Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld
I've been reading more science fiction than usual this year, as you can see by looking back over my recommendations. More than usual, and most of what I have read has been very good; the success rate of my recent picks has been remarkably high. Possibly this is because I am finally getting around to reading books I've been meaning to read for a dog's age.
Scott Westerfeld is an author I've been hearing really good things about, most particularly with respect to this series. So far I have only read the first book, Uglies, but I'll be sitting down with Pretties just as soon as I can get my hands on a copy, and then there are two more after that, Specials and Extras. Each title refers to a specific group in the society of his world -- well, the first three do, and I expect I'll find out what "extras" are in time. It's a near-future setting which, you gradually discover, takes place after some kind of industrial apocalypse; what remains are eco-friendly cities, very isolated from one another, which have figured out a way to get everyone to live in peace.
They make everybody pretty.
It's sort of a "Harrison Bergeron" mentality. Envy leads to strife, and so they remove one caues of envy -- taking with it all the prejudices associated with skin color and so on. You grow up in Uglyville, and then when you turn sixteen you undergo an operation that makes you pretty, in ways particularly associated with youth: big eyes, soft skin, and so on. New pretties live in a nonstop party, supported by eco-friendly technology that means nobody really has to work. After some years of that, you're resculpted into a middle pretty, a figure of wisdom and authority; eventually you're a late pretty, but I haven't seen any characters of that kind yet.
Of course, if you've read any science fiction in your life, you're already looking for the fly in the ointment. It's there, naturally, but I won't give away what it is. My enjoyment of this book didn't come from any surprise when Westerfeld revealed the dark side to this society; I'm in it for the characters, and for the way the ideas play out.
The protagonist, Tally, is nicely flawed. She's been looking forward her entire life to the day she'll become pretty, rejoining the older friends who have already gone ahead of her. But her last friend runs away before the operation, and the powers that be offer Tally a choice: help them find the runaway, or spend the rest of her life as an ugly. As far as she's concerned, that's no choice at all; life as an ugly would mean permanent social ostracism, and not just in a high school sense. She would be shut out of her society, unable to participate. So she barely thinks twice before caving. Tally's growth from that original unthinking desire to be pretty is what made this book interesting for me -- that, and the ripples that spread outward from her choices.
If you're looking for rigorous scientific plausibility, you probably won't find it here; it's hard to figure out just how that society manages to keep functioning, where all of its nice technology comes from, not to mention the food. Perhaps later books address those questions in more detail. But it's YA SF, written for an audience that on the whole is probably much less interested in the engineering, much more in the social ideas. It's YA SF that is very readable for adults, though, which is generally how the best of it works.