As I indicated in my last post, I was completely entranced by the world Scott Westerfeld imagined in his Uglies series. I was so into it, in fact, that I read the entire four book series in 15 days. That's even more impressive when you consider that I was in grad school for more than half of that time, which meant that I couldn't just curl up with these books regardless of how much I wanted to.
The Uglies series takes place several hundred years from now. After humanity nearly destroyed the planet and itself by wantonly using up resources and being dependent on oil, it finally got its act together. Everyone lives in population-controlled cities (capped at one million people each) that are spread across the planet. Most consumer goods are made of plastic and recycled after use. A metallic grid under each city provides the magnetic power needed to allow the citizens' hoverboards and hovercars to fly.
These future people didn't just fix humanity's need to destroy the earth, though. They also ended prejudice. Every citizen undergoes a major operation at the age of 16 that allows him or her to fit the biological standard of beauty (symmetrical face, large eyes, full lips, clear skin, etc.). Since everyone eventually looks the same, there's no reason to hate other people for being different. In fact, the only real differentiation that happens in this society is along age lines: children are called littlies, 12-15 year olds are called uglies, once you turn 16 and have the surgery you join the new pretties, middle-aged people are called middle pretties, and the elderly are called crumblies.
The series was originally intended to be a trilogy: Uglies, Pretties, and Specials. The heroine of those three books is Tally Youngblood and the trilogy does a really good job of wrapping up Tally's story. At the start of Uglies, Tally is counting down the days to her 16th birthday so she can have the surgery and join her best friend Peris and all the other new pretties. She meets a girl named Shay, who just so happens to share her birthday. After they become friends, Shay tells Tally about a mysterious place called the Smoke; it's outside the city and the people who live there don't get the pretty surgery. It sounds horrible to Tally, but Shay is determined to run away to the Smoke. Tally refuses to leave with Shay but what happens next changes Tally's life and, eventually, Tally's world.
Like so many other dystopian sci-fi stories, the trilogy doesn't end with "and they all lived happily ever after," but it does have a hopeful ending. After having read Extras, I wish I'd ended with the original trilogy. Honestly, I wish Westerfeld had ended with the original trilogy. However, several years after writing Specials, he had an idea for a story in a world with a reputation economy. He realized he could set it in the world of Uglies several years after the end of Specials. It made a lot of sense.
I'm not saying that Extras is bad; it isn't. I just wish I'd bothered to look into it a bit before I started reading it. Had I realized that it really isn't a story about Tally, I probably wouldn't have read it. I think that was really my problem: I care deeply for Tally and several of the other characters of the original trilogy and Extras is about none of them. Sure, a bunch of them show up (eventually), but they are peripheral characters. Plus, I didn't really like Aya Fuse, the heroine of Extras. She was annoying and not Tally (and she didn't have enough redeeming features to cover up those two sins). There was also the weird sense of disorientation that came from reading a book set in a world that was not what I'd expected. (If that makes sense.)
In conclusion, I highly recommend the original trilogy of Uglies, Pretties, and Specials. However, I would probably wait a while to read Extras after finishing those three. For what it's worth, I want to buy paperback copies of the trilogy but have no intention of buying Extras.
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