Scott Westerfeld still owns the original trio of staple-bound D&D rulebooks, purchased when he was twelve, roughly the same time he went to his first fannish event: a Famous Monsters convention in New York City. Since then he’s designed computer games, composed twelve-tone music, learned Esperanto, and ridden in a zeppelin. The geekiest thing he’s done lately was to devise a tactical combat system for steampunk ironclads played with Lego miniatures.

He is the author of the Uglies and Midnighters series, and the novels So Yesterday, Peeps, and The Last Days. But his next trilogy will be far geekier: Leviathan, an alternate-history, Edwardian-biotech, living-airship extravaganza set in 1914, coming Fall 2009.