Follow Up: Westerfeld’s “Uglies”

So many months ago—obviously before Active Voice came into being—I wrote about my reaction to Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy (which now includes a fourth book, Extras). I just finished reading the new book (which eventually will get reviewed on AV, but I’ve read a lot of books lately so it actually isn’t next in line), and found out that he (along with Garth Nix, Justine Larbalestier, Margo Lanagan, and Jonathan Strahan) was doing a signing in a NYC bookshop. Of course Jess and I went. It was a lot of fun; all of the speakers had interesting things to say, fun anecdotes, and were quite nice. And it finally gave me a chance to as Mr. Westerfeld about the biggest issue I had with his series—the characters’ use of self-injury.

Specifically, what I asked during the Q&A was, “Why did you decided to include a theme of self-injury in two of the books in your series?”

He answered, as closely as I can remember (all information I’m sure of, it’s the wording I don’t have exactly), “The series is largely about body dysmorphia, the rejection of a person’s own body. That’s what leads to the extreme plastic surgery in the book, and is what drives a lot of Tally’s—and everyone else’s—issues. Cutting is a part of that, a very destructive form of dysmorphia, and I felt it was important to include in the series. The idea is that instead of rejecting your body and having it cut up by a surgeon, you do it by cutting yourself with a knife.”

Interesting.

I do see his point, and why it was included. I’m still not entirely comfortable with the way it’s included, which is to say, in a light that isn’t entirely negative. When I read it, I didn’t get the impression that, though the characters felt like their minds were clearer, they were actually harming themselves—instead it was a disturbing image, but a step forward for the characters. I didn’t follow up my question, as doing so at a signing seemed inappropriate (and I also haven’t reread the books since, so the details are less clear in my mind). So while I’m glad to know what the reasoning behind including those images was, I’m still fairly disturbed by their use in the story.

Unrelated to Westerfeld’s books, another audience member asked Jonathan Strahan, an anthology editor who noted that most of his job consists of reading every single scifi short story written every year, about whether the male to female ratio of writers was equalizing. (An awesome question, by the way.) Cheeringly, Strahan’s answer was yes—his observations are that within the last ten years, what was an overwhelming gap has shrunk considerably, and that it’s continuing to improve. (Two of the four authors on the panel were female; he said that seven of the fifteen authors in his next anthology are female.) So that, at least, was very cool, good news.