When did Scott Westerfeld create Uglies?
Uglies
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 16. It tells the story of teenager Tally Youngblood who rebels against society's enforced conformity, after her newfound friends Shay and David show her the downsides to becoming a "Pretty".
Video Killed the Radio Star
The Buggles, which formed in 1977, first consisted of Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes and Bruce Woolley. They all wrote "Video Killed the Radio Star" in an hour of one afternoon in 1978, six months before it was recorded, together in Downes' apartment located above a monumental stonemason's in Wimbledon Park, London. The piece was built up from a chorus riff developed by Woolley. It is one of the three Buggles songs that Woolley assisted in writing, the two others being "Clean, Clean" and "On TV." An early demo of the song, featuring Horn's then-girlfriend Tina Charles on vocals, helped the group get signed to Island Records to record and release their debut album "The Age of Plastic", as well as producing and writing for the label, after Downes' girlfriend, who worked for Island, managed to get it played to executives there. Woolley left during recording to form his own band, The Camera Club, which did their own version of "Video", as well as "Clean, Clean" for their album "English Garden".
Horn has said that the short story "The Sound-Sweep", in which the title character—a mute boy vacuuming up stray music in a world without it—comes upon an opera singer hiding in a sewer, provided inspiration for "Video," and he felt "an era was about to pass." Horn claimed that Kraftwerk was another influence of the song: "...It was like you could see the future when you heard Kraftwerk, something new is coming, something different. Different rhythm section, different mentality. So we had all of that, myself and Bruce, and we wrote this song probably six months before we recorded it." In a 2018 interview Horn stated: "I’d read JG Ballard and had this vision of the future where record companies would have computers in the basement and manufacture artists. I’d heard Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine and video was coming. You could feel things changing".