What is the setting of Uglies by Scott Westerfeld?

The novel is set in a future world years after our modern society has become extinct because of an organism designed in a lab that destroyed all the world's oil. This future society blames the destruction of their ancestors on greed and discrimination. For this reason, this future society as created a society in which all persons are surgically altered to become the ideal of pretty, a biological 'pretty' that is thought to appeal to all human beings. The cities of this future society are all designed to cater to each level of this surgical version of pretty.

The setting of this novel is such an important aspect of the plot that the plot would fail if the reader did not believe the premise of the setting. For this reason, the setting of this novel is designed in such a way that it becomes almost like a character in the novel. The author has spent a great deal of time imagining this future world, but he devotes only moderate amounts of space to descriptions of this future world so that the reader might imagine for themselves the exact descriptions of the pretties, their homes, and their cities. In this way, the author has created an authentic world that is easy to believe in and therefore supports the plot of the novel perfectly.