(1) Blastr reports the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum needs photos or film of the original Enterprise model to assist them in replicating what the Enterprise looked like during and after the cult-classic episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” That apparently was the last time the model was altered while the series was in production.
The National Air and Space Museum is opening its hailing frequencies and asking fans for help. They need original pics or footage of their original Enterprise model — which has already gone through eight different restorations ever since it was built in 1964, by the way — so that they can restore it to all its August 1967 glory. Yep, it’s that specific.
Star Trek fans made first contact with the ship in 1972, when a model was featured at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, Calif., during Space Week (a 10-day gathering of space-related activities). Then, in 1974 through 1975, the ship was put on display in the Smithsonian’s Arts & Industries Building in Washington, D.C., while the National Air and Space Museum’s new home base was being built on Independence Avenue.
(2) And while we’re discussing Classic Trek, should anyone ever ask you how Roddenberry came up with “Sulu” as the character’s name, George Takei explains:
In an interview with the website Big Think, he revealed that his character is based on the Philippine Sulu Sea. According to him, show creator Gene Roddenberry wanted a generic Asian name for the helmsman. He thought that most Asian last names were country-specific, like Tanaka, Wong, and Kim. In 1966, Asia was dealing with issues like warfare, colonization, and rebellion, and Roddenberry didn’t want to reference any of that.
(3) A few days ago I posted about the new BB-8 robot from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Now someone has dissected a BB-8 with photos and commentary worthy of a medical examiner. You sicko!
(4) And on Force Friday, that glorious excuse to sell toys from the new Star Wars franchise, the rarest collectible was a mis-packaged Kylo Ren action figure – found on the shelves in Glendale, John King Tarpinian’s home town. And specialized collectors are always on the lookout for funny/funky slipups like this.
That’s when eagle-eyed shoppers might have spotted Kylo Ren—the helmeted, crossguard lightsaber-wielding new villain played by Adam Driver in The Force Awakens—being sold as lady storm trooper Captain Phasma after an apparent packaging error placed the new Star Wars villain in the wrong box that got shipped out for the massive retail push.
Misprinted, misshapen, and mis-packaged memorabilia occupy a niche spot in the world of collectibles, particularly in the long history of the Star Wars franchise. And while packaging errors are known to occur “more often than people think,” according to Toy & Comic Heaven’s James Gallo, it’s the production errors and discontinued design variants that yield more highly prized value to collectors….
There’s the infamously naughty 1977 Topps C-3PO #207 trading card, in which the Force appears to be very strong in C-3PO’s chrome junk, an aberration that Topps quickly corrected in subsequent printings. A bizarre yellow-hued discoloration on Kenner’s 1997-era Luke vs. Wampa set made the “incontinent” Hoth beast a curious find for Star Wars collectors. “Yak Face” (never distributed in the U.S.), “Vinyl Cape Jawa (later reconfigured with a cloth cape), “Rocket Firing Boba Fett” (cancelled on the eve of production for fear of a choking hazard) and versions of Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi bearing telescoping lightsaber accessories have reportedly sold to hardcore collectors over the years for thousands of dollars.
(5) Amazon says The Man in the High Castle: Season 1 will be available November 20, 2015. The first episode was teased in January. This trailer debuted at the San Diego Comic-Con.
(6) For a limited Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood is offering guests the rare opportunity to see the new Batmobile from Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice before the movie debuts in March. Here’s a video of Batman’s new set of wheels.
(7) “Alien Nuclear Wars Might Be Visible From Earth” writes Ross Andersen in The Atlantic.
A team of astronomers recently tried to determine whether Trinity’s light might be cosmic in a different sense. The Trinity test involved only one explosion. But if there were many more explosions, involving many more nuclear weapons, it might generate enough heat and light to be seen from nearby stars, or from the deeper reaches of our galaxy—so long as someone out there was looking….
I asked Jill Tarter what she thought of the paper. Tarter is the former director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute and the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the heroine of Carl Sagan’s Contact, played by Jodie Foster in the film adaptation. Tarter told me the paper was “getting a bit of buzz” in the SETI community. But she also urged caution. “The problem is the signatures are detectable for cosmically insignificant amounts of time,” she said. Distant stars burn for billions of years, sending a constant stream of light toward Earth, but the flash from a nuclear war may last only a few days. To catch its light, you have to have impeccable timing.
(8) There’s a tad too much science fictional truth here for this cartoon to make a successful motivational poster. “Shoot for the Moon” on The Oatmeal.
(9) Let’s not forget one other award given last weekend at Dragon Con. Larry Correia and “Brando TorgersOn” were the first to win the “super prestigious LaMancha award.” Says Correia —
The fact that the gnome is tilting at that windmill with a nazi tank is just one of the added touches that make the LaMancha so prestigious. It is crafted out of the finest southern bass wood and delicately hand carved with a poignant message.
La Mancha Award
(10) “We Watched That (So You Didn’t Have To): John Cusack and Jackie Chan’s VOD Historical Action Epic, ‘Dragon Blade’” by Shea Serrano on Grantland —
I sit here before you a man, a man who has watched Jackie Chan in any number of films — in a near countless number of films. There was one where he played a man who operated a fast food van and had to become a hero. There was one where he played a man in South Africa with amnesia who had to become a hero. There was one where he teamed up with a white man to become a hero and also one where he teamed up with a black man to become a hero, not once, not twice, but thrice. And now I have seen him wear a very thick wig and a poet’s goatee and a very generous amount of makeup and sing about racial harmony and total peace and then make a deathmobile out of shields and spears and then become a hero. I sit here before you a man, a man who has seen Dragon Blade.
(11) Your reality may vary!
I wonder, if I did a poll to see who thought this was a genuine comment or a parody, how it would turn out. pic.twitter.com/exDoPlW4uu
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 9, 2015
Honestly, I can never tell when a File770 comment is parody anymore. :-/ https://t.co/opfyTO08dp
— Serenity “Leap Year Capybara” Dee ???? (@sapphixy) September 9, 2015
(12) An especially good installment of SF Signal’s Mind Meld, curated by Paul Weimer, calls on participants to discuss the best deaths in science fiction and fantasy — T. Frohock, Richard Shealy (sffcopyediting.com) , John Hornor Jacobs, Ramona Wheeler, Richard Parks, Alasdair Stuart, Martha Wells, Tina Connolly, Susan Jane Bigelow, Christian Klaver, Joe Sherry, and Gillian Polack.
(13) While researching today’s scroll I found a few more things I needed to report about Sasquan. Such as – the silly PA announcements.
Just heard over the @sasquansf speakers: "Good morning. The voice of God approves this message."
— shoshoctopus ???????? (@shoshoctopus) August 20, 2015
And photos of the Other Awards winners including David Aronovitz.
Sam moskowitz archive award: David Aronovitz@TheHugoAwards @sasquansf #Sasquan #HugoAwards pic.twitter.com/Mrc1P9MWJa
— Better Living Through Alchemy (@EvanJPeterson) August 23, 2015
John Hertz accepting for Julian May, Danny Kaye, and Dorian Gray@TheHugoAwards @sasquansf #Sasquan #HugoAwards pic.twitter.com/B6NPWFrTU9
— Better Living Through Alchemy (@EvanJPeterson) August 23, 2015
Then, someone recorded Filthy Pierre playing the Superman theme on his Melodica.
And finally, whatever the opposite of comic relief is –
https://twitter.com/XDPaul/status/641467729145233408
(14) Just how scientifically accurate is The Martian? This short video on Yahoo! lets Andy Weir, Matt Damon and others make their case.
(15) Sometimes a battle between a giant space jaybird and the Enterprise is just a battle between a giant space jaybird and the Enterprise.
[Thanks to Susan de Guardiola, Martin Morse Wooster, Mark, Will R., Colin Kuskie, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Hmmm … I don’t have exact numbers; Wylding Hall is either a shortish novel or a longish novella. Either way, I’d say it’s well worth $3.82, especially if you’re an aficionado of the 1960s British folk rock scene.
@James Moar
Here’s some SW geekage. While it’s been treated as a SF joke for years, not only was the term clarified in the SW Expanded Universe, but it actually comes from one of the earliest drafts of the script (or the first rough draft. I can’t remember which).
The Starkillers were supposed to make their escape through a notorious area of space that was populated with black holes and anomalies. The safe course that was mapped was a long, round-about path that took dozens of parsecs. But if you were crazy and/or desperate, you could try a more direct path by skimming the edges of the gravity wells of the black holes. The shorter the route, the more the danger.
The scene was cut but the name and idea of the ‘Kessel Run’ stayed in. By the time the drafts got near completion, Lucas had marked it up as an obvious lie Solo was telling to impress the provincial rubes he took Luke and Ben for. The original scene was turned into the basis for the asteroid field chase in Empire.
In the Expanded Universe, they turned it into the route around The Maw, a cluster of black holes that also was the only route to bring glitterstim spice from Kessel that wasn’t completely blocked by the Imperial Navy. In that version, the traditional Kessel Run was 18 parsecs; Han’s piloting and the advanced nav computer in the Falcon shaved a third of that off.
So it’s a classic mistake yet not really a mistake that was later explained in canon.
@James Moar: OK *blush* I really ought to assume everything here is done on purpose even if I don’t spot that it’s a reference
The cartoonist David Willis made fun of the Parsec line a few times in his webcomic Shortpacked! And every time someone would point out in the comments that parsec was a measure of distance…
as Hypnotosov pointed out, a parsec is a measure of distance, based on parallax angle (the earliest method of determining distances to nearby stars was to measure parallax from opposite sides of the Earth’s orbit) so “parallax seconds”, equivalent to 3.26163344 light years.
Apologies for pedantry, especially if you did know that.
@vasha:
It was a reference to Han stating that the Millenium Falcon could make the “Kessel run” in “under twelve parsecs” in the original Star Wars. As you note, parsecs is a measure of distance not time. I always thought Han was bullshiting but fans have come up with various explanations. I never read the EU but I think one was that the Kessel system was surrounded by some sort of anomaly that requires ships to take a circuitous route so if you could make the run in 12 parsecs then you were cutting closer to the black holes (or whatever) and could make the run faster. FANWANK! Of course the real reason Han said that is cos George Lucas didn’t know what a parsec was and thought it sounded cool.
There are two pomeranians. One is Miranda’s, and since the last time it’s mentioned is some 15 years before the shit hits the fan, it’s safe to assume he dies a peaceful natural death. The other is Dr. Eleven’s, and nowhere it is mentioned that something bad happens to him. They are both called Luli; there is another dog called Luli and he makes it to the end too.
That is about the extent of the reassurance I can give aboit Station Eleven.
@cmm
I knew I liked her.
More Agent Carter first though please!
And here I thought they were commemorating the 1940 invasion of Holland!
Ar ar ar ar ar!
rcade
In case you or anyone else was wondering at some omissions, our bookworm has somewhat oversimplified Chaos Horizon’s position. What’s quoted above was only the list of novels already read and slated for future writeups on the site as possible contenders. See https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/2015/07/29/review-round-up-strategy-for-2015/ for a fuller picture of what CH views as likely/possible novel contenders including not yet read and yet to be released books.
Speaking of reading, I’ve seen the Nnedi Okorafor and Ernest Cline titles pop up often enough now I guess I’d better add them to my list of potential nominees to get my hands on a copy of sometime in the next few months.
Yes, I knew this part, and I knew that Rochita was given the cold shoulder by RH/BS’s friends when she was in the UK in 2014, but IIRC it happened at Nine Worlds, not LonCon. Although at LonCon, which was the week after Nine Worlds, maybe people hadn’t caught on and were not as aware that this was going on, so were not extra reassuring (as I for one woukd have been if I had known).
Personally, I went to the first Nine World and liked it, but did not appreciate the rumors that started circulating about how Loncon was not only a con full of old white people and therefore worthy of contempt, but also unsafe, whereas Nine World was intersectional, inclusive and wonderful. It is of course not NW’s fault if they have some unpleasant stans, and mostly I didn’t return because they moved to the Radisson Non Euclidean and I have suffered through two Eastercons already there.
I’ve read Cline’s Armada; it’s a fun read, but a little light for a Hugo, in my opinion. Fifth Season is next on my reading list.
@Lis Carey
The free sampler of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine has the Bear story (apparently, I haven’t actually checked because I have the full version). This Amazon link may or may not work.
> “I’m ready to dive into a new novel that might be Hugo worthy … Any suggestions?”
Right now, at the absolute top of my potential-nomination list is Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge. (Since it had a 2015 U.S. publication date, it’s still eligible for nomination this time around.) I’ve read 4-5 other 2015 books that have nomination potential, but so far that one has blown them all away.
And of course, regarding the explanation for the Star Wars “parsec” line, others have shot first, and better. Cheers!
I’d like to correct “blown them all away”; I had momentarily forgotten “Shadow Scale” by Rachel Hartman, which is up there at the top, too. It is the second volume of a duology (“Serafina” is the first one), and I am considering whether to nominate it by itself or the two books as a unit, since the actual story arc is really the two books combined.
(Of course, there are many 2015 books I haven’t read, but I’d have to read some pretty amazingly awesome stuff for either Cuckoo Song or Shadow Scale to drop off my list.)
Lis Carey
I mentioned In Libres by Elizabeth Bear, was that the one you were thinking of?
@Cat/Lis
If it wasn’t, it should be. I really liked In Libres.
@Dex, the obvious retcon is obvious. In my head-canon I sometimes go with, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the parsec was a unit of time”.
Also: “I don’t know half of the in-jokes half as well as I should like…”
“… because the commenters here are exceedingly well-read & knowledgable.”
On the BS/RH and Tricia Sullivan/Shadowboxer thing. What makes it extra terrible is that one of the editors at the company who published Tricia, David Moore, is incredibly friendly with BS/RH on Twitter. (Her book was published by Ravenstone Press, one of Rebellion Publishing’s imprints, and David Moore heads up Abaddon Books, another of their imprints.)
Will I add something to my TBR pile (Hugo division) purely on Kyra’s say so?
Apparently, yes, I will. Did. Please refrain from abusing this power, Kyra – it’s a long list already.
@RAH – Yes, we’ve seen the trailer for The Martian. There was much jumping up and down and waving of hands when it first dropped.
It looks as if it will be great, as long as Hollywood doesn’t screw it up.
For rcade:
Seveneves is not even close to Hugo-worthy, IMHO. See wall of ROT13 some days back for reasons.
The Rest of Us Just Live Here, to get ahead of the YA-award debate!
(I think the only novel I’ve read so far that’s eligible for next year’s award)
I asked my exoplanet-hunting friend and got a nice long answer:
Yes, but…
Kepler is not longer able to point at it’s original field of view and so we are no longer continuously monitoring these stars. You would need to launch a new spacecraft to monitor the same field. The light curves that Kepler produces look like of like these : http://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.0291.pdf see page 15. These are folded on the orbital period of the planet so that all the planet transits are stacked on each other.
If the planet just disappeared…
If we had detected a few transits and then detected no transits after some period of time we would probably call it a false positive detection (this does happen) rather than a destroyed planet. As detecting a destroyed planet would be unlikely and has never been detected before and Occam’s razor being what it is; false positive seems like a better theory.
Detecting the debris from the planet’s destruction might be more promising, but that depends on what happened to it.
If, when the planet was destroyed, there was an intense flash of light then it would show up in the light curve from the star. This would be interesting, but some of the pixels, when hit with cosmic rays, are permanently damaged and so something like this might mimic cosmic ray damage. If you go back to the individual pixels it would look suspicious because all the pixels having light from the star would suddenly get brighter which is not what a cosmic ray looks like. For stars dimmer than mag 15 this brightening effect might not be cause enough pixels to brighten.
If, when the planet was destroyed, it was more or less intact but slowly disintegrating then you might see some of the chunks and gases in the light curve like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR0XblPfnks .
If the planet was slowly disintegrating (like over the course of several years) and you could observe multiple transits and you had a good signal to noise ratio then you might be able to see the change in the shape of the light curve over time. Presumably the depth of the transit would become deeper as the matter expanded covering more of the star with every transit, presumably in the orbital plane of planet. As the material would become more diffuse the light curve would become more shallow and noiser before eventually disappearing.
If the material of the planet was shifted significantly during the planet’s destruction then it might no longer be detectable with transit photometry as this methodology is very sensitive to the orbital plane of the exoplanet especially habitable zone planets. Of course, Sean’s World, is in the habitable zone. So you might have to use something else.
If you have a bright enough star you might be able to look at how the spectrum of the star changed when the remnants of Sean’s World passed in front of it. Sean’s World is a rocky planet so there would be an increase in iron and siicates compared with the atmosphere of Sean’s Star. This might work even if the debris cloud was not readily detectable with transit photometry.
Depending on the distribution of mass of the debris field you might be able to use the radial velocity method to determine and orbiting mass around the star. An Earth mass planet is at the limits of radial velocity techniques and so it might take some time to detect this. If Sean’s Star was very quiet and had a slow rotation period then you might be good to go. I believe that you might still be able to detect this even if the planet’s debris field had shifted many degrees out of it’s former orbital plane.
Direct imaging of such small planets in habitable zones is not currently possible, but if you had destroyed a planet that we can currently detect with direct imaging then you should be able to see the debris field.
Stop destroying my planets.
Cat & Mark,
I don’t know which one it was originally, because I couldn’t follow up at the time, but now I have two Elizabeth Bear stories on tap, so that’s a win. Thanks!
Anna
I think the ongoing process of harassment, and cycle of fear, was amplified at Loncon since Worldcons are correctly viewed as far more influential than individual cons.
It is far easier to persuade someone that a Worldcon can make or break them than a not very famous con somewhere in England, which makes it all the more to Rochita’s credit that she stood firm.
Also, in fairness, I think the harassment went a great deal further than ‘cold shouldering’ someone; as Michael F has noted, if an editor is bosom buddies with the people threatening that you won’t be published then the threats look a lot more credible.
The fact that BS didn’t want to put the boot in herself because it would have demonstrated that her new persona was a tissue of lies is also an important factor in judging the credibility of the latest attempt by BS&B to rewrite history…
Re: Swearing
I usually (but not always) go through and delete any, but that’s because I want to rather than anything else. I’d noticed that because my mother swears extremely rarely, people who know her tend to shut up and take note whenever she does because she must mean business. It seemed like a useful tool to have in conversation, so I’ve been trying to cut down in general (without much success verbally, but I’ve been getting a lot of practice in text at least).
@Source Decay
Re: FFA
I assumed it was because a majority of regulars (not that I’ve taken a census, but this is my impression) are noisily against allowing Benjanun Sriduangkaew get away with the things she likes to get away with, which in her/their minds makes File770 basically the same as FFA. I’m not sure how the presence of a small group of pro-Sriduangkaew people plus a small group of hey-shouldn’t-we-have-forgiven-her-or-at-least-just-be-ignoring-her-by-now people fits into that picture, but then I’m also not intimately familiar with the workings of FFA. Maybe they have those, too.
@Mark
Good lord, I hope not.
@Lydy Nickerson
Lady Jane Grey sounds delightful, I hope you find a good home for her. 🙂
Welding Hall is a novella according to PS Publishing that did it in the UK. It’s mostly a look at the folk rock scene with some magic in it. I’ve read it and it’s well-worth reading.
If you’re interested in the folk rock scene in Britian in general, I highly recommend Deborah Grabien’s Haunted Ballads series which has a folk rock band where the lead musician and his long-term girlfriend have a ghostly encounter in each novel.
It was supposed to run six books but the publisher canceled the final book. I’m hoping she self-publishes it someday.
Lydy, I am sorry that the little one did not make it, but I would love to see a picture of Lady Jane Grey. I have a few pictures of our own Not Our Cat that I’ve been meaning to put up (at the risk of turning this into File 770 Science Fiction Fandom News and Cat Adoption Service).
Oh, darn it. I’m now going to have to buy at least five Deborah Grabien novels …
Connie Willis & Larry Correia interviewed (audio):
Hugos Battle: Both Sides Claim Sci-Fi Is Being Ruined By Politics.
h/t Kevin Standlee.
“I’m well aware that you and Ann like to have an argument from time to time, which I take great pleasure in staying well away from”
Oy! I have Moaning Rick blanked, and have had for a couple of weeks. Please don’t imply I am reading his comments, or planning to respond to whatever it is he is bitching about now. And stop making out I have involved myself in a fight he is apparently trying to start (for reasons I know now) when I haven’t.
Thank you.
Thank you! I had very much lost track of the pomeranians. I could only recall Dr. Eleven’s.
Pomeranian Death Count should be both a service offered by GoodReads and the name of a Prog-Rock/Thrash-Metal Fusion band.
I see Anna has a sharper recall of the mortality status of the Pomeranians. I’d say Station Eleven isn’t the MOST bleak and depressing post-acpocalyptic novel you could read but it isn’t a barrel of laughs and as it isn’t an action-orientated zombie-slaying or Mad-Max sort of post-apocalypse it may be even more bleak and depressing given the time you have to linger on the contrast of before and after.
I still think Steven Baxter’s Titan may be the bleakest book I ever read. Mostly because you can actually see the wheels coming off back on Earth while the mission continues on its way (because, seriously, what else could they do even if they wanted to?). Ones set after the apocalypse (zombie, nuclear, whatever) usually at least put a bit of distance between the reader and the part where things fall apart.
I have The Martian in my stack!
(It occurs to me that when a bookish fellow says ” She’s really stacked!” there could be an alternate meaning. If anyone even says that any more.)
I’m good for a wide variety of apocalypses, but Titan lost me with the strong streak of “those darned kids with their new-fangled devices and their not caring about the minutiae of my generation…so the whole human race deserves to die, really”. I’m old enough to find younger generations sometimes mystifying, but I solve it by having shared interests with folks half my age or less and learning things from them. World of Warcraft guildmates have been great for that. 🙂
There’s a lot I actually appreciated in Titan anyway, but I wasn’t as engaged with it as I’ve been by other apocalypses.
I’m disappointed to see that no-one has made the connection between Spock’s ability to catch and hold a dog with a unicorn horn, and the date of his Pon Farr; after all, only virgins can manage it…
May I suggest “tragic relief” ?
Stevie — But Spock is a mature Vulcan, and surely must have experienced pon farr a few times before the incident chronicled in Star Trek. I wonder what happened on those occasions? If it happens every seven years, then I’d guess that there would have been one or two, at minimum, while in Starfleet.
Titan was Baxter in his “Let’s go to space with Apollo-era technology (and describe the space toilets in Clancyesque detail)” phase.
Which is not to say there wasn’t a lot about it I also appreciated.
Joe H: My Dad worked for NASA (at Jet Propulsion Labs) in the era Baxter was fetishizing. I enjoyed that part. 🙂
On the reduction of one’s TBR pile, I’ve found that one very effective way — which I recommend to absolutely no-one — is to be flat broke for an extended period of time. It doesn’t make the pile disappear, as a kind of Zeno’s paradox applies: first you read half the pile, go and reread some other books for a bit; then you read half the pile, then go read something else; then you read half the pile, and so on, until you’re down to the last one, which you really don’t fancy that much, but maybe you’ll get around to it, some other time….
Hi Mr. Baugh, do you think life is easier or harder for today’s kids than for us? It seems to me they have it much harder. They really do have a Permanent Record. I have heard of prospective employers demanding access to a kid’s Facebook. When we were their age what you did off the clock was none of your employer’s business.
It’s not a unicorn, it’s a Vulcan monoceratops.
Hi NelC, nowadays we know that Spock’s heat periods were on his Facebook. Which he deleted before joining Starfleet. But the screen shots are out there…
Why has it taken almost 50 years for me to see this questioned? Has no one actually asked before?
Stand by to fire headcanons!
@Bruce: Yeah, that was one of my favorite parts about all three of those books (Voyage, Titan, Moonseed) — reading about the tech; I just found the toilet discussions kind of amusing.
I found a lot of things about Titan extremely annoying, but the whole “art is stupid and weird and pointless” throughline particularly rankled.
Personally, I will be tremendously disappointed if Armada gets a nomination. I loved Ready Player One, but Armada felt like slightly whiny male wish-fulfillment.
My list so far is:
Sorcerer to the Crown
The Fifth Season
Seraphina/Shadow Scale
…and then two of the following:
Uprooted
The Lie Tree (I’m with Kyra; Frances Hardinge is amazing, only my very favorites of hers are Gullstruck Island and A Face Like Glass
The Scorpion Rules (Erin Bow)
…or something that I haven’t read yet?