You sometimes get the sense that celebrities come from a planet different from our own, but I’ve never actually interviewed an alien. At least, that is, until now. The intergalactic intermediaries at HarperCollins managed to get the elusive author of I Am Number Four, an extraterrestrial Elder from Lorien named Pittacus Lore, on the phone. The upcoming YA novel follows a teenage alien, one of the last of his kind after his planet was destroyed, now on the run from the warlike race of Mogadarians intent on killing him and invading Earth. We spoke with Lore about the war currently being waged right under our noses. To protect his identity (he’s hiding away from the Mogadarians, you see) he spoke with a voice changer, but all these words are his own. Whether you accept his story like a Mulder or doubt it like a Scully is up to you.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This is your first book, or at least your first book on Earth. What kind of inspirations did you have, either YA-wise or sci-fi-wise?
PITTACUS LORE: I wrote the book to tell the story of the Loric race and their fight here on Earth, their fight for their own survival and their fight for the Earth’s survival. In researching the book, I read some young adult fiction and I read some science fiction, but we wanted to tell our own story in our own way.
Were you afraid that you might be jeopardizing your presence by writing this?
Nobody knows who we are, nobody knows what we look like. We can’t be found, we look no different than you, we talk no different than you, we walk no different than you. I’m not jeopardizing anything. If I’m doing anything, it’s letting the inhabitants of Earth know that they are in danger, that there is a war going on amongst them.
READ FULL STORY »
EW’s Jeff Giles may have liked Solar, Ian McEwan’s most recent novel—but not many others did. In the New York Times Walter Kirn lambasted the book, saying, “Instead of being awful yet absorbing, it’s impeccable yet numbing, achieving the sort of superbly wrought inertia of a Romanesque cathedral.” McEwan, long a critic’s darling, was clearly stung by the reaction. Yesterday he told the British newspaper The Telegraph, “I think…I caught America in a mood of profound boredom about climate change. They just didn’t want to hear about it any more, they were sick to the teeth.” I wasn’t a fan of the book (though I count Atonement as one of my all time favorites), but I have to say, I kind of admire McEwan’s creative defense of it.
