After this extended Paris Hilton period, you eventually become a Middle Pretty and have little Uglies of your own, and after that you become a Crumbly (though still a really good-looking one). To distract humanity from ravaging nature again, a high-tech version of bread and circuses has been developed: under the age of 16, when you still have the looks you were born with, you’re known as an Ugly, but on your 16th birthday you undergo an operation that turns you into a Pretty - ravishingly if conventionally beautiful - after which you are turned loose in a district known as New Pretty Town and encouraged to party like it’s 1999. To a young reader, and even to a reader who only remembers being young, the shrewdly satiric premise of Scott Westerfeld’s extraordinarily entertaining series of Uglies novels might not seem dystopian at first: a few hundred years after industrial civilization has destroyed itself in an ecological apocalypse, humankind lives in self-contained city-states surrounded by wilderness. Perhaps that explains why even dystopian novels written for adults, like “1984,” are most powerfully experienced in early adolescence, when Winston Smith’s realization that Big Brother wants to crush him kind of feels like the reader’s real life. Whatever the author’s intent, which is usually gloomily political, the story’s psychological underpinning is the adolescent’s shock at learning that some of what you’re taught isn’t true, your parents are flawed human beings and the world isn’t constructed for your benefit.
Dystopian fantasies are uniquely suited to the young adult reader, mainly because the usual story line - the hero realizes that his or her “perfect world” isn’t perfect after all - mirrors the experience of venturing from the relative safety of childhood into the harsher realities of adult life.
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