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various sorts of ugly
Thursday, 14 June 2007 05:11 pmDrat. If I had been less slow and shambling, or had left the house at all, I might have noticed the hordes of zombies about yesterday. As it was, since they didn't actually eat the gardener or moan loudly enough to penetrate the dense fog of Disney criticism and Rachmaninov, I remained blissfully oblivious. Suits me, I'm more of a ninja gal. Of course, they might all have been lurching around outside Parliament as part of the strike action, although I'm not sure if it's actually possible to toyi-toyi while chanting "Braaaaaains!"
All that aside, I'm overdue on an actual review of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies, a random copy of which I picked up at a second hand book stall in aid of the Foreign Legion or something. (The same stall which evilly provided the seed of my current Stephanie Plum obsession. Pshaw.) I've been hearing a bit of a buzz around Teh Interwebs about Westerfeld, who is making waves with young adult sf, although it turns out he also writes adult sf and YA fantasy, none of which I've ever encountered. Uglies interested me because it's such a relief to get away from (a) imitation Harry Potter, and (b) vampires and faeries and pixies, oh my, which seem to be the current flavours of choice for YA fiction.
Teen-slanted sf doesn't seem to be as fast-growing a genre as teen fantasy, which I think parallels my memories of childhood - I'm not sure if sf is seen as being too rigorous or serious for younger readers? Certainly the sf books I remember from childhood are a tad heavy - John Christopher's Tripods, for example - which seems inevitable if they're going to do justice to sf's aspect of social enquiry. (Don't let's talk about Heinlein's teen-aimed texts, they just make me grind my teeth). Uglies fits right in here: it's very much about teen angsts and preoccupations, primarily beauty issues and fitting in, but it's also quite a stern social enquiry into totalitarianism. The premise has that power that good fantasy has, to externalise inner issues - here, the notion of plastic surgery as a given at a certain age, with the ostensible purpose of creating an equality of the beautiful and thus eradicating discrimination and marginalisation, those twin bugbears of teen existence. Unlike the simpler magical/symbolic function of something like Buffy, Uglies also is a clear sf extrapolation from current tech and trends, and succeeds in being both logical and rather terrifying as well as punchily representational on a symbolic level. Also, it has kick-butt hoverboards and some nifty ecological sub-themes, both of which get my vote.
I wouldn't say Westerfeld is a stand-out stylist, but the story is well-shaped in workmanlike prose which doesn't, hallelujah, press any of my buttons by throwing around incomplete sentences or similar solecisms. (It's thus a quantum leap ahead of something like the Artemis Fowl stories, which are fun and entertaining but whose editor should be taken out back and shot for cruel and unnecessary discrimination against the verb). Overall, it gives me hope for teen SF, and I'll definitely hunt down the sequels.
It's also, I should add, a fascinating stylistic comparison to the other teen-aimed book I picked up recently, which is Jeanette Winterson's Tanglewreck, a sort of mad, unwieldy, slightly mind-blowing time-travel quest sf story thing. Winterson is a Big Name Serious Gender-Issue Writer, which always makes for dynamite YA fiction; Isabel Allende springs to mind in this context, and Tanglewreck has the same characteristics I associate with Allende's kids' fiction, which is a sort of denial of traditional narrative shape, a tendency to pack more into the story, and to let it wander around less neatly, than do more mainstream children's writers. I wouldn't say it was necessarily more challenging than something like Westerfeld, who is pretty darned challenging in social and psychological terms; rather it's challenging in a different way, on the level of narrative rather than issue. Tanglewreck has stayed with me more vividly, whereas Uglies has stayed with me more coherently. Make of that what you will. But I recommend them both.
All that aside, I'm overdue on an actual review of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies, a random copy of which I picked up at a second hand book stall in aid of the Foreign Legion or something. (The same stall which evilly provided the seed of my current Stephanie Plum obsession. Pshaw.) I've been hearing a bit of a buzz around Teh Interwebs about Westerfeld, who is making waves with young adult sf, although it turns out he also writes adult sf and YA fantasy, none of which I've ever encountered. Uglies interested me because it's such a relief to get away from (a) imitation Harry Potter, and (b) vampires and faeries and pixies, oh my, which seem to be the current flavours of choice for YA fiction.
Teen-slanted sf doesn't seem to be as fast-growing a genre as teen fantasy, which I think parallels my memories of childhood - I'm not sure if sf is seen as being too rigorous or serious for younger readers? Certainly the sf books I remember from childhood are a tad heavy - John Christopher's Tripods, for example - which seems inevitable if they're going to do justice to sf's aspect of social enquiry. (Don't let's talk about Heinlein's teen-aimed texts, they just make me grind my teeth). Uglies fits right in here: it's very much about teen angsts and preoccupations, primarily beauty issues and fitting in, but it's also quite a stern social enquiry into totalitarianism. The premise has that power that good fantasy has, to externalise inner issues - here, the notion of plastic surgery as a given at a certain age, with the ostensible purpose of creating an equality of the beautiful and thus eradicating discrimination and marginalisation, those twin bugbears of teen existence. Unlike the simpler magical/symbolic function of something like Buffy, Uglies also is a clear sf extrapolation from current tech and trends, and succeeds in being both logical and rather terrifying as well as punchily representational on a symbolic level. Also, it has kick-butt hoverboards and some nifty ecological sub-themes, both of which get my vote.
I wouldn't say Westerfeld is a stand-out stylist, but the story is well-shaped in workmanlike prose which doesn't, hallelujah, press any of my buttons by throwing around incomplete sentences or similar solecisms. (It's thus a quantum leap ahead of something like the Artemis Fowl stories, which are fun and entertaining but whose editor should be taken out back and shot for cruel and unnecessary discrimination against the verb). Overall, it gives me hope for teen SF, and I'll definitely hunt down the sequels.
It's also, I should add, a fascinating stylistic comparison to the other teen-aimed book I picked up recently, which is Jeanette Winterson's Tanglewreck, a sort of mad, unwieldy, slightly mind-blowing time-travel quest sf story thing. Winterson is a Big Name Serious Gender-Issue Writer, which always makes for dynamite YA fiction; Isabel Allende springs to mind in this context, and Tanglewreck has the same characteristics I associate with Allende's kids' fiction, which is a sort of denial of traditional narrative shape, a tendency to pack more into the story, and to let it wander around less neatly, than do more mainstream children's writers. I wouldn't say it was necessarily more challenging than something like Westerfeld, who is pretty darned challenging in social and psychological terms; rather it's challenging in a different way, on the level of narrative rather than issue. Tanglewreck has stayed with me more vividly, whereas Uglies has stayed with me more coherently. Make of that what you will. But I recommend them both.
 | Bunny Threat Level: definitely still in the red. |
