Author: Dan Wells
Pages: 352
Publisher: Balzer & Bray
Release Date: February 16th 2016
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Los Angeles in 2050 is a city of open doors, as long as you have the right connections. That connection is a djinni—a smart device implanted right in a person’s head. In a world where virtually everyone is online twenty-four hours a day, this connection is like oxygen—and a world like that presents plenty of opportunities for someone who knows how to manipulate it. Marisa Carneseca is one of those people. She might spend her days in Mirador, the small, vibrant LA neighborhood where her family owns a restaurant, but she lives on the net—going to school, playing games, hanging out, or doing things of more questionable legality with her friends Sahara and Anja. And it’s Anja who first gets her hands on Bluescreen—a virtual drug that plugs right into a person’s djinni and delivers a massive, non-chemical, completely safe high. But in this city, when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is, and Mari and her friends soon find themselves in the middle of a conspiracy that is much bigger than they ever suspected. Dan Wells, author of the New York Times bestselling Partials Sequence, returns with a stunning new vision of the near future—a breathless cyber-thriller where privacy is the world’s most rare resource and nothing, not even the thoughts in our heads, is safe.

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1. Hi Dan! Thanks so much for being here today, super excited to have you. For my first question, I would love to know what you did in celebration of the release of Bluescreen?

I'm a man of simple pleasures, so I celebrated this book the way I prefer to celebrate most things: hanging out with my friends and family, eating food and playing board games.

2.What are you most excited for readers to read about?

That's a great question, because the things that excited me changed as I wrote the book. In the beginning it was the world that thrilled me, and the technologies and the intriguing new realities the characters have to deal with, and then as I wrote I got more and more into the plot, and all the exciting things the characters have to go through and the solutions they come up with to save the day. By the end of the book, though, and this might be obvious by this point in the paragraph, it was the characters themselves that I really loved: their personalities, their ingenuity, and more than anything their friendship. Marisa and her friends will do anything for each other, and those friendships get tested a lot in this book, but they always come through, and I like to think they always will.

3. Describe your thoughts on Bluescreen's cover in six words.

The Most Freaking Beautiful Thing Ever

4. What struggles did you come across and how did you overcome them?

One of the big problems I faced was a problem that everyone eventually runs into when they try to depict computer hackers in a book or a movie: hacking is just not visually interesting. I had to do a lot of research to get it technically correct, and then I actually had to back down from some of that realism to keep it entertaining. It's not a perfect balance, and I'm still working on it (the hacking in book 2, for example, I think works much, much better), but I'm pleased with what I've done and I hope readers like it.

5. If you were to be brought to the Bluescreen world, what would be the first thing you would do?

Get a djinni, absolutely. Not only are they amazing pieces of technology that can do everything I've ever wanted a computer to do, but the world of BLUESCREEN is designed around them, and doesn't even function well for people who don't have one. Bao can live without one, and more power to him, but I want a djinni :)

6. Thank you Dan for being here today! For my final questions, I would like to know, what is one common thing you share with your protagonist?

We're both planners--we get eager and we get fired up and sometimes we shoot our mouths off, but we don't like rushing into things without a plan. Sometimes that makes us slow to respond, or hard to convince, or a little too willing to let something slide because we can't think of a good way to deal with it, but when everything's clicking and we have a good plan, we're unstoppable.

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Dan Wells

Dan Wells is a thriller and science fiction writer. Born in Utah, he spent his early years reading and writing. He is he author of the Partials series (Partials, Isolation, Fragments, and Ruins), the John Cleaver series (I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, and I Don't Want To Kill You), and a few others (The Hollow City, A Night of Blacker Darkness, etc). He was a Campbell nomine for best new writer, and has won a Hugo award for his work on the podcast Writing Excuses; the podcast is also a multiple winner of the Parsec Award.

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So tell me: Have you heard of Bluescreen and what are your thoughts on it? Also, what did you think of my interview?