Extras

by Scott Westerfeld

Novel

If you’ve read Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, Pretties, and Specials, you’ll appreciate the way Extras, the fourth book in the series, extends the fictional world of the first three books.  And if you haven’t, Extras can be read and enjoyed on its own.

Extras picks up several years after the end of Specials, when Tally Youngblood brought down the uglies/pretties/specials system, which maintained the social order by keeping everyone over the age of sixteen pretty and dumb.  Now the world is in a renaissance, people can look and act how they want, and Tally is anticipating the day when she’ll have to save humanity from itself.  While Tally waits in the wings, fifteen-year-old Aya Fuse is waiting for her life to begin.  Just as Tally once craved beauty, Aya craves fame, which in her city, with its “reputation economy,�?equals money and life.  A “city interface�?constantly monitors and ranks everyone’s level of fame, and if you’re not high in the rankings, you’re nothing but an “extra.�?nbsp; Aya’s own rank is low, but she has a plan to get noticed-even if it means betraying her friends and unleashing the wrath of some well-armed extraterrestrials. 

Like the series�?previous installments, Extras is a highly entertaining novel that poses thought-provoking questions about contemporary society and human nature.  Does our obsession with “face rank�?(as seen on MySpace, for example) keep us from truly being seen and known?  Is Paris-Hilton-style tabloid notoriety “the one big story that makes the rest of us disappear�?  Is fame a new religion, the modern anecdote to that old feeling of “randomness�?  Are machines “bad for tricks?�?nbsp; And is humanity finally just “too dangerous to be free�?