Most of the action takes place in and around the "doll house," the stasis bubble—a place to store objects from the past—where Timmie lives. Dr.

Hoskins explains that "In Stasis, time as we know it doesn't exist. Those rooms are inside an invisible bubble that is not exactly part of our Universe." No object retrieved from the past may be taken from a stasis bubble without a huge cost in energy; the bigger the object, the greater the cost.

Timmie, a large object, must remain within his bubble.

For the four years covered by The Ugly Little Boy, Timmie's movements are limited to a bedroom, a playroom, and Edith Fellowes's bedroom, as well as a washroom. Edith Fellowes, a nurse at a hospital, has an outside life at the start of the novella, but as the story progresses her world becomes totally focused on...