Mind-Rain: Your Favorite Authors on Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series

Introduction by Scott Westerfeld

There’s an old saying that goes like this: “It takes a village to raise a child.”

This saying doesn’t suggest that parents are unimportant, only that children are hungry little sponges who are shaped by everything around them. They need a lot more than the input of a nuclear family to reach their full potential—they need a community. The larger the world that a child experiences, the more they can become themselves.

Having spent the last five years emailing with, talking to, and lurking on the blogs of Uglies fans, I would humbly submit that it also takes a village to read a book.

Again, this doesn’t mean we authors aren’t important. We still want the last word in certain kinds of arguments. (That’s why it’s called authority, people!) And we still crave all those fan mails and delicious royalty checks.

But books, like children, are hungry things. They want more than just one spindly author. They want fanfic and fan art and discussion boards and LJ icons cribbed from their covers. In a word, books want conversations.

Of course, you guys know this already. You write me all the time to tell in mind-bending detail how you gave the Uglies books to your best friends, who passed it on to their friends, until you had whole cafeteria tables wa-ing and la-ing and generally confusing everyone around them with bubbletalk. So clearly you know the secret of getting the whole village reading.

Because when more people read a book, the book gets better.

But why is that, anyway?

Well, part of it is the simple truth of humanity: we’re social creatures. We need to talk about our lives, including our friends and families. So why wouldn’t we want to talk about the characters and events we know from fiction? Just because they aren’t real doesn’t mean we can’t gossip about them.

But a weird kind of magic happens thanks to all this conversation—it makes a book more real. It rewires your brain a little, nudging you over into a world where bubbletalk and hoverboards are commonplace, and where Tally Youngblood is flesh and blood.

So this book, the one you’re holding in your hands, is a continuation of that process. It’s more of that conversation. Maybe the gossip here has been refined a little (with quotes and references and footnotes!) but its main purpose is the same: to make the Uglies books a little better, and the village a little bigger.

In these pages, our contributors examine the language and slang of Tally’s city; plumb the secret life of Shay; compare David with Zane as boyfriend material; look at some Tally-like heroes from myth, literature, and history; ask whether Tally is a hero at all; explore deep questions of beauty; contrast the Prettytime to Japanese culture; review the history of brain and body modification; scrutinize the science of the series; and invite you to join a history class in Aya’s world.

In short, all the things you’ve already been doing around the cafeteria table, just more of it. Because like those little sponge-children, books always want more.

As an added bonus, we’ve included Ted Chiang’s short story “Liking What You See” and Charles Beaumont’s classic “The Beautiful People,” both of which inspired me to invent Tally’s world.

So thanks to all my brave contributors, who took some time off from writing their own wonderful YA to talk about mine. That’s a great compliment, always. But mostly thanks to you Uglies readers out there who talk the bubbletalk, make the fan art, clog the comment threads, and generally spread the word.

Without you guys in the conversation, my job would be about one percent as fun.