Zeroes Authors Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, and Deborah Biancotti Share their Superpowers

In Zeroes, out September 29, authors Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, and Deborah Biancotti weave a refreshingly downbeat take on superheroes, in a world where powers don’t make you immune to trouble, they just lead you into more of it. The “zeroes” include Crash, who has the ability—and compulsion—to take down any kind of electronics with her mind, but spends most of her life hiding from its disruptive pulse. Then there’s Scam, who uses something he calls “the Voice” to tell people what they want to hear, and nearly gets himself killed doing it. Bellwether can harness and direct the energies of a crowd, and Flicker, herself blind, can see through other people’s eyes. After a falling out, the crew reunites to save Scam from the latest disaster his Voice has talked him into, in the first book in a projected trilogy.
We asked the Zeroes authors which superpowers they already have, and which they’d develop if they could.
Margo Lanagan
My current superpower is that I can walk into any room and, if the radio’s on, it’ll straight away turn unlistenable. If it’s classical music, some long dirge will start, or sopranos will start randomly shrieking, or some tuneless piece will come on that sounds like someone cutting a piano up with a hatchet. On a current music station the music will stop completely and the hosts will start reading out gig dates, or giggling at each other’s jokes, or taking pointless phone calls.
I also have a second, minor superpower in that I can slow down any queue I want to, simply by joining it.
The reversal of either of these powers would be handy, but what I’d really like to be able to do is teleport. That would save a lot of time during the upcoming Zeroes tour. Particularly queuing time. Particularly queuing listening to muzak systems I just borked.
Deborah Biancotti 
I have the power to gauge volume and weight exactly. Like, when I make a smoothie, I know precisely how much of each ingredient I need to eventually fill a glass. Just by looking. Once I had to buy a kilogram of eggplant, and I picked up an eggplant that measured 1.0 kg perfectly. It’s eerie.
Oddly, I completely suck at anything related to distance, though. When the GPS tells me something is “five metres ahead,” I have absolutely no idea what that means. I don’t know when I was supposed to learn distance, but I guess I was sick that day.
The superpower I wish I had is the ability to find lost stuff. I know people joke about the madness of losing one sock from every wash, but for me that’s an outrageous and awkward reality. Where do they go? Also, Tupperware lids. I mean, are they having some secret rendezvous with the socks?
Scott Westerfeld
My current superpower is that I can open a book to the exact page I want. If I’m looking for a certain passage in a novel I read, say, a year ago, I can pick it off the shelf and open it to that passage. This also works with cookbooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and many other thing that the internet has made utterly obsolete. In other words, I had a search function before they were cool. (Actually, search functions were always cool.)
The superpower I wish I had is the one Margo already stole, teleportation. But I would use it in a totally different way: to avoid paperwork. As a teleporter, I could go to Antarctica via a normal means of travel, and then never come back, officially at least. Thus, I don’t officially live anywhere, and need never do paperwork again. Also: no more airports. I’m down with that.