about the book
Alix Banks is being trained for a life of money and power. She’s a senior at the prestigious Seitz Academy, the whitest school on the East coast. Easily maintaining a 3.9 while taking advanced courses, next fall she’ll head off for Harvard or some other Ivy League college, all expenses paid by her wealthy father. She just floats along with it all, because that is what is expected.
And then her world shatters.
From her science class window, she spots a cool guy staring up at her from the quad. A tall African American in an army green trench coat and old-style aviator shades, he’s too gangsta to be Seitz material. Alix watches as the headmaster strides up and demands that the stranger leave. The guy just grins and slams a punch into the academic’s portly gut. As the headmaster doubles over, the puncher pats him on the back and gently lowers him to the ground. Then the enigmatic renegade smiles up at Alix and leisurely saunters off!
The next day when Alix arrives at the school, she finds it surrounded by police cars and special security people. The students are herded into a tight mass away from the science building. Swat teams enter and suddenly the windows are splashed with red spelling out 2.0. Moments later the cops rush out of the building chased by hundreds of rats.
Alix is hardly aware of the stranger who comes up behind her. What he tells her will change her life…if she believes him. He says that her father and his PR firm are orchestrating a massive cover-up protecting greedy corporations that produce faulty drugs that have caused countless deaths. She knows her dad’s company, nicknamed the Doubt Factory, is super powerful, but surely her father couldn’t be involved in this type of malfeasance.
When her parents realize that Alix is being stalked, they hire personal body guards for her, but that doesn’t stop her from investigating the disturbing claims. And what she learns is that 2.0, Moses Cruz, the leader of a radical band of brilliant orphan teens, may be right. Now she has to make a decision. Can she really blow the whistle on the man who raised her so lovingly?
about the author
Paolo Bacigalupi grew up and currently lives with his wife Anjula and their young son in Paonia, a small town of 1600 residents, on a mesa in western Colorado.
Paolo attended Oberlin College in Ohio. After earning a degree in East Asian Studies, he worked in China as a consultant, helping companies enter the Chinese market. He returned to the U.S. to work at a Web development company in Boston before finally settling in Paonia where he now works at the local environmental newspaper.
Though Paolo’s publishing success might seem to have come suddenly, he actually came very close to abandoning writing. Publishers usually said his writing was too dark. After a decade of work, frustration, self-doubt, and rejected manuscripts, he was inspired by his Asian travels. He is now intent on using science fiction as a way of connecting readers to the environmental problems that are facing the real world.
Sources:
Author website
Author interview: Locus Magazine
Author video interview
Also by Paolo Bacigalupi:
Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker, Book 2). Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. 2012.
Ship Breaker (Book 1). Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. 2010.
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