THR reported that Disney has picked up the rights to the brand new YA series Fallen. The first book is already out and there are three more yet to come, all of which Disney now own.

The story is strikingly similar to Meyer's vamp series. A misunderstood girl meets a mysterious boy that she's strangely drawn to. What's his ace in the hole? Why he's a fallen angel, doncha know, hence the title. Plus there's another angel, also fallen, that she's also drawn to, and they fight over her, as men are wont to do. Sign me up. And while we're at it bring on Legion, Hush Hush and Going Bovine.

via THR

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Angryfilms has optioned the Cycler series, which McLaughlin has already adapted as a screenplay, and is currently looking for a director. Cycler tells the story of Jill, an otherwise normal teenager who physically and mentally transforms into a boy named Jack for four days each month. For years, Jill and her parents have kept the secret of her mysterious transformations from the outside world, but one day Jack longs for a life beyond Jill's bedroom and escapes one day.

After the eroticized chastity of the Twilight films, Cylcer could bring us a young adult-targeted film that frankly explores sex and sexuality, not to mention a host of gender issues.

Angryfilms options 'Cycler' books [The Hollywood Reporter via /Film]

According to Publishers Weekly, this fall will see a dozen new titles with angels in starring roles, including Becca Fitzpatrick's Hush, Hush and Lauren Kate's Fallen, which both center on teenage girls who fall for Edward Cullen-esque fallen angels. Some publishers are seeing it as the next logical step for readers of vampire romances, with the added dimension of religion and heavenly wars in lieu of bloodsucking:

Bad-boy angels are the new hotties. Like modern vampires, they can be gorgeous, immortal and otherworldly heartthrobs, unlike, say, zombies. "With all that rotting-off, they're not very sexy," said Justin Chanda, v-p and publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, who calls angels "safe gothic" and "romantic."

But while angels may be shoving aside the undead in the romance department, not all of the angel-themed books are focused on otherworldly love. This year also sees the publication of Libba Bray's Going Bovine about a terminally ill boy who starts seeing a punky angel (who may be a delusion) and Timothy Carter's Evil?, in which an openly gay teenager discovers his new Biblical Studies teacher is a fallen angel controlling the minds of his neighbors.

[Publishers Weekly]

Bransford, an agent with Curtis Brown, posted a poll allowing people to identify their works in progress according to a variety of different genres, but the comment thread turned into a massive debate about how to fit one's work into any of the boxes. There are the cries of people whose novels don't fit into a neat tidy genre:

You totally forgot the, "Help help mine is cross-genre, URGH, what do I call it?" category. "Other" just doesn't quite convey that. ;)

As well as the questions from people who aren't sure whether to call their novels "mainstream" or "literary." (To which Bransford suggests "literary," since that's not a value judgment, just another genre, and he doesn't believe that "mainstream" fiction exists as a category.)

There are the people who are writing superhero novels, and reluctantly classifying those as science fiction. One person is writing a steampunk novel and isn't sure if that's historical fiction or SF. There are the people whose YA novels have science fictional elements — like the person I quote in the headline, above. At least one person wants to abolish genres altogether, to which Bransford asks how the bookstore would know where to shelve things.

But don't worry too much about trying to classify your own work, Bransford says: "You don't even HAVE to tell the agent what you think it is. If you wrote the query well the agent will already know."

And then there's this guy:

I think my novel holds together as one solid entity but when I analyze it in terms of genre?

Total schizophrenia.

My main interest is in character and prose style, so maybe it's literary.

But it's based on my life experiences, so there's a strong element of confessional memoir to it.

It does feature adventures in which an alternate fantasy world is saved, so it's obviously quest fantasy.

But the fantastic elements are rationalized in a speculative fashion, so it might be science fiction.

It deals intimately with the nitty-gritty details of life at the bottom of the blue-collar ladder, so it's social realism.

Much of the material is disturbing on levels ranging from the spiritual to the physical, so it's horror.

It's intended to be funny and there's rarely a lot of space between jokes, so it's humor.

One of the central themes is redemption through love, so it's romance.

The plotting and a storyline involving a drug deal are clearly noir.

I was once asked to describe the damned thing in five words. What I came up with was, "Autobiographical horror with sick laughs."

As for Bransford himself, what novel is he secretly working on in his off hours? He explains:

It's kind of a cyberpunk PLUS steampunk women's fiction slasher romantic comedy.

[Nathan Bransford - Literary Agent]

For those of you unfamiliar with Scalzi's previous novels in this series, a quick recap. Humanity has reached the stars to find the neighborhood teeming with other races all vying for the same planets to colonize. The Colonial Union governing all the human worlds except Earth has a tight monopoly on all travel, commerce, and information between the colonies. The home world is kept ignorant technologically and politically. Mother Earth is just the CU's breeding ground for more colonists, mostly from the Third World, and cannon fodder for their endless wars. The Colonial Defense Force doesn't draft witless eighteen-year-olds to do their dirty work. They want educated volunteers with life-experience who no longer fill useful roles in dirtside society.

On his seventy-fifth birthday John Perry leaves Earth to fulfill his contract with the CDF expecting never to return. He and his fellow septuagenarian are shortly amazed to find themselves in young healthy bodies. CDF soldiers wear cloned flesh with augmented abilities covered in chloroplast imbued skin. These old fogies are now mean green fightin' machines armed to the teeth facing alien armies over hotly contested planets, "Get off my lawn, you tentacled scum!"

This series has often been compared favorably with Starship Troopers, although Scalzi treads a bit lighter on the soapbox than Grand Master Heinlein and has a superior sense of humor. If you haven't read Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony you are in for a treat. Zoë's Tale is more of a companion novel than a sequel and works fine as a stand alone story. It recounts the events from The Last Colony but from the viewpoint of John Perry's seventeen-year-old adopted daughter Zoë and is the stronger novel for it.

The story opens as John and his wife, Jane Sagan a former Special Forces officer, have retired from the CDF in new demilitarized bodies living as rural colonists with their daughter. Zoë's biological father was Charles Boutin, a scientist who schemed with an advanced race called the Obin against humanity. The Obin were uplifted to sentience by the Consu, a godlike and enigmatic species who gave the Obin intelligence without consciousness, then kicked them to the galactic curb without explanation. Boutin offered the Obin a technology that would give them all individual consciousness and emotion in exchange for wiping out the CU whom he believed responsible for Zoë's death.

Of course Zoë wasn't dead, the plot failed, Boutin was killed, but the technology worked. To honor Boutin for his miraculous gift the Obin made a truce with the Humans and sent two of their kind to protect and serve Zoë, whom they revere with something akin to worship. Her two bodyguards, Hickory and Dickory – she named them when she was very young – vaguely resemble a cross between a giraffe and a tarantula, carry huge knives and scare the bejeesus out of everybody. They treat her like a beloved magic princess but she still has to do homework and chores and junk, bummer. Clearly the girl has issues.

Naturally, a quiet pastoral life is not in the cards for this odd but loving little family. The growing populations of the older established colonies pressure the CU to continue spreading out into an increasingly dangerous galaxy. Because of their leadership skills and military record John and Jane are asked to lead a brand new colony called Roanoke. I know, why not just call it Certain Doomsylvania? At least their ship isn't named the Titanic. Immediately things go terribly wrong. The tiny colony is cut off from the rest of the CU deprived of advanced technology on a world with an incompatible biology and a savage native species. A Conclave of a hundred hostile races patrols space sworn to destroy any further human colonization. And oh yeah, the whole planet smells like a stinky locker room.

As young people do, Zoë adapts quickly to this difficult new life. She, her wise-cracking pals, and her absolutely dreamy boyfriend, Enzo, manage to have fun when they can while working alongside the adults for Roanoke's survival. Zoë inherited Boutin's brilliance as well as her adopted father's relentless,sarcastic wit and Jane's fierce determination and resourcefulness. Good thing too, because she's going to need all that and more to save herself and the new colony.

I wondered if it was very realistic to have a heroine that young be so clever and observant while spouting off with Scalzi's trademark sarcasm. Some readers might think that a brilliant and resourceful young Messiah of an alien race who Saves the Day with blatant Deus ex Machina has it a bit too easy. But Zoë's Tale isn't really about the clash of mighty empires or rescuing loved ones from monsters, exciting as those parts are — it's about Zoë. It's about that time in our lives after we've come to grips with how the world sees us but we are still not sure how we see ourselves. It's not about what you are, but finding out who you are. This whip-smart, often funny, and deeply moving novel portrays that journey of self-discovery to the satisfaction of adults young or otherwise.

Zoë's Tale via Amazon

This month, io9 reviews all the nominees for the Nebula, Hugo and Clarke awards. You can read them all here.

Commenter Grey_Area is known among the space-cruising whipper-snappers as Christopher Hsiang. Why can't you young punks let an old man read in peace?!

There's a lot to like about AEF, as silly as it is: for one thing, it includes an older generation of heroes. Ben, aka Captain Extraordinary, discovers that his maternal grandfather is a retired superhero, the Green Termite, and later finds out his dad was Captain Extraodinary before him. (And grand-dad gets to join the team!) For another, his teammate Shani, aka Wired, gets to save the day sometimes. Also, there's a superhero called the Hammer, who goes around mostly naked except for his cape and loincloth. (But he never explains how the Hammer is not his fists.)

And you have all the usual awesome plots, like supervillains trying to steal the world's supply of Unobtainium, our superheroes getting split into their good and evil selves, and a woman physicist getting blasted with gamma rays and turned into a 50-foot woman. Here's the trailer for season two:

The resulting book (cowritten with dad), The Strand Prophecy, has won several awards, including three Benjamin Franklin awards, and an Independent Publisher book award. According to Amazon:

The Strand Prophecy is a science fiction epic set in the present day. The action begins on the steps of the White House, with stops in the jungles of Brazil and the deepest regions of Africa. Strand, a troubled and reluctant superhero discovers the beginning of a rapid evolutionary cycle. One in which new life and new predators will quickly emerge to threaten all of human existence. He races against time and the U.S. military to protect the innocent, safeguard his niece and along the way, perhaps find redemption for his brothers death.

The Winner twins shared their inspirational story with kids at West Middle School by performing songs they wrote themselves, dancing, and being interviewed by a 3-D robot on a big screen. Warning: newspaper site seems to be launching hostile code. [Downey Patriot]

Doctorow started the conversation by telling fans that the reason they're not finding his new book, Little Brother is because they're looking in the wrong place:

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rang me yesterday to talk about a weird little phenomenon: people who were going to stores looking for my newest, Little Brother, were walking away unfulfilled because they were looking in the science fiction section, not the young adult section.

Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction's status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids' section of your bookstore (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom).

I have a friend with access to BookScan, which tracks book sales through stores and retail outlets, who at my request checked the aggregate bestseller list sales of adult fantasy and science fiction against the sale of YA fantasy and SF. Without mentioning specific numbers or titles, my friend says that last week, the top 50 YA SF/F bestsellers outsold the top 100 adult SF/F bestsellers (adult SF and F are separate lists) by two to one. So 50 YA titles are selling twice as much as 100 adult SF/F titles. The bestselling YA fantasy book last week (not a Harry Potter book) outsold the bestselling adult fantasy book by nearly four to one; the bestselling YA science fiction title sold three copies for every two copies of the chart-topping adult SF title. And as a final kick in the teeth, YA SF/F is amply represented at top of the general bestselling charts of YA book sales, whereas adult SF/F struggles to get onto the general bestselling adult fiction charts at all.

Young adult sections in bookstore — a parallel universe of little-regarded awesomeness [Boing-Boing]
Why YA [Scalzi.com]