However, the second half of the book veers back into sci-fi adventure territory. It was simultaneously exciting, enlightening - and very disturbing. It doesn’t matter that it’s totally trivial she’s famous because people talk about her.) There are elements of Facebook and Twitter in there - the popularity contest that is having hundreds or thousands (or millions) of followers hanging on your every tweet or status update. (The second most famous person - Tally is first, even though she doesn’t live there - sends out feeds about what she eats and what she wears, and people all over buzz about it. This is the best part of the book - Westerfeld has created a world where everyone has a say about everything where the trivial is important, if you can get people to talk about it. She discovers the Sly Girls, an anonymous clique that thrives off danger and having low face rankings, and infiltrates them in the pursuit of a story. Aya is an “extra,” with a “face-ranking” of nearly 500,000 (in a city of 1 million) - she’s someone who doesn’t really matter.Īya is determined to change that, by “kicking” a story that will get people talking about her, thereby bumping her face rank, and allowing her to get out of the lousy dorm that she’s in. In Aya’s city, the way they’ve dealt with it is to create a merit- and reputation-based economy: only those who are popular get the good stuff - nice houses, clothes, invites to all the best parties. The most recent book in the Uglies series, Extras, picks up the mantle of social commentary after it was abandoned in Pretties and Specials.įor the first half to two-thirds of the book, Extras is a completely captivating look at the world Westerfeld created, and what happened in the years after the “mind-rain:” Tally’s dismantling of the world system in the previous three books. Visit him at ScottWesterfeld.Scott Westerfeld has a talent for crafting brilliant social commentary and disguising it as dystopian fiction.
His other novels include the New York Times bestseller Afterworlds, the worldwide bestselling Uglies series, The Last Days, Peeps, So Yesterday, and the Midnighters trilogy.
Scott Westerfeld is the author of the Leviathan series, the first book of which was the winner of the 2010 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Fiction.
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