Extras

On my first snow day of the year, I spent the morning finishing the book Extras by Scott Westerfeld. I loved the Uglies trilogy and this book is a great continuation of that storyline, but I am not writing a book review here. This futuristic book made some great connections to current times and really got me thinking.

The story takes place in a futuristic Japanese society, not long after the government's ploy to make all adults "bubbleheads" was uncovered and set to right. It has only been a few years since humans regained their autonomy, and of course, thinking for yourself has its downsides. Societies of people are left confused and uncertain, turning in many different directions looking for answers. Standard economies no longer exist and must be rebuilt from scratch.

The Japanese society that is the focus of the book has found answers in a "face ranking" society, where people gain access to goods in only two ways: either by earning merits for good work and deeds, or by their face ranking, which is basically your level of fame. The society is a crazy hybrid of past and present models. Face rankings go up and down by the minute and are maintained by a city interface. Each time someone mentions your name, your face ranking improves. Each time someone links to a story you put up on your feed, your face ranking improves. Good press and bad press are treated equally in terms of access to goods.

So that's the basic idea. But what got me thinking was the use of feeds -- from a young age, all citizens are given their own individual feeds in which to post information about themselves, stories they've written, etc. The whole point is to get noticed, to get linked back to, to get discovered via your postings to your feed. It's like the movie stars of today, but optimized for cyberspace. When you start to think about it, we're really not too far off from this kind of a model right now! Nameless, faceless people can be famous based solely on what they post to their blogs...and when you reach a wide audience, what do you get? People stumbling over themselves to get you to try out or advertise their product, invitations to fancy dinners, etc. It's just taking the way fame works today and turning it up a few notches!

To sum it up: a must-read for all YA lit fans, futuristic society junkies, or RSS feed followers. I guess. Let me know what you think.