Anyone else remember it? I saw it while paying late fees at the library ( I know, I’m a bad man) and I remember how much I liked it as a kid, but it scared me too…
Interstellar Pig was a great book, and I always thought somebody should have made the board game.
Would this be related to “Pigs in Spaaaaaaace!”?
Yes! Yes! I read it in Finnish at age 10 or so.
Man, that book was quite cool. I think I’ll go borrow it from my parent’s house tonight and read it again. What were the players, again? The spider-woman, the weird gas-filled squid-thing, the water-thing and the flesh-eating moss?
Yeah, they were a carnivorous mold, like little pink beanbags that would eat you…they were creepy. I so wanted a bracelet-thing that let me change shape, and I felt bad for all the other players. It was a pretty dark book for a kid, mood-wise I thought.
There was a sequel, too.
I like almost all of William Sleator’s stuff.
There was a sequel? Is it any good?
I picked up Interstellar Pig at the Friends of the Library Sale, and reread it. It really held up quite well, as kid’s books go. I’m trying to get my husband to read it.
Perhaps I’m being whooshed, but Interstellar Pig was loosely based on the game Cosmic Encounter.
If you haven’t played it, it’s a fantastic game. I recommend the Mayfair games verion, but it’s popular and out of print, so you’re probably looking at a few hundred on Ebay for it. The current in-print version, by Avalon Hill, is certainly good, but not nearly as good as the Mayfair game.
I really liked the Sleator that had the garage where time went very slowly. Spending a year in one night was an interesting idea. On Googling: Singularity.
Well, Cosmic Encounter has an online version here, free version is limited, pay for more characters.
I loved Interstellar Pig and also The Boy Who Reversed Himself. I believe it was Sleator himself who came to my school and read some of it, explaining how 4D worked using felt/velcro characters.
Ah, Interstellar Pig. I found the first book when I was nine or ten, heard later that there was a sequel, and sought it fruitlessly. It was the tragedy of my young life. Now that I’m older and wiser and live in a world with internet bookstores, I should really track it down.
The sequel: Parasite Pig.
Either that or Space Hog…
Huh. The Zathura ads had me thinking about this book, but I couldn’t remember the title or author.
Then I click on Cafe Society and there it is!
Elapsed time? 26 minutes.
Thanks a bunch, Podkayne.
I’ve been reading this book a few pages at a time for months. I like it. I’d finish it if I ever was exiled from the library, but my own books tend to get read last. No deadlines on them 
Much like Interstellar Pig, the sequel is a very cool book, but what’s interesting is that further information on a lot of the ideas in the book can be found in Carl Zimmer’s book Parasite Rex. I’m almost certain that William Sleator read through Zimmer’s book and decided it would make a great sequel to Interstellar Pig. Anybody who read the first book should definitely read the sequel (even if, like me, you read the first Pig book as a kid; Sleator’s books are still decent reads for adults even though they’re written for young adults) as it expounds on some things that happened in the first book. And then should also read Parasite Rex.
We love Sleator. Has anyone ever read The green futures of Tycho? I think it’s out of print now, but it was really great and very creepy.
I just read House of Stairs. Also creepy.
Yay William Sleator!
I picked this book up when I was 10 for a reading assignment (read a book and write a book report). It was the first sci-fi book I’d ever read, and I’ve been into sci-fi ever since. I remember after I read the report in front of the class, they were all looking at me like I’d grown a third eye. It was rather traumatizing :o