Deborah Biancotti, Margo Lanagan, and Scott Westerfeld’s collaborative efforts have come to fruition with the first novel of a brand new series launched in Australia on Tuesday and I was thrilled to be at the book launch at the Sydney Kinokuniya (an epic bookstore, which I spend way too much time in).
The three authors discussed their writing process as a team (which apparently involved a lot of pubs). Scott compared the experience to watching the Oscars while on twitter - it makes it bearable. Zeroes is about six teens with abilities that, compared to the superheroes in films and anime, are fairly unremarkable. Each author wrote two characters so each character has the weight of a lone protagonist, sharing page time in a way multi-character novels rarely do.
I’ve a soft spot for narratives that explore the unexpected hero. Like the young protagonists in China Melville’s Un Lun Dun and Patrick Ness’s The Rest of Us Just Live Here, the characters in Zeroes are not the chosen ones, nor are they born of hero material. That doesn’t stop them from becoming ones though. I’ve only just started reading my signed copy of Zeroes, but I already know I won’t be disappointed!