There are, however, three mysterious neighbors who are obsessed with a board game called Interstellar Pig. There’s some subtle hints that Barney is at a crossroads in his life– this probably would have been that “magical teen summer,” except there aren’t any girls around. Interstellar Pig is a strange story about about a sixteen year old boy named Barney who is forced to stay at his parent’s summer beach house in Cape Cod, despite having no friends there to hang out with. Strange Attractors is about time travel, and evil twins from alternate timelines attempting to thwart the plans of the main characters.īut my favorite of them all is Interstellar Pig. But even the sci-fi takes a backseat to the family dynamics. There’s also one specific science fiction element in the book– a “singularity” that threatens to change the nature of the twins’ relationship forever. The most powerful book Sleator wrote is probably Singularity, which is a novel about twin boys and their sibling rivalry. I haven’t read the book in years, and I still remember the last sentence: “Without hesitation they began to dance.” (It’s a lot creepier in context.) Despite the relatively grounded explanation to the mystery, the reader is left with an exceptionally creepy final image. The book deals with powerful themes, like scarcity economics, political sociology, and class structure and authority.
House of Stairs is about four teenagers in a dystopian future awakening to find themselves in some sort of enclosed fractal space– an infinity of stairs stretch in different directions, and their presence there is without apparent explanation. They deal with the mysteries of the universe. They deal with real issues, teenage angst and existential angst. But these books are not the standard fare.
William Sleator wrote primarily novels in the Young Adult category. And if you haven’t read his books (or read them for a few years), you should pick one up. William Sleator is gone now, but every used bookstore in America has at least one of his books for sale. Strange as it may sound, Interstellar Pig is the inspiration for the Chaosmos board game that’s close to raising $100,000 on Kickstarter. This post by Joey Vigour, the lead designer at Mirror Box Games, is about YA sci-fi author William Sleator and his book Interstellar Pig.
0 kommentar(er)
