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Kate Ascher is our guest blogger during the week of December 17th. If you have any questions for Kate Ascher, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about The Works: Anatomy of a City:

Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more. Full of fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Works gives readers a unique glimpse at what lies behind and beneath urban life in the twenty-first century.

About Kate Ascher

Kate Ascher received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in government from the London School of Economics and her B.A. in political science from Brown University. She formerly served as assistant director of the Port at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and worked overseas in corporate finance, before her previous position as executive vice president of the Economic Development Corporation for City of New York. She is currently the director of development at Vornado.

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The Unquiet Ghost of Robert A. Heinlein

Hi!

This year, 2007, is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Anson Heinlein. You don't have to be an admirer or worshiper to recognize that Heinlein (July 7, 1907 -- May 8, 1988) had an enormous influence on the development of science fiction as a genre: despite his manifest flaws he was hugely inventive, and developed many of the literary tools (and no small number of the genre cliches) that we call on today when we work in the field he pioneered.

I never met Mr. Heinlein, but I've felt his ghost breathing down my neck periodically, ever since I began writing science fiction. And I must admit, I resent it. Why, oh why, do so many otherwise sane writers feel the need to try their hand at writing a Robert A. Heinlein novel? Why can't Spider Robinson, John Scalzi, and John Varley just be their own unique selves, rather than lending their word processors to the restless ghost of --

Oh. You mean it's *my* turn?

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Somewhere people got the idea that history is "true," and that all a historian has to do is string one "true fact" after another. Actually, we construct it like a puzzle, and sometimes we put pieces in the wrong place. They look right, but are not. That sense of connection with your subject can lead you into this kind of mistake if you're a biographer. You try to make allowances for another time and place, but inevitably, your time and place become intertwined. You only hope that this doesn't distort the history you're trying to tell.

As a feminist, I wanted to make this unorthodox woman a champion for her sex. Du Châtelet certainly acted as a feminist might, challenging the intellectual authorities of her day; insisting that they read her writings on the nature of fire, on metaphysics, on the Bible, on morality, and that they judge them as they would those of a man. I could hear my stepmother asserting: "I pride myself that I think like a man." Barbara Lewis Zinsser was one of three women in her law school class at Columbia University, and always insisted that she didn't understand what the feminists of the 1970s were talking about. So, I thought I understood that part of Du Châtelet's attitudes. I, too, as an admirer of my lawyer stepmother, had once believed "you think like a man," the highest praise one could receive as an intelligent woman. When I remembered that, I avoided forcing Du Châtelet into a twentieth-century feminist mold. This eighteenth-century genius did acknowledge that her successes proved women's capabilities, but she met the challenges for herself, not for all women.

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Fantasy conjures images of dragons and wizards, and has roots in ancient myths and legends. Magic and other supernatural elements dominate the plot, and it is distinguished from horror and science fiction in both feel and theme, though there is often a great deal of overlap. Internal consistency is as important as it is in science fiction, even if the rules and paradigm are utterly strange and fantastical. From Beowulf to The Lord of the Rings through to the writers of today, Fantasy is a venerable and thriving genre.

Pat McKillip was born in Salem, Oregon, the daughter of an Air Force officer. Between 1958 and 1962 he was stationed with his family in Germany and England. McKillip attended San Jose State earning her B.A. in 1971 and M.A. in 1973, the year she also published her first two books, The Throme of the Erril of Sherrill and The House on Parchment Street, which she had been writing while she was supposed to be studying. She has been publishing novels ever since, moving frequently about the US until settling down in Oregon with her husband. Patricia A. McKillip is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, and the author of many fantasy novels, including The Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy, Od Magic and Cygnet.

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I'm in an interesting place right now. My brain is still in the highest mountains on Earth, while the rest of me appears to be walking and talking (sensibly, I hope) down in the normal world. If you ran into me at the store, I might appear to be loading up on bread and milk for my family, but really I'm caught up in a horrific global conflict to save mankind.

Sounds crazy, right? It's actually a lot of fun. In two years I've written two books in the Plague Year series. The sequel, Plague War, is on my editor's desk and slated for publication in August 2008.

That's a great feeling. I'm now developing other projects... one of which is a third Plague book. I'm very excited that my publisher wants more. It's a fascinating world full of strong, active people doing their best against impossible challenges-and I get to find out what happens before anyone else! Bwah HA ha ha ha!