William Sleator Selected Author • William Sleator was born February 13, 1945 in Havre de Grace, Maryland. • Starts writing stories when he was seven years old. • Begins piano lessons at eight years old. • Graduates from University City High School and enrolls at Harvard University in 1963. • Begins writing film scores in 1966. • Graduates from Harvard in 1967 with a BA in English and Music. • Moves to London, England in 1968 to study music composition. Lives in the house that becomes the basis for his first novel: Blackbriar. • In 1970, he writes the text for Angry Moon, which is illustrated by Blair Lent. This book wins a Caldecott Honor Medal in 1971. • Blackbriar is published in 1972. • Run is published in 1973. • In 1974, he begins working for the Boston Ballet Company as their pianist; he works here until 1983. • In 1979, he publishes Into the Dream. • In 1981, Green Futures of Tycho. • He leaves the Boston Ballet company in 1983, the year Fingers is published, to become a full-time writer and lecturer. • Interstellar Pig in 1984. • Singularity in 1985 • Boy Who Reversed Himself in 1986. He visits Thailand for the first time. • In 1988, The Duplicate is published. • In 1989, He wins the California Young Reader’s Medal for Interstellar Pig. • Approximately one book a year or every two years is published since then. The most recent being Parasite Pig, the sequel to Interstellar Pig, published in October of 2002. “Others See Us” published in 1993 by William Sleator is a story of what happens when someone gains the power to read other people’s thoughts. Jared is sixteen years old and on summer vacation with his parents. He is eagerly looking forward to seeing his cousin, Annelise, who he finds lovely and charming and is very interested in moving past friendship with her. But Jared puts off seeing her when he first arrives for his traditional bike ride that he takes when he first arrives at his family’s vacation compound. He’s so preoccupied thinking about Annelise, that he has a bike accident that throws him into the swamp near the road. The swamp had been used as a chemical dump for years and the town only recently had been successful in stopping the continued dumping, but had not yet got the swamp cleaned up. Jared is covered in the swamp sludge and it soaks into his skin for a good while before he can get back to the house and get it cleaned off. Jared begins to be seized by odd thoughts and feelings, when he realizes that he is able to actually understand what other people are thinking. But before he gets the chance to try and sort it all out in his journal, he discovers that it is missing. He comes to the conclusion that someone else must be a mind reader as well, and heads off to try and discover who it is. His cousin Lindie seems to be hiding something, but his abilities are not developed enough to discover what it is, although he decides that she hasn’t taken his journal. He remembers telling Annelise that he had a journal and goes to see if she may have been the one who took it. When he arrives at her house, she is agitated because her journal was taken as well. She obsessively goes over the journal entries that she doesn’t want read and Jared discovers some unpleasant truths about her. He also discovers in the course of his conversation with her that his indomitable grandmother also fell into the swamp earlier that year. They both go to talk with her, and she does indeed have their journals. She says that she will say nothing and give them back their journals if they both go and retrieve a half-gallon of the swamp water for her. Annelise knows nothing about what the water does, but she is now suspicious and when Jared takes her to the swamp, she falls in too. Now Jared must try and figure out a way to keep a sociopathic and telepathic Annelise from being unleashed upon first their family and then the world, find a way to discover what his grandmother is hiding, as well as developing a newfound respect and liking for his cousin Lindie. In “Marco’s Millions” published in 2001, Marco and his little sister, Lilly, are both unusual children in different ways. From the time that Marco was a very small child, he has been taking journeys alone. He got on a bus alone when he was five years old and rode around for hours, fascinated by the many different neighborhoods they passed through. He discovered the commuter trains when he was seven. He didn’t have to pay for these trips, because he was under the minimum age for fares. And he never got caught by his parents; he was always home on time. But his sister, Lilly, knew that he was addicted to going on journeys. Lilly was unusual herself. She knew things that she shouldn’t. When her father was late getting home, she reassured her mother that he had only had car problems. She told her mother where her mother had left her favorite knife. Lilly’s and Marco’s parents sent her to therapy because they were worried about her strange ability. Her Aunt Martha, her mother’s sister, had had the same abilities and then mysteriously disappeared when she was a child. Lilly is frustrated by always seeming different and causing financial hardship for the rest of the family because of the doctor bills. One day, Lilly sees something in the basement, an odd light coming from what should be a blank wall. She gets Marco, but he can’t see it. He can feel it though, when he touches the stone with Lilly holding his hand. Marco enters the hidden tunnel, for just a few minutes, but when he returns, he finds that three hours have gone by back in the basement, and Lilly is almost hysterical wondering why he was gone so long. Marco saw completely alien creatures that speak to him through their minds. A crowd of aliens watch a giant swing with many creatures on it seeming to try and reach for something on the top of an impossibly high column. And a frightening spinning disk in the sky that pulses malevolently. It is also difficult for Marco to move there, he feels very heavy. The aliens see him, but are polite. They urge him to bring Lilly over, for they want her very badly to help them appease their god, the light in the sky. Marco is frightened by this, so he doesn’t tell Lilly. Over the next days, Marco figures out that what he saw in the sky must have been a naked singularity, an uncloaked black hole, and that the tunnel in the basement leads to a different universe. Marco and Lilly figure out a way for Marco to return, while Lilly is still able to communicate with him using her strange abilities. With Lilly’s help, Marco is able to successfully capture the small item that the aliens were trying to get on the giant swing. He is then sent on a mission to take the object as close to the singularity as he can. Unfortunately, he forgets that the closer one gets to a black hole, the greater the time stretch, and time begins to fly by in the world where Lilly waits, and grows up, ready to help Marco when she is able. These two books have some similar themes, in spite of the wildly different settings. In both novels, there are strong elements of the telepathic. In “Others See Us,” Jared, his grandmother, Annelise and Lindie all end up gaining telepathic abilities through the use of the swamp water. In “Marco’s Millions,” Lilly and Aunt Martha both have slightly different styles of telepathy, which is unexplained. In both books, women seem to posses more intelligence or power than the male protagonists. Jared is manipulated by Annelise until he finds out what she’s really like. Lindie doesn’t need to read minds to know what Annelise is really like, she could see through her before the swamp water. And Jared’s grandmother is the most powerful figure of them all. Marco’s sister, Lilly, is crucial to Marco’s success in the other universe. She provides him with help using her telepathy at the moments he is in most need of it. Her daughter, Annie, is the contact for the next generation. Both books were told from the perspective of a teenage male protagonist. Both male protagonists begin the story as fairly normal people, but by the end of the stories, are widely separated from not only their families, but humanity in general. Jared now has mental powers that make interacting with normal people on a regular basis largely unfeasible. Marco is separated by his twenty-three year absence, in which he ages not at all, and has the device that allows him to stop or speed up time flow. Both books are well paced and in spite of some convoluted plot twists, or difficult scientific ideas, are easy to follow and understand. Some books by Sleator, most recent to oldest: Parasite Pig Rewind Marco’s Millions Boltzmon! The Boxes The Beasties The Night the Heads Came Dangerous Wishes Oddballs The Spirit House Others See Us Strange Attractors The Duplicate The Boy Who Reversed Himself Singularity Interstellar Pig Fingers The Green Futures of Tycho Into the Dream Among the Dolls House of Stairs Run Blackbriar Angry Moon Note: The ones in bold face are currently in stock on Amazon.com. Sources: http://www.tycho.org/sleator.shtml http://www.friend.ly.net/scoop/biographies/sleatorwilliam/ http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/authors/William_Sleator.htm Davis, James E. and Hazel K. 1992. Presenting William Sleator. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 080578215X.