, too. Westerfeld manages the action impeccably, and he leaves threads of plot hanging for a grand space-opera finale in a promised sequel.

Captain Laurent Zai of the Imperial frigate Lynx is a walking dead man. Unjustly held responsible for the death of the Child Empress, sister of the immortal Emperor, Zai has been sent to fight an unwinnable battle. The Lynx must stop a vastly superior Rix ship from reaching the planet Legis, a suicide mission that will almost certainly end in oblivion for Captain Zai and his crew.On the planet Legis below, a Rix compound mind--a massive emergent AI formed from every computer on the planet--as been isolated by their Imperial blockade. But the mind has guided a lone Rix commando, Herd, to the planet's frozen north, and will soon order a desperate attempt to seize a polar communications array and break the blockade.

Ever wonder who was the first kid to keep a wallet on a big chunky chain, or wear way-too-big-pants on purpose? What about the mythical first guy who wore his baseball cap backwards? These are the Innovators, the people on the very cusp of cool. Seventeen-year-old Hunter Braque’s job is finding them for the retail market. But when a big-money client disappears, Hunter must use all his cool- hunting talents to find her.Along the way he’s drawn into a web of brand-name intrigue—a missing cargo of the coolest shoes he’s ever seen, ads for products that don’t exist, and a shadowy group dedicated to the downfall of consumerism as we know it.

Moving when you're in high school is difficult enough, especially when your parents can't seem to hold their own lives together and your younger sister is being more obnoxious than usual. However, for 15-year-old Jessica Day, these concerns pale when bizarre things start to happen and she discovers that she now has unwanted magical powers. Part science fiction, part horror story, this novel is the first in a series about the midnighters, a select group of individuals whose birth at the stroke of midnight gives them the special ability to move about in a mysterious 25th hour. As Jessica takes her place among these extraordinary teens, she must battle the increasingly dangerous slithers and other darklings that have suddenly become more violent and aggressive.

As the Midnighters search for the truth about the secret hour, they uncover terrifying mysteries woven into the very fabric of Bixby’s history, and a conspiracy that touches the world of daylight. This time Jessica Day is not the only Midnighter in mortal danger, and if the group can’t find a way to come together, they could lose one of their own . . . forever. As they continue to battle evil creatures living in an hour hidden at midnight, Jessica and her new friends learn about Bixby, Oklahoma's shadowy past and uncover a deadly conspiracy that reaches beyond the secret hour.

There is something evil brewing in Bixby, and the teens from the previous Midnighters titles must save the world from the darklings. The monsters have found a way to expand midnight so that all humans will enter the blue time and become prey. Complicating the crisis is Rex's residual darkling characteristics that leave him with the unsettling notion that other humans are food, Jonathan's secret desire that the midnight hour could last forever so that he would always be free of the confining flatland gravity, and the fact that no one has yet figured out why the darklings wish to dispose of Jessica Day. Blue Noon has an end of the world premise that will appeal to Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans.

In Westerfeld's smart, urbane fantasy, parasite positives, or "peeps," are maniacal cannibals that cause illness. College freshman Cal was lucky: he contracted the sexually transmitted disease during a one-night stand, but it never developed into its full-blown form. Now he works for an underground bureau in Manhattan that tracks down peeps. Apart from the cravings for rare meat and enforced celibacy (turning lovers into monsters is "not an uplifting thing"), life is okay--until a hip, cute journalism student intensifies Cal's yearnings for companionship. Complicating matters are indications that peeps have an urgent evolutionary purpose. Breezy essays on parasitology feel a bit intrusive, and the plot ultimately spirals into B-movie absurdity.

Something horrifying is bubbling up from the earth, and vampires stalk the streets of New York--but in this electric sequel to Peeps (2005), Moz and his buddy Zahler think only of forming a band. One night Moz, with the help of passerby Pearl, rescues a Fender Stratocaster guitar. Like Moz, Pearl is a musician, and a band is born. Soon the band recruits a singer, a Peep with her parasite mostly under control, and a drummer who literally sees the music and the terrifying things it attracts. Eventually it becomes clear that the new band will play a key role in the coming struggle against the powerful evil. Westerfeld continues his captivating, original vision, improving it in this tightly plotted sequel. The new characters are engaging, and the breezy dialogue is graced with both unique slang and a touch of humor. Teen will savor the picture of a band finding its sound while saving the world. Both new readers and Peeps fans will eat this up.

Uglies is the first of a new trilogy. It's about a world in which everyone has an operation when they turn sixteen, making them supermodel beautiful. Big eyes, full lips, no one fat or skinny. This seems like a good thing, but it's not. Especially if you're one of the uglies, a bunch of radical teens who've decided they want to keep their own faces. (How anti-social of them.)

In this highly anticipated sequel to the hit Uglies 2005), Tally Youngblood struggles to retain her mental acuity after undergoing the operation that transformed her into a Pretty. While in the renegade Ugly community, Tally learned that along with cosmetic enhancements, new Pretties are given brain lesions that leave them in a perpetual state of lazy vanity. Tally volunteered to take a drug developed to cure the lesions, but now that she is a Pretty, she has forgotten her promise. A coded message leads her to some pills and a letter that she wrote to herself before her transformation, and after swallowing the cure, she is catapulted into a dangerous new adventure, in which she discovers that the peace and happiness of Pretty society come with a terrible price.

Set some time in the future, after a human-made bacteria destroyed the modern world, the trilogy tells of new cities established and tightly controlled through brainwashing and a series of operations leading to a compliant society. Tally Youngblood, the 16-year-old protagonist, learns in the first two books that free will and truth are more important than a false sense of security. In Specials, she has become an elite fighting machine, fully enhanced with nanotechnology and super-fast reflexes, and made to work as a Special Circumstances agent for the nameless city that she fled. As in the first two books, much of the story takes place with characters whizzing through the air on hoverboards, but Tally and her friends are in for some harsh realities here.

A few years after Tally and The Cutters brought the mind-rain and ended prettytime, Aya Fuse is a normal ugly teen, too young for the optional brain, face, and body surge(ry) that most people choose to have, and too unimportant to do anything exciting. Her city uses a reputation economy, based on face-rank - the people who are the most important, well-known, and interesting get to do and have the most exciting things. Everyone has their own feed in an attempt to gain a higher face-rank, and Aya's greatest hope for fame is as a kicker, someone who finds and reports on the best stories in their world. When she meets a group of dare-devil girls who aim to stay unknown, she knows that kicking their story is her chance to make her name. But when they all find some mysterious things in a nearby mountain, the story becomes bigger than Aya could have imagined - big enough to involve the person with the biggest face-rank