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Free summary and analysis of Chapter 1 in Scott Westerfeld's Uglies that won't make you snore. We promise.

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Uglies is a 2005 science fiction novel by Scott Westerfeld. It is set in a future post scarcity dystopian world in which everyone is considered an "ugly," but then turned "Pretty" by extreme cosmetic surgery when they reach the age of 16. It tells the story of teenager Tally Youngblood who rebels against society's enforced conformity, after her friends Shay and David show her the downsides to becoming a "Pretty,".

Written for young adults, Uglies deals with themes of change, both emotional and physical. The book is the first installment in what was originally a trilogy, the Uglies series, which also includes the books , , and . In 2018, four new installments were announced, collectively titled the Imposters Series.

Former cities have decayed after bacteria infected the world's petroleum, making it unstable. The old society, so dependent on oil, fell apart when cars and oil fields exploded and food could no longer be transported. People who lived before this catastrophe are called "Rusties."

When Tally arrives at the Smoke, she finds Shay, her friend David and an entire community of runaway Uglies. She is reluctant to activate the pendant and it eventually becomes clear that David is in love with her. David takes her to meet his parents, Maddy and Az, who are the original runaways from the city. They explain how the operation does more than "cosmetic nipping and tucking." It also causes lesions in the brain to make the people placid, or "pretty-minded." Horrified, Tally decides to keep the Smoke secret and throws the locket into a fire to destroy it. However, the flames' heat causes the tracker to activate, giving away the Smoke's location.

The following morning, Special Circumstances arrives at the camp and Tally makes an effort to escape. She does not succeed and is caught and taken to a rabbit pen, where other caught Smokies are kept, tied up. Eye scans are taken of all the captured Smokies, identifying from which city they fled. Tally is then taken to Dr. Cable, who explains how they found the Smoke. Because of how long it took to activate the pendant, Dr. Cable suspects that Tally betrayed her but activated it by accident. Dr. Cable tests Tally by ordering her to retrieve the locket, which should be intact. Tally escapes on a hoverboard. After a long and stressful chase, she manages to hide in a cave where they cannot track her heat signature. There she finds David also hiding and together, they begin to plan a rescue.

Once everyone is safe, Maddy begins working on a cure using Dr. Cable's tablet. She then offers it to Shay, who refuses, not wanting to become a "vegetable." Since Tally feels responsible for her betrayal, she decides to become a Pretty and take the cure as a "willing subject". To convince David to let her go back to the city, she tells him about her involvement with Special Circumstances and searching for the Smoke to betray them. While David is absorbing what Tally admitted, Maddy advises Tally to go back with Shay before she changes her mind. Once there, Tally announces to a Middle Pretty, "I'm Tally Youngblood. Make me pretty," the final phrase of the novel.

Tally Youngblood is the main character of the story. She is clever and loves tricks. Her Ugly nickname is Squint. As the story progresses, she begins to stray from the rules of her city, and her assignment. She falls in love with David at the Smoke. Together, Tally and David rescue the Smokies after the Smoke is captured by Special Circumstances. In the end, she gives herself up to be Pretty and help Shay.

Shay is Tally's new friend in Uglyville. She is an Ugly nicknamed Skinny. They meet while Tally is fleeing from New Pretty City. Shay teaches Tally how to hoverboard and more about the outside world and the Rusties. Shay prefers to refer to Tally by her name, however, they occasionally call each other by their Ugly nicknames to provoke each other. After a fight, Shay decides to "grow up" and go to the Smoke. Shay grows jealous of Tally's presence in the Smoke, especially of her relationship with David. Shay realizes Tally's ultimate betrayal, but no longer cares once she is made Pretty.

David, the son of the founders of the Smoke, was not born in any city. Shay has an interest in David but he does not reciprocate her feelings. After Tally arrives at the Smoke, his interest in her makes Shay jealous. David helps change Tally's feeling towards the cities. He wears hand-sewn clothing, made from animal skins, and has survival skills which he passes on to Tally.

Maddy is David's mother. She tells Tally about the brain lesions caused by the Pretty surgery, and later develops a cure for the lesions. She is a founder of the Smoke.

Az is David's father and dies in an operation. As part of the Pretty Special Committee, he discovered the brain lesions that the Pretty surgery causes and suspects the lesions are intentional. He is a founder of the Smoke.

Croy is another Smokie. He is originally from Uglyville and knows Shay. He is originally suspicious of Tally, but grows to trust her.

The Boss: Although he is called the "Boss", he is not in charge of the leaderless Smoke; however, he is in charge of the library. He died when the Specials arrive.

Dr. Cable is the head of Special Circumstances, and the one who denies Tally the operation until she finds Shay. She sends Specials to destroy the Smoke. She is described as having an aquiline nose, non-reflective gray eyes, a razor-like voice, and sharp teeth.

Peris, Tally's best friend, is three months older than Tally and thus has become a Pretty. He helps Tally decide to betray Shay. His Ugly nickname was Nose.

Ellie Youngblood is Tally's mother who helps Tally decide to turn in Shay. She is a Middle Pretty.

Sol Youngblood is Tally's father who helps Tally decide to turn in Shay. He is a Middle Pretty.

According to critics, Uglies contains themes of identity, particularly regarding teenagers. Phillip Gough said the government of Tally's city, which controls what happens within the operation, "removes responsibility for identity, " creating sameness and uniformity. By placing heavy emphasis on the role of individualism, the novel shows the importance of teen's self-concept. Because identity is formed by "displacement," and all citizens are carefully sheltered, there is no chance for them to branch out into independence. "Physical identity is determined by committees," noted Gough in his essay discussing Westerfeld's novel. Due to the lack of choice, all "markers of physical identity" are destroyed by their government.

Kristi N. Scott and M. Heather Dragoo note that another recurring theme in the "image-obsessed society," is beauty, and its recurring relationship with individuality. Gough agreed, commenting that "when everyone is equal, beauty loses its meaning". Beauty went hand in hand with identity: Uglies were taught to think of their bodies and faces as "temporary", something that would be replaced later with cosmetic surgery. A strong line is drawn to connect features with personality, and one critic stated that the characters develop "ugly" and "pretty" personalities with each stage of their operations.

A "utopia resting on ruthless suppression of individual freedom" was Amanda Craig of The Times's description of Tally's city. Many critics identified the trend of a controlling government in the novel. People in the protagonist's world are "programmed and designed by the Pretty committee, " with no say-so in their operation, and identity is placed firmly "in the hands of the state". Dragoo and Scott point out how segregated the city is, with Pretties, Uglies, Middlies, and Crumblies neatly divided into different sections. Many reviewers have commented on the way in which the city manipulates its inhabitants, including the supposedly rebellious uglies, who are nothing more than "docile bodies". Bedies, the dystopian society depicted by Westerfeld includes a particularly common trope in the genre: the duality of spaces, the metropolis representing the totalitarian civilization and nature as a field for freedom.

When asked how he came up with the idea of Uglies, Westerfeld said, "the inspiration came from a friend whose dentist asked him to consider getting cosmetic surgery." He is the son of a computer programmer for Univac, which meant he grew up familiar with the cutting edge of 1960s technology. Amanda Craig said that "it is his prescient perception of how such inventions will lead to absolute loss of privacy which has elicited as much fan-mail as the issue of how looks dominate our lives."

The book shares many themes with the 1964 The Twilight Zone episode " Number 12 Looks Just Like You". The author of the books noted that he saw the episode in his childhood but had forgotten the details.

In the dedication page for Uglies, Westerfeld says: "This novel was shaped by a series of e-mail exchanges between myself and Ted Chiang about his story " Liking What You See: A Documentary". His input on the manuscript was also invaluable." In another interview, Westerfeld says that this short story is about a new technology that enables an individual to turn off their ability to see beauty so they can focus on the deeper and more important parts of another individual. In a 2012 interview on Bookyurt, Westerfeld explained that his point in writing the book was not to make a big commentary on the issues with beauty, but to make people aware of the culture of retouching that is developing in the world and to be aware of our own ideas about beauty and our need to think for ourselves.

The novel has received mostly positive reviews. The Baroque Body praised the novel as having "creative slang, unique technical gadgets, and defining characteristics of personhood." Cory Doctorow complimented its "perfect parables of adolescent life," and stated that it is "fine science fiction for youth." Jennifer Mattson claimed it to be "ingenious. " Reed Business Information praised the "convincing plot" and noted that it is "highly readable."

However, Publishers Weekly commented that Tally was a "rather passive protagonist," and the United Kingdom Times complained that "Tally herself is a bit too vague as a character." Critic Jennifer Mattson noted that the brisk pace of the novel as being "bad for convincing relationships."

The novel sparked discussion over the use of plastic surgery to improve one's looks. The author said he has "received many letters from girls who have decided against having surgery since reading Uglies," while others, sparked by Uglies, have started to ponder the ethics of changing your body's appearance. Westerfeld has theorized that "having extreme cosmetic surgery will be like buying a $1,000 Gucci bag, an indication that you are a member of the privileged class." Critics echo his opinion. However, Westerfeld has also stated he "wouldn't hesitate [to use plastic surgery] if he had a kid with port-wine stain. We have all been altering our appearances ever since clothing was invented." Other critics have stated that while altering one's appearance with plastic surgery can be ethically debatable, the benefits of it to people who have need for it are tremendous.

20th Century Fox and producer John Davis () bought the film rights to the novel in 2006. The movie was reportedly supposed to be released in 2011, according to the Internet Movie Database, but the film was delayed.

In September 2020, it was announced that Netflix had acquired the rights for a film based on the novel. Joey King, who had previously worked with Netflix on The Kissing Booth, was chosen as the movie's executive producer; she will also play the protagonist Tally Youngblood. McG is set to be the director.

Steven Cummings illustrated Uglies in a manga-style graphic novel written by Westerfeld and Devin K. Grayson called Shay's Story which tells the story from Shay's perspective. It was published in a black-and-white 5¾ x 8¼ inches format by Del Rey Manga in 2012.

The novel Uglies was first published in 2006, and re-released in 2011 with a new cover. It is the first part of a trilogy, with sequels Pretties, and Specials, and another book Extras. The trilogy featured on the New York Times bestseller list for a significant amount of time. There has also been an audio recording made of the book (published in 2006), available on both CD and cassette.

Westerfeld, Scott (2005). . Uglies Tetralogy. Vol. one (two ed.). New York: Simon Pulse. pp. 406. ISBN 978-1-4424-1981-0.

1. ^ Craig, Amanda (11 November 2011). "Future Imperfect". The Times. United Kingdom. p. 15. Archived from the original on 11 January 2020.

2. Robinson, Kimberly Downing (Fall 2012). "Book Review". Interdisciplinary Humanities. 27 (2): 151-154.

3. ^ Gough, Philip. ""Who am I? Who was I?": The Posthuman and Identity Formation in Scott Westerfeld's Uglies Trilogy". Thesis Essay. Roehampton University (School): 10.

4. ^ Scott, Kristi; M. Heather Dragoo. "The Baroque Body: A Social Commentary on the Role of Body Modification in Scott Westerfeld's Uglies Trilogy" (PDF). Thesis Essay. Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 December 2015.

5. McKinley, Robin (2006-01-21). "Pretty faces, hideous truths". The United Kingdom Times. The United Kingdom. p. 17.

6. ^ Galdon Rodriguez, Angel (2014). "Urban and Natural Spaces in Dystopian Literature Depicted as Opposed Scenarios". Ángulo Recto. Revista de estudios sobre la ciudad como espacio plural. 6 (2). doi:10.5209/rev_ANRE.2014.v6.n2.47585.

7. ^ Galdon Rodriguez, Angel (2010). "Urban and Natural Spaces in Dystopian Literature Depicted as Opposed Scenarios". Ángulo Recto. Revista de estudios sobre la ciudad como espacio plural. 6 (2). doi:10.5209/rev_ANRE.2014.v6.n2.47585.

8. ^ Craig, Amanda. "Scott Westerfeld interview: future imperfect". Archived from the original on 11 October 2012.

9. ^ Westerfeld, Scott (3 January 2008). "Number 12 Looks Suspiciously Familiar".

10. ^ Doctorow, Cory (January 1, 2006). "Uglies: young adult sf that perfectly captures adolescent anxiety". Boing Boing.

11. ^ Hunter, Susan W; Jones, Trevelyn E; Toth, Luann; Charnizon, Marlene; Grabarek, Daryl; Raben, Dale. "WESTERFELD: Scott. Uglies". School Library Journal. Reed Business Information / Reviews. 51 (3): 1.

12. Grayson, Devlin (5 March 2012). "Uglies Shays Story". Publishers Weekly.

13. ^ Kroll, Justin (29 September 2020). "Joey King To Star And Exec Produce Netflix's Adaptation of 'Uglies' With McG Directing". Deadline.

14. ^ "Why Now Is The Right Time For Scott Westerfeld's YA Classic Uglies To Come To Netflix". CINEMABLEND. 4 October 2020.

15. Westerfeld Publication Page

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Uglies is a 2005 science fiction novel by Scott Westerfeld. It is set in a future post scarcity dystopian world in which everyone is considered an "ugly," but then turned "Pretty" by extreme cosmetic surgery when they reach the age of 16.

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How is a sense of dystopia created in 1984

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1984 by George Orwell is a dystopian novel. This means that it describes a nightmare vision of future society - The polar opposite to a perfect world. George Orwell creates this image through a number of different methods and techniques. Language/Style The language in the novel is simple.

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Since last week's revelations of the scope of the United States' domestic surveillance operations, George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," which was published sixty-four years ago this past Saturday, has enjoyed a massive spike in sales. The book has been invoked by voices as disparate as Nicholas Kristof and Glenn Beck. Even Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old former intelligence contractor turned leaker, sounded, in the Guardian interview in which he came forward, like he'd been guided by Orwell's pen. But what will all the new readers and rereaders of Orwell's classic find when their copy arrives? Is Obama Big Brother, at once omnipresent and opaque? And are we doomed to either submit to the safety of unthinking orthodoxy or endure re-education and face what horrors lie within the dreaded Room 101? With Orwell once again joining a culture-wide consideration of communication, privacy, and security, it seemed worthwhile to take another look at his most influential novel.

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" begins on a cold April morning in a deteriorated London, the major city of Airstrip One, a province of Oceania, where, despite advances in technology, the weather is still lousy and residents endure a seemingly endless austerity. The narrator introduces Winston, a thirty-nine-year-old man beset by the fatigue of someone older, who lives in an apartment building that smells of "boiled cabbage" and works as a drone in the Ministry of Truth, which spreads public falsehoods. The first few pages contain all the political realities of this future society: the Police Patrol snoops in people's windows, and Thought Police, with more insidious power, linger elsewhere. Big Brother, the totalitarian figurehead, stares out from posters plastered throughout the city, and private telescreens broadcast the Party's platform and its constant stream of infotainment. Everyone simply assumes that they are always being watched, and most no longer know to care. Except for Winston, who is different, compelled as if by muscle memory to court danger by writing longhand in a real paper journal.

Thinking about Edward Snowden on Sunday, it wasn't much of a leap to imagine him and his colleagues working in some version of Oceania's Ministry of Truth, gliding through banal office gigs whose veneer of nine-to-five technocratic normality helped to hide their more sinister reality. Holed up in a hotel room in Hong Kong, Snowden seemed, if you squinted a bit, like Orwell's protagonist-hero Winston, had he been a bit more ambitious, and considerably more lucky, and managed to defect from Oceania to its enemy Eastasia and sneak a message to the telescreens back home. In fact, at one point in his interview with the Guardian, Snowden could be channelling the novel's narrator, or at least delivering a spirited synopsis of the book:

If living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept, and I think many of us are, it's the human nature, you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But if you realize that's the world that you helped create, and it's going to get worse with the next generation, and the next generation, who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk, and it doesn't matter what the outcome is, so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied.

Are we living in "Nineteen Eighty-Four"? The technological possibilities of surveillance and data collection and storage surely surpass what Orwell imagined. Oceania's surveillance state operates out in the open, since total power has removed any need for subterfuge: "As for sending a letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit," the narrator explains. This sounds like an analogue version of what Snowden describes: "The N.S.A., specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default." That seems like a safe operating assumption about e-mails, texts, or telephone calls-even if a person is not saying anything interesting or controversial, and even if no one is actually monitoring our communication, the notion that one's personal digital messages would remain inviolably private forever, or that they would not be saved or stored, was probably naïve. Regardless of the actual scope of the government's snooping programs, the notion of digital privacy must now, finally and forever, seem a mostly quaint one.

Meanwhile, words, as Amy Davidson points out, are manipulated by the three branches of government to make what might seem illegal legal-leading to something of a parallel language that rivals Orwell's Newspeak for its soulless, obfuscated meaning. And, indeed, there has been a hint of something vaguely Big Brotherian in Obama's response to the public outcry about domestic surveillance, as though, by his calm manner and clear intelligence, the President is asking the people to merely trust his beneficence-which many of us might be inclined to do. Even Winston, after all, learns to love Big Brother in the end.

Still, all but the most outré of political thinkers would have to grant that we are far from the crushing, violent, single-party totalitarian regime of Orwell's imagination. In one of the more chilling passages in the novel, the evil Party hack O'Brien explains, "We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about." The N.S.A., on the other hand, is primarily interested in overt acts, of terrorism and its threats, and presumably-or at least hopefully-less so in the thoughts themselves. The war on terror has been compared to Orwell's critique of "the special mental atmosphere" created by perpetual war, but recently Obama made gestures toward bringing it to an end. That is not to say, of course, that we should not be troubled by the government's means, nor is it clear that the ends will remain as generally benevolent as they seem today. But Orwell's central image of unrestrained political power, a "boot stamping on a human face-forever," is not the reality of our age.

While it's tempting to hold the present moment up beside Orwell's 1984, the book is more than a political totem, and overlooking its profound expressions of emotion robs it of most of its real power. Some novels have both the good and bad fortune of being given over to wider history, inspiring idiomatic phrases that instantly communicate a commonly understood idea. Through this transformation, books become blunt and unsubtle, losing something of their art. We might call it the Catch-22 of "Catch-22," or, in this case, of "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" is not simply a cold counterfactual. Instead, it is a love story between Winston and Julia, a younger member of the civil service, and, like many great novels, some of its high points can be found in the minor moments shared between these two characters. Their first real meeting, because of its implicit danger, is one of the more breathtakingly romantic scenes in modern literature-a mixture of lust and decorum like something out of Austen. In the office hallway, Julia slips Winston a piece of paper, a dangerous act. Filled with nervous excitement, he returns to his desk and waits a full eight minutes to look at it. When he does, the words appear as a jolt: "I love you." They arrange to meet in a crowd in order to remain anonymous. Among a mass of people, standing close, their hands touch. A love affair follows-they go to the countryside, like Adam and Eve attempting to push their way back into Eden. Later, they keep a small flat. The Party's stamping out of sex is an essential mode of control. But love, it seems, may exist in a place beyond the government's reach:

They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

But, in the end, even that place can be found-love is also a political act, and so it must be destroyed, and Orwell uses its dissolution as final, terrible evidence of the scope of oppression. Winston and Julia are broken by the Party, forced to inform on each other and, later, made to live on with the memory of having done so. The two meet a final time, and share a muted exchange, akin to one of the clipped, inarticulate breakup scenes from Hemingway, in which, bruised by heartache, no one can quite think of the right thing to say. Julia explains that by denouncing Winston, she has somehow obliterated him:

"And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer."
"No," he said, "you don't feel the same."

Were this just a novel, rather than an ideological novel with an aim to warn and instruct, it might have ended here, in ambivalence, leaving out the clever and rather heavy-handed turn of Winston's final conversion. If so, its political utility might be less clear, but we would be left instead with its artistic force and mysterious inner workings.

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Since last week's revelations of the scope of the United States' domestic surveillance operations, George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," which was published sixty-four years ago this past Saturday, has enjoyed a massive spike in sales. The book has been invoked by voices as disparate as Nicholas Kristof and Glenn Beck.

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Directed by Gary Ross. With Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Stanley Tucci. Katniss Everdeen voluntarily takes her younger sister's place in the Hunger Games: a televised competition in which two teenagers from each of the twelve Districts of Panem are chosen at random to fight to the death.

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The official website for The Hunger Games, featuring book, film and author information, plus free downloads and games.

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Imagine a world where a government controls everything and there is no such thing as privacy, even in your own home...

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Imagine a world where a government controls everything and there is no such thing as privacy, even in your own home...

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http://www.prirodniskola.cz/media/files/1984.pdf - access to the ebook
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/context.html
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/so-are-we-living-in-1984
https://macleoh.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/how-is-a-sense-of-dystopia-created-in-1984/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4rBDUJTnNU - although we're studying the text, here is a link to the movie trailer of 1984

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Imagine a world where individuality is rejected and as of your 16th birthday you think, speak, act and look like everyone else

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Imagine a world where individuality is rejected and as of your 16th birthday you think, speak, act and look like everyone else

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http://scottwesterfeld.com/books/uglies/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uglies
http://www.shmoop.com/uglies/chapter-1-summary.html
file:///Users/fionaroberts/Downloads/Uglies.pdf -access to the book online

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Imagine a world where every year the government selects 24 teenagers to be thrown into an arena to fight to the death...

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Imagine a world where every year the government selects 24 teenagers to be thrown into an arena to fight to the death...

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http://www.thehungergames.co.uk/
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/the-hunger-games/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/ - for movie trailer