GLORY O' BRIEN'S HISTORY OF THE FUTURE by A.S. King

Last year, I featured A.S. King's book REALITY BOY, which I loved. I was excited to meet her again at this year's American Library Association Conference, where I found out about her new book. The premise is knock-your-socks-off amazing:

Would you try to change the world if you thought it had no future?

Graduating from high school is a time of limitless possibilities — but not for Glory, who has no plan for what's next. Her mother committed suicide when Glory was only four years old, and she’s never stopped wondering if she will eventually go the same way... until a transformative night when she begins to experience an astonishing new power to see a person’s infinite past and future. From ancient ancestors to many generations forward, Glory is bombarded with visions—and what she sees ahead of her is terrifying.

A tyrannical new leader raises an army. Women’s rights disappear. A violent second civil war breaks out. And young girls vanish daily, sold off or interned in camps. Glory makes it her mission to record everything she sees, hoping her notes will somehow make a difference. She may not see a future for herself, but she’ll do everything in her power to make sure this one doesn’t come to pass.

In this masterpiece about freedom, feminism, and destiny, Printz Honor author A.S. King tells the epic story of a girl coping with devastating loss at long last—a girl who has no idea that the future needs her, and that the present needs her even more.

And here are her answers to some updated questions:

GLORY O'BRIEN'S HISTORY OF THE FUTURE has one of the best openings I've ever read--I was immediately hooked. What is your process for building openings, and what, if anything, guides that process?

My openings come to me pretty organically and they guide the rest of the book, really. I hear a character in my head and I write down what they tell me to write down. In the case of Glory O'Brien, I was in a school in Omaha, Nebraska and I had to come up with something quickly to use an example of my own writing during a writing and revision workshop. What I wrote that day is still the prologue to the book. In many ways I finished the book because the students said, "That's mental! What happens next?" But why did that idea come to me--drinking a bat? The fast train? I have no idea. I just wrote the first thing that came to me and then went with it.

Sometimes that's the best way to go. You always create sly, witty characters that readers want to hang out with for tons of pages. If you could have lunch with one of your characters, who would it be and why? (And what would you have for lunch?)

This is such a super hard question. And thank you. I'm so glad you dig my characters. I'd love to meet a lot of my characters. But if I could have lunch with anyone from any one of my books, I'd have lunch with Gerald from Reality Boy. I think I just want to tell him that he's going to be all right one day and hug him. I want to be his hockey lady. :) We'd probably eat Chinese food right out of the cartons with plastic forks.

I'm so glad Gerald has a hockey lady, both in the book and in real life. In our last interview, you mentioned that your favorite book is usually the one you're working on. What about this book made it your favorite while writing it?

Wow! Now THAT'S a question. Because I'm two books into the future, I have no idea. I think I loved that I got to revisit my 2004 (unpublished) book WHY PEOPLE TAKE PICTURES and find out what happened to that main character, as sad as it might have been. I also probably liked the angle of Glory's narration--from the present and the future. Wow. This is such a hard question to answer. But you know what? I kinda think I liked being unapologetically real about the nature of Glory's question about what a woman really looks like in our society and what that question does to all of us. That same thing scared me sometimes too. But I think being scared of what one is writing is probably a good thing in the end. If we don't take risks in life and art, then we're just making products. I'm here for art. I know this makes me look weird, but much like Glory, I really don't care if I look weird as long as I'm me.

And we're certainly glad you're you. Thanks for another excellent interview!

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