Extras

All good things must come to an end -- or so I thought when I turned the last page of Specials, the third of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy.

But then I saw the solicit for Extras, a new adventure set in the world of the Pretties, a few years after Tally Youngblood's revolution. The only way I can explain how excited I was to learn of this was to compare it to seeing a surprise announcement of an eighth Harry Potter novel. Yes, the books are that good -- so all you Googlers who come here looking for information to fill your book reports with should really sit down and try reading the books; you're really missing out by not doing so.

Extras changes the setting from the Diego territories of the trilogy to a post-"Mind Rain" city somewhere in Japan. With the bubbleheadedness of being Pretty wiped out, the citizens were beset with a whole new set of problems. Before, anything anyone wanted was provided by a magical hole in the wall. Now, with their minds cleared, people began wanting more, threatening to tax the city's resources. To counter this, the Good Citizens Council developed a new economic structure based on merit and reputation. Merits were earned by working, but the real value came by your ranking within society, a ranking calculated by the city's computers based on how much people talked about you. The more famous you were, the more you had access to.

...the size of YouTube's impact on politics and society will likely be far more important than its impact on finance.

-- Stephane Fitch