Scored is on sale now. It’s already gotten the thumbs up from “the world’s toughest book critics” at Kirkus. But can it win the heart and mind of a two year old?

Find out for yourself:

The great deleveraging is upon us. According to some economists, the global slump we’re currently in is a normal and necessary end stage to the bubble economy we floated on for too long. We still have a long way to fall before the deleveraging stops and we can start thinking about growth again, but one thing seems clear to me:

It’s time to get real.

We consumed too much, borrowed too much, spent too much, deregulated too much, and generally let the forces of greed and short-sightedness run roughshod over common sense for too long. That paradigm is now dead–not because it was immoral but because there is no more hot hair left to fill all of those bubbles that made the paradigm possible. But I’m not hearing this painfully obvious fact from any of our elected leaders. They seem to soldier on blithely as if they could resurrect the housing bubble, solve unemployment through infrastructure projects, and spur growth by giving millionaires and billionaires even bigger tax breaks then they already have.

Let’s be clear about something. Government spending grew while tax rates shrank. This was sort of okay for a while because the growing economy meant even historically low tax rates were delivering lots of tasty revenue to the IRS. Of course those two wars were never paid for, nor the Bush era prescription drug plan. But then Republicans never believe the federal government should balance its budget until there’s a Democrat in the White House. But bipartisan digs aside, what I would love to see is for someone, anyone, in either party, to deliver the actual truth to the American people, which is this:

The next ten years are not going to look anything like the last ten years. The bubble may have been fun and it may have brought us all kinds of whiz bang things, but it’s over now.

I know. It’s not the kind of platform that generally leads to electoral success, but maybe in this age of extreme cynicism about politics, the one who stands up and tells the harshest truth is the one the people start trusting.

Or maybe we just have to trust ourselves. As the good (if unshowered) people of Occupy Wall Street say: “we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

check it:

The clock is ticking. My book goes on sale in less than 2 weeks (though it’s available for pre-order already). To celebrate the occasion, I’m kicking off with a reading at KGB bar in New York City. KGB’s Fantastic Fiction series is a brilliant monthly event featuring some of the hottest writers of speculative fiction in the world. I’ll be reading with the extraordinary Holly Black. We read together a few years ago and it was a blast. Here are the details:

When: Wednesday, October 19th at 7PM

Where: KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street (just West of 2nd Ave)
New York, NY 10003

What: reading plus cocktails

Here’s a map.

I’ll be giving away a signed copy of Scored to one lucky attendee. Will it be you?

I sure hope so. See you there!

One of the great things about writing science fiction, especially near-future science fiction, is that sometimes you get to see your dreams and nightmares come true in real time. I confess I am not above pretending I am actually controlling these things like some kind of evil genius. Luckily I am furnished with a husband who can be relied upon to remind me of the various ways in which I’ve gotten it wrong.

Yes, I was wrong about skinny jeans. I predicted they would be a flash in the pan. Mea culpa.

I was, however, right about the resurgence of fair isle sweaters. Go ahead, dig them out of storage. It’s safe to wear them again.

Now, in the New York Times today, I read the following headline:

“Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’”

I won’t get into all the technical details of this massive project, though you should read the article yourself if you want to know the future. But it very eerily parallels the software at the heart of my new novel, Scored. It’s a super-intelligent software program that mines vast quantities of data (from the Web, traffic cameras, financial market indicators, and elsewhere) in order to tease out patterns that will allow it to predict human behavior. No human intervention is necessary in this endeavor. The algorithm does it all. And, no, I wasn’t merely describing my novel just then. I was describing an actual government project, which your tax dollars are currently financing.

As Thomas Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence (talk about a science fictional name) at MIT says, “We have vastly more detailed and richer kinds of data available as well as predictive algorithms to use, and that makes possible a kind of prediction that would have never been possible before.”

Now the good people of IARPA (which stands for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) only want to use this giant hive mind to predict political turmoil and maybe flu epidemics. But, if it works (and, yes, that remains a big if) does anyone honestly believe it will only and ever be used for such things?

I sure don’t. That’s why I wrote a book about it.