New

 

Coming May 2nd, 2008

Extras

Book Four in the Uglies Series

by Scott Westerfield 

 

 

 

Extras is just as thrilling as its predecessors, but it's also a thoughtful novel of ideas, a brilliant parody of the modern obsession with fame. Like almost everyone else in her world, Aya records everything she does with the help of a semi-sentient hovercam (a sort of floating soccer ball that's a cross between R2D2 and Weegee), using the resulting footage to boost her face rank. It's as if the whole world were like Facebook, with every citizen simultaneously a celebrity and his or her own paparazzi. The situation is the opposite of the enforced egalitarianism of beauty in the earlier books; here, Westerfeld slyly shows what happens when you take the brakes off and let the market of media exposure determine individual worth. With its combination of high-stakes melodrama, cinematic action and thought-provoking insight into some really thorny questions of human nature, the new novel, like its predecessors, is a superb piece of popular art.

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