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1. Note to self: “Gourmet burritos” at the Oakland airport aren’t.
2. If you aren’t reading Yahtzee, you should be (keyboard/drink interface warning).
3. Is it wrong to love that I’ve now seen and enjoyed two Sam/Dean Sam-POV vids set to “Next Contestant”? (Boy howdy do people enjoy touching Dean’s face.)
Scott Westerfeld, Uglies, Pretties, Specials and Extras: The first three books follow the adventures of Tally Youngblood in a post-collapse world in which the surviving humans are living well in tightly controlled cities. In Tally’s city, everyone gets a special operation to become Pretty at age 16, at which point their lives become perfect. At least that’s what Tally thinks, until she meets Shay, a girl with a line to the outside world—who then runs away in order to stay ugly. When Tally is forced to betray Shay, she sets off a chain of events that leads to her discovery of the dark side of the Pretty operation, and ultimately to the transformation of her world, not entirely for the better. Because Tally’s mental state changes a number of times during the first three books—she generally wants whatever situation she most recently had, but that situation keeps changing on her because of her own acts—the reader often sees the world quite differently than she does. And though Tally makes key choices, she’s not the moral center of the books; I would like to read a short story from Shay’s perspective.
The fourth book of the “trilogy” follows Aya, a girl on the other side of the world in a different city where “face” or fame a la internet fame is the relevant currency—only famous people can get good things. Aya wants to break out of anonymity, and she sees her chance to do so with a great story when she discovers a group of girls who reject fame and pull dangerous, hidden stunts. But one of their stunts reveals a secretbigger than face, bigger even than their entire city. I liked the world-building: of course, in a world where fame is the only currency, certain rebels will turn to radical anonymity. (I did hate a repeated formation he used to replace “un” and “il” and other prefixes and suffixes of negation, e.g., “brain-missing” and “logic-missing.” It got old fast.)
Scott Westerfeld, So Yesterday: The aptly named protagonist, Hunter, is a teen cool-hunter who works for The Client (Nike, though he refuses to use any brand names except Google, because Google is Just That Good). He meets Jen, an Innovator—not a trend-setter, but a person who actually invents a behavior that becomes a trend—and takes her to a focus group, where she makes an observation about a proposed ad (see The Angry Black Woman on the Missing Black Woman Formation) that will not endear her to the Client at all. Through some shenanigans, this leads the pair to a warehouse full of incredibly cool shoes, several chase sequences, two haircuts, several dye jobs, credit card abuse, and other travails in the life of a cool, but insecure, Manhattan teenager. Good fun, but probably not as subversive about branding as he wanted to be.
Scott Westerfeld, Peeps: Cal is a carrier of a very special parasite, one that turns most of the infected into slavering cannibals (source of vampire and werewolf legends), but leaves one in a hundred as a carrier with heightened senses and appetites, but still in control. After he was infected, he was drafted into a secret police force that hunts down and contains parasite-positives (peeps). But his latest assignment gets complicated, with strange new vectors, possible corruption in the force, and an attractive young woman, Lace, with whom he can’t have a future, given that his disease is sexually transmitted. Every other chapter has a discourse on some icky parasite, and if the argument about the importance of parasites to the natural order is oversold, at least it’s interesting.
2. If you aren’t reading Yahtzee, you should be (keyboard/drink interface warning).
3. Is it wrong to love that I’ve now seen and enjoyed two Sam/Dean Sam-POV vids set to “Next Contestant”? (Boy howdy do people enjoy touching Dean’s face.)
Scott Westerfeld, Uglies, Pretties, Specials and Extras: The first three books follow the adventures of Tally Youngblood in a post-collapse world in which the surviving humans are living well in tightly controlled cities. In Tally’s city, everyone gets a special operation to become Pretty at age 16, at which point their lives become perfect. At least that’s what Tally thinks, until she meets Shay, a girl with a line to the outside world—who then runs away in order to stay ugly. When Tally is forced to betray Shay, she sets off a chain of events that leads to her discovery of the dark side of the Pretty operation, and ultimately to the transformation of her world, not entirely for the better. Because Tally’s mental state changes a number of times during the first three books—she generally wants whatever situation she most recently had, but that situation keeps changing on her because of her own acts—the reader often sees the world quite differently than she does. And though Tally makes key choices, she’s not the moral center of the books; I would like to read a short story from Shay’s perspective.
The fourth book of the “trilogy” follows Aya, a girl on the other side of the world in a different city where “face” or fame a la internet fame is the relevant currency—only famous people can get good things. Aya wants to break out of anonymity, and she sees her chance to do so with a great story when she discovers a group of girls who reject fame and pull dangerous, hidden stunts. But one of their stunts reveals a secretbigger than face, bigger even than their entire city. I liked the world-building: of course, in a world where fame is the only currency, certain rebels will turn to radical anonymity. (I did hate a repeated formation he used to replace “un” and “il” and other prefixes and suffixes of negation, e.g., “brain-missing” and “logic-missing.” It got old fast.)
Scott Westerfeld, So Yesterday: The aptly named protagonist, Hunter, is a teen cool-hunter who works for The Client (Nike, though he refuses to use any brand names except Google, because Google is Just That Good). He meets Jen, an Innovator—not a trend-setter, but a person who actually invents a behavior that becomes a trend—and takes her to a focus group, where she makes an observation about a proposed ad (see The Angry Black Woman on the Missing Black Woman Formation) that will not endear her to the Client at all. Through some shenanigans, this leads the pair to a warehouse full of incredibly cool shoes, several chase sequences, two haircuts, several dye jobs, credit card abuse, and other travails in the life of a cool, but insecure, Manhattan teenager. Good fun, but probably not as subversive about branding as he wanted to be.
Scott Westerfeld, Peeps: Cal is a carrier of a very special parasite, one that turns most of the infected into slavering cannibals (source of vampire and werewolf legends), but leaves one in a hundred as a carrier with heightened senses and appetites, but still in control. After he was infected, he was drafted into a secret police force that hunts down and contains parasite-positives (peeps). But his latest assignment gets complicated, with strange new vectors, possible corruption in the force, and an attractive young woman, Lace, with whom he can’t have a future, given that his disease is sexually transmitted. Every other chapter has a discourse on some icky parasite, and if the argument about the importance of parasites to the natural order is oversold, at least it’s interesting.
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I see that the strange vocabulary of Extras is part of the text's whole commentary on blogging (after all, it's not like HUNGRY GIRL IS HUNGRY or INVISIBLE PRESIDENT or ALL YOUR MEMES ARE BELONG TO US aren't just as annoying), but that didn't keep it from getting old. I also found the text's whole ambivalence about blogging and the fame culture ironic, given that Westerfeld is a fairly big-name blogger in a small corner of the blogosphere. On the whole, I found Extras to be fairly aggravating, and not least because of its presentations of characters from the earlier three books.
Peeps (which, amusingly, my dictation software wants to spell "Pepys", which tells you something about my usual vocabulary) is just absolutely amazing to me. I don't think the sequel is a strong, but Peeps itself is just simultaneously so powerful and so much fun that I can't recommend it highly enough.
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I agree that the vocabulary produces a certain effect; I just didn't want that effect after a short period. But I didn't think it was more extreme in Extras--in fact, I thought slang should have changed more in Japan after the recent eventful years, so it annoyed me more in the last volume simply because I wanted new and different slang.
I will read the sequel to Peeps when I get the chance, for sure.
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