Scott Westerfeld’s “Pretties”

I like juvie novels. “Juvie” is a term from the ghetto world of science fiction and fantasy, where it refers to books intended for a young adult audience–stuff in the tradition of Andre Norton, Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, and so on. The nice thing about juvies in genre fiction is that they don’t do a lot of talking down on the stuff that really matters.

Cory Doctorow turned me on to Scott Westerfeld‘s stuff when he stayed at my place during ETECH this year. So I went and got one of his books. Then three more. Now I’ve got all of them, I think.

Westerfeld’s stuff is highly readable; I confess that I grabbed two books to carry around with me, this one and Ted Castronova’s new tome Synthetic Worlds, and sorry Ted, but this is the one I ended up reading at 1am last night.

More importantly, though, Westerfeld tackles interesting issues. In So Yesterday he delved into the world of cool-hunting and more importantly, the ecology of cool, wondering whether as cool becomes commodified, what sort of people it takes to keep generating fresh ideas. In Peeps he creates a thoroughly plausible explanation for vampirism-as-biological-trait, carried by a variety of creatures in a manner similar to flu. His Midnighters series is about a group of teens who literally can live in the witching hour, during which everything else in the world is frozen–except the ancient magical beings that humanity forced out of the world back in prehistoric days, and which have shaped most of our superstitions and religions ever since.

In Uglies and its sequel Pretties Westerfeld imagines a post-apocalyptic world (the old oil-eating bacteria being the McGuffin this time) in which society has been re-engineered to turn “uglies”–meaning “normals”–into perfectly beautiful people when they turn sixteen. They also turn into basically the right sort of citizen for the society that is being engineered–docile and responsible (after a teenage-to-twenties period in which they are allowed to be as thrill-seeking and frivolous as they want). Naturally, every young teen can’t wait to be Pretty–but some people just aren’t that sort of person.

The books have a lot to say about the ways in which body image affects our perception of people, the ways in which attractiveness can sometimes enable a person to succeed when they otherwise wouldn’t, and also about the ways in which rebellion is important but may also be damaging to society as a whole. Our heroine, Tally Youngblood, keeps trying to rebel and do the “cool” thing, which eventually becomes the “right” thing, but also keeps interfering in matters beyond her control. Despite all the portrayal of the true “adults” of the world (the Specials) as lupine, insectlike, sharp-toothed, and so on, you can’t help but have a sneaking suspicion that they are also living ina world which Tally doesn’t really understand.

Part of why these books catch my attention is that the transition from Uglies to Pretties is also very much the transition from real life to virtual. In a lot of ways, the story Tally goes through is the story that players go through in online spaces. Maybe that makes the admins the specials. That must explain the sharp teeth.