In alternate chapters, readers get to know Deryn Sharp, a girl so intent on joining the British Air Service she's willing to disguise herself as a boy. Roughly following historical contours, Leviathan opens with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, but focuses on their surviving son, Alek, who escapes death. “I wanted a story that had the same look and feel of something like Boys' Own Adventures, but would appeal to girls, too.” “There was a King of Mars, and a Prince of Mars, but typical of books written in that era, no Princess of Mars,” Westerfeld says.

Westerfeld's inspiration began with A Trip to Mars, a 1906 science fiction novel by Fenton Ash that featured full-color illustrated plates but no female characters. “I thought, 'What if I never have another huge series?' This was my chance to take the leverage I had earned with Uglies and do something with it.”

“It's completely nutty, but this story pushed most of my buttons-steampunk, airships, military history,” Westerfeld says.

It imagines a WWI fought with hybrid creatures, living products of Charles Darwin's 19th-century discoveries about DNA and bioengineering.īecause Westerfeld wanted the finished book to have the period feel of the era in which the story is set, S&S is using 70-pound paper, full-color endpapers depicting an allegorical map of Europe, and 50 interior illustrations-lavish bookmaking financed in large part by Westerfeld himself. Leviathan will be published by Simon & Schuster in October, first in a planned four-book series (three novels and a heavily illustrated “manual of aeronautics”).

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