I believe we were 2/3 of the way through the ‘David Trilogy’ when I decided to take a break and do…something. Now I can’t remember what. It’s almost like I have a mental block stopping me from remembering what I wrote about for the previous two weeks. Eh, it’ll come back to me.

Onwards!

Rachel's most fearsome morph yet!

Book 21 ended with Jake on the verge of death, Tobias possibly lying just on the wrong side of the verge of death, and Rachel…

Wait. What’s that in the upper-right-hand corner of the cover art?

Oh god, that’s what I was writing about FLASHBACKS.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

Okay. Okay. There’s no need to panic here. I can…I can get through this. Just take a deep breath and don’t think about the TV show.

So Rachel (who is NOT played by Brooke Nevin) gets woken up by Ax (WHO DIDN’T SPROUT A WEIRD HUMAN MOUTH AFTER DOING THE FROLIS MANEUVER). Ax tells her what’s going on with David, and Rachel makes the correct assumption that Jake wants her there because she’s the most violent among them and is most likely to be willing to kill David if it comes to that.

They find Jake on the roof of the shopping mall. He’s unconscious, but alive. Rachel goes after David and almost dies when he attacks her in lion morph, but manages to get to safety via some fancy gymnastics moves. Unfortunately, the police have arrived and Jake is still an unconscious tiger, so Rachel and Ax morph into flies and hide in Jake’s ear (yes, really).

The police take Tiger-Jake to the Gardens, where Cassie intercepts them and says that the tiger is one of theirs. (Which is sort of true, since Jake is morphing the tiger from the gardens.) So that’s one plot thread on hold for now! There’s a lot going on in this book, trust me.

They go off to Marco’s house and wake him up. Ax flies in through his bedroom window in bird morph, but ‘Marco’ whips out a baseball bat and hits him with it so hard that part of his beak flies off. I remember this scene vividly from the first time I readit, because the idea of getting hit so hard that a piece of your face goes flying through the air has a way of sticking with you when you’re eleven.

It turns out that they were actually dealing with David, who acquired Marco and then morphed him.

Ax lay on the grass, unmoving. Marco/David held up one finger. Then another. Then another. One, two, three.

He was counting how many of us he’d killed. One, two, three: Tobias, Jake, Ax.

It’s kind of hilarious that after months (a year?) of going up against Visser Three and all of his Conrollers, the Animorphs come closest to defeat when fighting a single whiny kid. It makes you wonder how the Yeerks ever managed to become such a huge threat.

Rachel comes up with a cunning plan to lead David into some overhead electricity wires while they’re both in bird morph, but he manages to outwit her and almost kills her. She’s saved at the last minute by (drum roll) Tobias, who is actually not dead.

My surprise, it is palpable.

Ax is also fine, despite getting his beak knocked off (aaaargh), but David is still on the loose. He shows up at the school the next day and demands the morphing box, which nobody is about to hand over to him. Cassie works out that he’s planning on trading it to Visser Three in exchange for his parents (good luck with that one!). Rachel gets into a fight with him and actually threatens to murder his parents if he tries to turn them in to Visser Three, which is pretty cold even for her. She also comes close to stabbing him in the ear with a fork.

But never mind all that, there’s a Yeerk plan to foil! Again!

Yes, they take another shot at ruining Visser Three’s plan to take over the world via politician infestation. Their plan this time is straightforward but smart: they go smashing through the hotel walls as various large animals, causing so much chaos that the big conference will inevitably be called off. It all goes perfectly for a change, except that David intercepts them on their way out and reveals that Rachel threatened to kill his parents. She denies it, but none of the others come to her defense, which naturally makes her feel pretty crappy.

She goes home and discovers that her cousin Saddler (who is still named Saddler) isn’t doing so well. In book 21 we found out that he’s in the hospital, so it seems his condition has deteriorated. Do doctors every actually say that, I wonder? I mean they phrase it that way on TV constantly, but I’ve been burned in the past when I relied on TV for my medical knowledge.

Anyway, he’s not doing so hot. Rachel and Jake go to visit him, only to find that he’s been ‘miraculously’ healed. Take a wild guess as to what’s actually going on.

David apparently waited until Saddler was being rushed to the operating room because his heart had stopped, found a way to acquire him, and then essentially took his place. He doesn’t come right out and say that he killed Saddler, but it’s kind of implied. And at the very least, he had to have done something with his body.

So…yeah. Oh, and here’s a nice discussion between Rachel and Jake:

“I worry about you, Rachel. More than any of the others except Tobias. I feel like this war is to you like booze is to an alcoholic. Like I don’t know what will happen to you if it all ends someday. What are you going to do? Go back to being the world’s greatest shopper? Go back to gymnastics and getting good grades?”

I laughed harshly. “You worry about me? What do you think you’re going to do? Jake, you’re a leader now. You make life-and-death decisions. All the time. You’ve learned to do that. And,” I added bitterly, “you’ve learned to use people. You use them for their strengths and their weaknesses. Worry about me? Like when all this is over you’ll go back to being a mediocre basketball player and a decent student? You’re not even in high school yet and you’re the most wanted person in the Yeerk Empire. Visser Three would trade his Blade ship for your head on a stick.”

ALL ABOARD THE ANGST TRAIN.

But anyway, back to getting rid of David! The kids all have a pretend-meeting in Cassie’s barn where they talk about how the morphing box dealie can totally split itself into separate pieces. For reals.

They go the mall and are accosted by Saddler-David, who tells them that he was in the barn while they had their meeting. Oh noes! Rachel leads him back to the Construction Site of Destiny, which is where she supposedly hid the fictitious box. Once there, he tells her to morph into a rat and lead her to each piece of the box in turn. He also morphs a rat so he can follow her.

Rachel leads him through a series of pipes underneath the construction site, stopping to retrieve what she claims is a piece of the blue box. In reality, it’s just a piece of Lego. She waits for the right moment and then leads David into a cage, narrowly avoiding getting killed by him in the process.

So, now they’ve got him trapped in a box. What to do? Wait two hours for him to be stuck as a rat forever, of course! It turns out Cassie was the one who masterminded the whole plan, since she was able to predict more or less everything David would do from the barn onwards. She’s not happy about it, but it’s not like David left them with a choice, right?

Ax and Rachel fly David out onto a remote island/rock a few miles off the coast and leave him there. For the rest of his life. (Which won’t be too long, given that he’s now a rat.) Thus ends the David Trilogy and possibly the most depressing book in the series so far. And if you’re thinking this is the most morally questionable thing the characters will ever do, YOU WOULD BE WRONG.

Seriously.

Join me next Wednesday for my re-read of Animorphs #23: The Pretender. According to the cover, it involves Tobias morphing into an adorable rabbit.

Stranded aliens seek out Earth’s most intelligent species. (Hint: It’s not us.) A bully discovers the meaning of “spatial displacement.” Two girls find out why you should never annoy a witch. When a swarm of sneaking, slashing, scurrying ninja weenies invades their neighborhood, a boy and his best friend find a way to fight back.

Acclaimed author and master of the macabre David Lubar is back with his sixth collection of warped and creepy tales. Here are thirty-three hilarious and harrowing stories that will scare you, make you laugh, or see the world in a whole new way. Find out where David got the idea for each story at the end of the book.

Don’t be a weenie. Read these stories. If you dare!

-synopsis and cover art courtesy of goodreads.

Atmospheric Analysis: Only in middle grade will you encounter a cover like this–illustrated, graphically interesting, and hilarious. I often feel that strong art is what’s missing from the world of YA covers; Beware of the Ninja Weenies‘ cover is a nice example of how MG often does YA one better in the cover department.

Planetary Class: This selection of short stories encompasses a large variety of fantasy and sci-fi subgenres. Everything from social sci-fi to horror to cartoonish fantasy is represented.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: The language in Beware of the Ninja Weenies was my biggest stumbling block. It’ll be a hit with reluctant readers because it’s very accessible, but it’s also so without flourish that at times it falls very flat.

Expanded Report: There are two types of kid’s books. The first is the kind beloved by children, and only by children; the second has the kind of cross-generational appeal that means they also work for parents and other adult readers who like strong stories about childhood and adolescence. As you’d probably guess, I’m fonder of the second type of book. While I can appreciate what kid’s books that are firmly for young audiences bring to the table in terms of entertainment value and accessibility, I still like a little bit more nuance and depth in my children’s literature.

David Lubar’s Beware the Ninja Weenies (the latest in a long series of Weenies books) is very much a kid’s book that’s strictly for kids. In many ways, this collection of science fictional short stories just didn’t work for me–they were too short, too punny (one features a gorgon who turns kids into gorgonzola), too familiar (another features a plot that Lubar acknowledges is right out of The Twilight Zone), too simplistic. However, it’s incredibly successful in meeting the needs of upper elementary and middle school readers on their own terms. These short, cheeky stories are often surreal and tap right into a kid’s sense of language and logic. In one, a boy gets “gummed up” when he swallows gum. In another, Lubar explores what it means to be an “artist’s model.”

I should note that some of these stories are a touch scary. Most of them aren’t horror, not exactly, but Lubar’s characters inhabit an oddly solipsistic universe. The predominant theme seems to be that you might as well be invisible–that the world is cold to the dangers it inflicts upon you. Very sensitive children might find this unsettling

But for those with strong constitutions, these stories are just the right length to read one or two before you tuck in at night. They’re quick, interesting, and ultimately cheeky. Stand-outs include “Poser,” featuring the aforementioned artist’s model, and the excellently voiced “Frigid Relations.”

Beware the Ninja Weenies and Other Warped and Creepy Tales comes out June 5th. It’s available for preorder now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local indie bookstore.

For thirty-five girls, the Selection is the chance of a lifetime. The opportunity to escape the life laid out for them since birth. To be swept up in a world of glittering gowns and priceless jewels. To live in the palace and compete for the heart of the gorgeous Prince Maxon.

But for America Singer, being Selected is a nightmare. It means turning her back on her secret love with Aspen, who is a caste below her. Leaving her home to enter a fierce competition for a crown she doesn’t want. Living in a palace that is constantly threatened by violent rebel attacks.

Then America meets Prince Maxon. Gradually, she starts to question all the plans she’s made for herself- and realizes that the life she’s always dreamed of may not compare to a future she never imagined.

-synopsis and cover art courtesy of goodreads

Atmospheric Analysis: We’re all sick of girls in dresses, every cover looks the same, you know the drill. This particular instance of the girl-in-dress trend manages to cross a sort of dress event horizon, though, with the dress on display being so elaborate that it loops through Boredom Space and becomes interesting to look at again. Also I like the background effect with the reflections. It’s a nice touch.

Planetary Class: Dystopia…ish? I’m tempted to call this near-future social SF, except that the ‘near-future’ part is a bit shaky. The technology level on display here makes it seem alternate-present, but there’s mention of a Fourth World War and geopolitical developments that would have needed a while to develop.

So let’s just go with ‘Social SF’ and leave it at that, shall we?

Viability Rating: Uh.

So, here’s the thing: I don’t demand iron-clad worldbuilding in speculative fiction. I’m willing to overlook leaps in logic or hand-wavey explanations for technology if I can see why the author did it. But the worldbuilding in The Selection goes beyond hand-waving territory and into the realms of incomprehensibility. Its setting is the fictional country of Illéa, which appears to have popped into existence overnight with no cultural or national precedents. Everything about it, from its political makeup (a monarchy, strangely) to its counter-intuitive caste system feel manufactured. The long infodump of a history lesson we get halfway through the book only makes things more confusing. Even the whole process of the Selection itself never gelled for me, which is a problem given that it’s the central conceit of the novel.

So we’re not looking at a terribly viable world here, is what I’m saying.

Mohs Scale: We have a 5! Not because the science here is truly speculative, but because science isn’t really the point. As I said before, The Selection could almost take place in our own world if not for the fact that it’s explicitly set in the (near? far?) future.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: The writing here is surprisingly good, given all my other complaints. America’s narration (in past tense, huzzah) is unaffected and easy to read. It’s not going to knock your socks off or anything, but it also isn’t ever objectionable. If that’s all your looking for in your prose, you’ll be happy enough with this.

Expanded Report: If you’ve read this far, you’ll probably have gotten the impression that I didn’t particularly like The Selection. And you’d be right! The worldbuilding is nonsensical, the plot is tepid (there are several ‘rebel attacks’ on the royal palace, none of which are in any way interesting) and the characters are fairly one-note. The romances (which look distinctly triangular when viewed together) are rote as these things go: forbidden past love, new love is the Prince but he’d never want our plain-Jane hero, except wait he does. I really hate to sum up a review as ‘If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this sort of thing’, but, well…if you like this sort of thing…

Having said that, reading The Selection did get me thinking about how so many YA authors seem intent on commenting on the reality TV craze in their fiction. I will now share those thoughts with you while pretending to still be writing a review.

The Hunger Games is often described as being a ‘critique on reality TV’ – erroneously, in my opinion. What happens in the Hunger Games books bears no resemblance to what happens on, say, The X Factor, which involves thousands of people clamoring for a chance at becoming a cog in a well-oiled publicity and marketing machine. People actually want to appear on The X Factor. For better or for worse, that particular brand of entertainment has become a cultural icon.

In a way, it’s not hard to see why. These shows are masterful in the how they manipulate the emotions of their audience. The contestants are shown to be in a position of incredible glamour and fortune, surrounded by a massive effort to make their dreams come true – if they do well enough. It’s the ultimate test of talent and skill, and the whole world is watching.

Or that’s the glamour, at any rate. We all know (or most people know) that what you see on the screen is only what the show’s producers want you to see. The judges are spouting what are clearly canned lines, the audience is cheering at all the right moments and the music is hand-picked to make everything seem as bombastic and grandiose as possible. In something like The Selection, then, the lure isn’t so much ‘What would it be like to win the X Factor’ as it is ‘What would it be like to win the X Factor in a world where that means something‘. What if the nation was watching your progress with rapt attention, all of them knowing that the grand finale of the competition would decide more than which contestant gets to put out a mediocre album and then fade into obscurity? When the girls in The Selection are…well, Selected, their lives really do change overnight. When they compete for the affections of Prince Maxon, they’re competing to become the future monarch of their country. It’s reality TV wish fulfillment on a grand scale, and I can at least appreciate why it must appeal to some people even if it doesn’t appeal to me.

If you want a story with a very traditional romance narrative front-and-center, and where everything else surrounding that romance exists solely to support it, then you should consider reading this book. If you don’t want that, don’t read it. It’s as simple as that.

The Selection is available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and your local indie bookstore.

Incapable. Awkward. Artless.

That’s what the other girls whisper behind her back. But sixteen year-old Adelice Lewys has a secret: she wants to fail.

Gifted with the ability to weave time with matter, she’s exactly what the Guild is looking for, and in the world of Arras, being chosen as a Spinster is everything a girl could want. It means privilege, eternal beauty, and being something other than a secretary. It also means the power to embroider the very fabric of life. But if controlling what people eat, where they live and how many children they have is the price of having it all, Adelice isn’t interested.

Not that her feelings matter, because she slipped and wove a moment at testing, and they’re coming for her—tonight.

Now she has one hour to eat her mom’s overcooked pot roast. One hour to listen to her sister’s academy gossip and laugh at her Dad’s stupid jokes. One hour to pretend everything’s okay. And one hour to escape.

Because once you become a Spinster, there’s no turning back.

-synopsis and cover art courtesy of goodreads.

Atmospheric Analysis: This cover’s colorful embellishes do a surprisingly effective job of communicating major bits of both atmosphere and worldbuilding.

Planetary Class: Crewel is mostly a dystopian novel, one that exists on a sort of sliding scale of fantasy vs. science fiction depending on how far in you read.

Viability Rating: At times, the cracks in Albin’s dystopian world show; for example, spinster women are subjected to rigid purity laws that seem to exist for no reason other than to up the stakes and draw a possible textual comparison between this world and the one glimpsed in The Handmaid’s Tale. But the logic here is somewhat circular and contradictory (spinsters are always chaste women because women are more easily controlled; women are more easily controlled because they’re told they must remain chaste), not organic or incisive as in Atwood’s case. Still, the world of Arras is so pretty, original, and vividly described that it mostly doesn’t matter. It feels real.

Mohs Scale: Crewel is fairly soft science fiction–2 on the Mohs scale, a world of phlebotinum where time and space can be manipulated on giant looms.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: Albin’s writing is gorgeous, the type of delicate, evocative prose rarely seen in YA. Clothing, food, and setting are particularly lovely in their descriptions. This author knows her way around the written word.

Expanded Report: When it comes to Crewel, Gennifer Albin’s highly buzzed October debut, I’m of two minds. On the surface, this is one of the most innovative titles to come so far out of the dystopian craze. It’s the story about Adelice, a gifted spinner who can miraculously see–and manipulate–the very threads of matter and time that make up her world. All girls so blessed must become Spinsters, locked in an opulent compound where they live a lavish lifestyle of parties and gowns while tasked with the responsibility of tending to time and space. Of course, in return they will never see their families again and, more, must live lives of chastity.

The writing is absolutely beautiful, and herein lies Albin’s greatest gift–the ability to perfectly describe a world completely foreign from our own and make you believe it. Arras is a hint classical–towns are named “Romen” and “Cypress,” and there are fishing villages filled with copper-skinned rebels. But it’s also a hint evocative of a Stepford America, too. Women work only as secretaries and teachers, and they don pantyhose and heavy make-up. Men wear smart suits (some double-breasted) and generally look like early-sixties Ken dolls. And yet these two very disparate sides of Arras mesh seamlessly. It’s a vivid, innovative setting, and I believed it completely.

The mystery that lurks behind Arras’s shining, gold-threaded surface is undoubtedly the strongest driving force of the novel. Who are these girls who can weave time and space? What happens when people are “cleaned” and “ripped” from the looms? Why did Adelice’s parents so fear her becoming a Spinster? How did such a world begin? The quest to discover the truth about a novel’s world is more common in adult science fiction than YA sci-fi. I can think of only two YA titles whose universes were as well-rendered and deliciously compelling (Incarnate, and A Confusion of Princes). It’s a bit like Lost in that way; some readers will want to keep up with the story so that they can discover the truth about those polar bears.

But . . . this is also where my major hesitation about Crewel lies. I intuited early on what the truth of this world might be, and after that, the pieces fell a bit too easily into place. This is a story you’ve seen before (with at least one major motion picture release centering on the same twist). Well before the reveal, I became  frustrated, rather than riveted.

I suspect this was largely problematic because Adelice’s personality only became fully-formed near the end of the novel. Early on, she was rather sketchily described, an impression not helped by her lack of response to the trauma she faces throughout. Eventually, she became a rather angry girl–an interesting twist, but one that happened just a little too late for me. Likewise, her love interests were very faintly drawn. And some of the more political thematics, about women’s roles, compulsory heterosexuality, purity, and beauty standards, felt ill-fitting with this world once I discovered the truth behind it.

And yet Crewel is still a promising, beautifully written, and iminently interesting book. It takes the kind of risks that I wish more YA sci-fi would, even if they don’t, in the end, always pay out. I’d recommend it for any reader who enjoys lyrical prose and rich worldbuilding. And, while the ultimate mystery of the world didn’t work for me, I’m sure it will be quite fresh and surprising for its intended audience of teenagers.

Crewel comes out October 16th, and is available for preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local indie bookstore.

I can see that you’re skeptical, and with good reason! Earth is the default milieu for all manner of YA speculative fiction, after all. Dystopians? Set on Earth. Post-apocalyptic? Post-apocalyptic-Earth, more like. Science-fiction? For the most part, there’s not a spaceship in sight.

People. We need to do something about this.

The Pitch

What is it about science fiction that makes it unique? Why is it so enduringly popular? You could give a hundred different answers to those questions, but for me, SF’s appeal lies in its ability to push every boundary you can think of when it comes to setting. A writer can produce SF stories set at any point in time from the beginning of the universe to its hypothetical end, and at any point in space from a specific location on Earth to the entirety of a multiverse. You can do anything. You can bring the reader anywhere.

The best works of science-fiction manage to produce in readers the same kind of awe experienced by astronomers when they consider the larger structure of the universe. There are astronomical events happening all around us that rival anything from the annals of fantasy in terms of sheer majesty. Taking a longer view of history, the universe is eventually going to become a very strange place indeed. Here’s a brief plot description for an upcoming game that takes advantage of that fact:

In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0×0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0×0001 0000 0000 0000 years.

It’s now the year 281,474,976,712,644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy.

Goddamn. This isn’t some hand-wavy ‘Magic is vanishing from the world’ fantasy stuff we’re dealing with here – it’s the real death of our real Universe, and it’s actually going to happen eventually. (According to some models of physics.

My point isn’t just that this kind of scenario is more incredible because it’s ‘real’, but rather that the reality of the universe so often trumps anything we humans could imagine. (Exhibit A for me being almost any of the images generated by the Cassini-Huygens mission.) Yes, you can set your story on Earth, but you don’t need to; you have at your disposal anything that has been revealed or suggested by modern science. The world of your novel can be the interior of a vast generation ship or the moon of a gas giant. It can be a planet lit by the twin suns of a binary star system or a research vessel orbiting a black hole. It can be anything and anywhere. You have the biggest sandbox imaginable to play around in.

There are a few more practical concerns as well. You might have gotten the impression that I take issue with the worldbuilding in a lot of YA dystopian novels (“Never!” gasps the comment section), and an awful lot of that can be chalked up to the fact that those books are set on Earth. At some point, you’re going to run up against the problem of how our present became your book’s future, and it’s going to take a gargantuan effort to make the two gel together if you’ve created a particularly outlandish fictional society. Set your story on another planet, and suddenly that’s not so big an issue; your society can be brand new, constructed according to the whims of its founders, or else it can be the remnants of an interstellar colonization attempt. Either of those scenarios (and you could easily come up with a dozen more) neatly bypass the need to explain how our own world morphed into the one in your book, because there’s a fundamental disconnect between the two (the movement of settlers from one planet to the other). I’m not saying you should think of it as an easy solution to complex worldbuilding problems, but…well, you totally could. If you were so inclined.

‘Think big’, is the short version of my pitch. Science fiction doesn’t just have to be about the ‘when’ – it can also be about the ‘where’, and that can be more compelling than anything our world can provide.

This post brought to you in conjunction with Phoebe, who is both a YA author and one of Saturn's moons.

The Problems

And now to bring you crashing back back to Earth (pun fully intended) by listing some of the difficulties inherent in setting your story on another planet. You’ll want to think about some or all of these before you decide to write about the settlers of Gliese 581b.

1) We know about the composition of a lot of near-Earth solar systems, and most of them probably can’t support life. Yet another case of science ruining fiction for everyone! Before deciding which star your fictional planet is going to belong to, you may want to make sure it’s not one that’s already known to be orbited by nothing but massive gas giants. (Although remember what I said up above about the moons of gas giants. If James Cameron could do it, then by God, you can too.)

2) Stars are really far away. Like, really far away. If your settlers are going to get there without using some form of stasis or a generation ship, they’re going to have to be leaving Earth at a time when we’ve got some pretty advanced propulsion systems. Intergalactic travel is orders of magnitude (literally) more difficult than the interstellar variety, and should not be attempted by any but the most audacious writers.

3) Alien planets probably aren’t going to be very hospitable. A lot of science fiction basically ignores this problem, but it’s nice to at least acknowledge the problem of evolved-for-Earth humans living on a planet whose ecosystem will likely be radically different.

4) You can’t entirely get away from Earth’s influence. If your settlers are first or second-generation, they’re going to have brought some of their culture(s) from Earth with them. If that’s a problem, you might want to set your story long enough after the planet’s first colonization that its population will have had time to develop a culture radically different to anything found on Earth. For extra bonus points, be sure to suit their culture to the physical conditions of their lives on Planet Whatever.

So, are you convinced? Not convinced? Give voice to your ire in the comments section! Also feel free to list some of your favourite YA that isn’t set on Earth.

Aiden Nomura likes to open doors—especially using his skills as a hacker—to see what’s hidden inside. He believes everything is part of a greater system: the universe. The universe shows him the doors, and he keeps pulling until one cracks open. Aiden exposes the flaw, and the universe—or someone else—will fix it. It’s like a game.

Until it isn’t.

When a TFC opens in Bern, Switzerland, where Aiden is attending boarding school, he knows things are changing. Shortly after, bombs go off within quiet, safe Bern. Then Aiden learns that his cousin Winter, back in the States, has had a mental breakdown. He returns to the US immediately.

But when he arrives home in Hamilton, Winter’s mental state isn’t the only thing that’s different. The city is becoming even stricter, and an underground movement is growing.

Along with Winter’s friend, Velvet, Aiden slowly cracks open doors in this new world. But behind those doors are things Aiden doesn’t want to see—things about his society, his city, even his own family. And this time Aiden may be the only one who can fix things… before someone else gets hurt.

-synopsis and cover  art courtesy of goodreads.

Atmosphere Analysis: The cover art for The Forgetting Curve has got a retro vibe to it that I like. Big green text isn’t usually my thing, and the mis-matched fonts are a bit painful, but overall it works better than it feels like it should.

Planetary Class: Cyberpunk-ish sci-fi.

Viability Rating: Apart from the ubiquitous ‘Therapeutic Forgetting Clinics’ (memory-erasers, basically), most of the technology in The Forgetting Curve is at least superficially plausible. When you’re dealing with near-future abstractions of our own consumer technology, there aren’t too many places where you could trip up.

Mohs Scale: An easy 4, with the memory-erasing tech being this book’s ‘one big lie’.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreaded reading books that deal with computer-savvy protagonists. I became a computer nerd at a fairly young age, you see, and it still surprises me often authors think they can write a story that centers around technology while knowing absolutely nothing about it. The slang can be particularly painful. (‘They’re hacking our mainframes! But don’t worry, I’ll backtrack up a firewall daemon. That’ll totally burn them!’) Thankfully, Angie Smibert dodges that bullet by knowing what an IP address is and keeping the hacker lingo to a minimum.

Apart from that, The Forgetting Curve is written in a way that manages to make it feel dense yet breezy at the same there. There’s a ton of stuff happening on almost every page, but the narration never gets bogged down. It does sometimes get confusing, though, mostly because the book features three viewpoint characters and isn’t afraid to switch between them with whiplash-inducing frequency.

Expanded Report: Cyberpunk. What does that word make you think of? For me, it calls to mind the idea that technology and the manipulation thereof is inherently cool. The internet? Cool. Installing any sort of non-standard operating system on your laptop? Cool. Accessing data that you’re not supposed to be accessing?

Cool as shit.

These days, the idea of an elite hacker class who can bend the modern world to their will feels more than a little bit outdated. Computers are commonplace now, and I think most people have copped on to the fact that you can’t magically disable every electronic lock in a high-security building just by running a program from your phone. Even still, there’s something alluring about the idea of people who can peer behind the digital curtain and see our technology-infused society for what it ‘really’ is.

The Forgetting Curve feels like a YA homage to the days when cyberpunk still aspired to prophesy instead of fantasy. Its characters are all teenage ‘hackers’ of one sort or another, whether they hack computers, machinery or society itself. They’re all outsiders of the most fashionable variety – quirky, wise-for-their-years and possibly a little bit unbalanced. I went from liking them to disliking them to liking them again over the course of the book’s relatively scant 200-or-so pages.

My ‘dislike’ period came when I started to suspect that I was supposed to buy in to the idea that these kids really ‘get it’ in a way that none of the boring, buttoned-down, sold-out-to-the-MAN adults around them could ever manage. Thankfully, the book starts to muddy the waters enough in its second half that I could get on board with the implausibly-adept protagonists. Aiden in particular (hacker extraordinaire) grew on me a good deal after a slightly rocky introduction.

I was slightly less enthusiastic about the rest of the book. Part of the problem is that this is a sequel to Memento Nora, Smibert’s first book, which I haven’t read. I suspect, however, that even a thorough understanding of The Forgetting Curve’s predecessor wouldn’t help with what often feels like an over-stuffed and under-planned plot. There’s an incredible amount of stuff going on at any one time: characters being reunited with their extended family after years in a mental hospital, a largely-unseen war, memory erasure clinics being mysterious, shady corporations being even more mysterious, and so on. It doesn’t help that all of the main characters at one point or another begin to suspect that their memories have been altered. Trying to untangle an amnesia-tinged conversation between three people you don’t feel entirely connected to is less fun than you’d imagine.

Despite that potential stumbling block, The Forgetting Curve is unrelentingly interesting throughout. Erased-memory plots may be confusing, but they’re also buckets of fun, and Smibert manages to get a lot out of the conceit over the course of the novel. I enjoyed myself enough that I might keep an eye out for Memento Nora at some point, and fans of that book should definitely check out this one. Hopefully Smibert won’t be the only author out there who feels like bringing some cyberpunk to YA.

The Forgetting Curve is out May 15th and is available to pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and your local indie bookstore.

Wait, there are more episodes?

Yes, there are more episodes. Lots more, actually! Despite some questionable production values (and man, will I be harping on those in a few minutes), the Animorphs TV series managed to last for one full season and part of another. The episode order loosely follows the book order for the most part, although as we’ll see, there’s not exactly a 1:1 relationship between the two.

The first two episodes cover some of the events of The Invasion. The third episode includes most of the rest: the kids realize that Tom is a Controller, find the Yeerk Pool, fail to liberate anybody from the Yeerk Pool, and almost get killed.

Also hilariously-dated computers:

That's a CD-ROM drive. No, seriously.

Remember that ‘Andalite disk’ thing from the previous episode? They try putting it in Marco’s computer, but DOS apparently doesn’t play well with alien technology. The computer crashes (for some reason), and the Mystery of the Disk is left for another day.

But wait, Tom is here! And he’s poking awkwardly at his ear! A doe, a deer, a female ear! Jake realises that his brother is a Controller and also appears to be in his thirties:

I think I can see why Jake's parents decided to take a second shot at the whole 'reproducing' thing.

Anyway, the rest of the episode goes as you’d expect: Chapman’s evil, Yeerk Pool sucks (and is surprisingly well-done as the sets in this thing go), but Tobias disappears right at the end instead of meeting up with Jake. Oh, and the disk get stolen by the Yeerks.

It’s the next episode where things start to go screwy. Jake and Marco are hanging out at the Bizarro Internet Café when suddenly the computer screens start showing a message from one Mr. Andalite. The (incredibly garish) e-mail thing informs whoever might be reading that the Yeerks are willing to make a trade: one Andalite for the disk thingy. I have no idea why the Yeerks would do this, since they think the Animorphs are Andalites, and I can’t imagine why Andalites would be hanging out at a badly-decorate internet café. But whatever, let’s just go with it.

The kids devise a risky plan: they’ll do a bait-and-switch by tricking the Yeerks into taking an animal rather than one of them, then they’ll walk off with the disk. As part of the plan, Marco acquires and morphs a security guard with no hesitation whatsoever. I’m sorry, were you expecting a bit of moral complexity or introspection in your children’s TV? TOO BAD.

The plan goes off more-or-less without a hitch – but wait, it turns out Visser Three isn’t quite as dense as we thought! Instead of giving the Animorphs the Andalite disk, he gave them one of those sparkly things that makes patterns when you twirl it around.

I'm not the only one who remembers these, am I?

I mean he gave them an advanced Yeerk tracking device. Yes.

The twirlyymajigger lets a trio of godawful actors Controllers follow the Animorphs using an utterly ridiculous-looking machine. Here’s a screenshot:

The quality here isn't great, but if you look in the woman's right hand you should be able to make out the stupidest thing you've ever seen.

Oh, and remember Dracon beams? In the TV series they’re played by flashlights:

I wasn't kidding about them being terrible actors, either. Yeesh.

But our heroes have tricked the Controllers by sticking the Thing into a cardboard display and putting it on an elevator. Ingenious.

If this episode starts to suggest that the series creators were willing (or forced) to suckify a lot of details from the book in order to keep costs low, then the sixth episode leaves absolutely no doubt about it. It’s based on The Message, Ax’s introduction, and it’s atrocious.

The setup is (mostly) the same as in the book, only without the scene where Jake notices some Andalite technology on a news report about beach combers. The kids start to get psychic hallucinations of NASA stock footage and a strange voice calling for help. In the books, this was Ax, and he was trapped at the bottom of the ocean. In the series it’s still Ax, but he’s trapped in an abandoned warehouse.

No really, an abandoned warehouse. In the first of these posts, I mentioned that the TV series didn’t really disappoint me as a kid, but watching this episode brought back a few bitter memories along the lines of ‘Where the hell is the Dome Ship?!’ This is without a doubt the episode that demonstrates why the series really should have been animated. Obviously, doing the Dolphin morph –> container ship –> underwater shark fight progression would have been ridiculously expensive even if Nickelodeon had been working with a Hollywood budget, so instead we get half-hearted investigation –> half-hearted stumbling around an abandoned construction site –> half-hearted ‘fight’ with a bunch of Human Controllers wielding flashlights. And isn’t it amazing how much it lowers the stakes when the kids are running away from humans all the time? I’m guessing they only had one Hork-Bajir costume/model and were afraid to bring it out too often in case they broke it.

Speaking of humans, Visser Three spends most of this episode as one.

He also morphs directly from a human to some dorky-looking alien thing. If this doesn't fill you with outrage, you've been living your life wrong.

Let’s count down what’s stupid about this:

• He hates humans. Why would he willingly choose to become one if he didn’t have to?
• His natural form is better in every way than any human morph. His Andalite body is faster, stronger, and more  imposing than the guy in that screenshot up above. Him walking around as a human would be like a lion deciding to turn into a domestic cat.
• At one point, Visser Three breaks down a door with his tail blade and then walks through it as a human. In other words, he goes into what he knows will be a fight against six people in his weaker form.
• As an Andalite, he can use any one of his ‘combat’ morphs at will. This is his primary strategy in the books. As a human, he has to demorph first and then remorph if he wants to use any of them. He is, again, placing himself at a huge disadvantage.

I’m not someone who usually goes all NERD OUTRAGE AARGH about these things, but goddamn. You could have at least tried, guys. Having Visser Three remain off-screen most of the time would have been infinitely better than this.

The episode ends with Ax joining the team and creating a human morph for himself using the FROLIS MANEUVER, and no, I will never get tired of that phrase. (Say it out loud! It really rolls off the tongue.)

If I was watching the series today, this is where I would have stopped. Whatever goodwill it might have generated in its initial episodes (and the first one at least is actually better than I remembered) is utterly squandered here.

The rest of the series feels as if it’s stuck in a holding pattern. Visser Three continues to spend most of the time impersonating the principal of a high school, the ‘Andalite Disk’ keeps coming up as a McGuffin without ever becoming interesting, and the series as a whole continues to lack any of the more grandiosely fantastical elements that make the books so fun. If you were to pick a random scene from any episode, I’d find it very difficult to distinguish it from any other scene. The second season gets a new, less cringe-inducing opening sequence, but doesn’t up the ante in any way. It’s boring, basically, and that’s something that a kid’s science-fiction show should never be.

All things considered, I can’t think of any reason to recommend the TV series, even to die-hard fans of the book. You might get a kick out of hearing real-life actors (well, mostly) talking about Andalites and morphing and whatnot, but overall the experience is like seeing a high school stage production of a book you really like: endearing and worthy of a certain amount of praise, but you’re going to start feeling restless at the half-hour mark.

In other words, stick to the damn books.

"Books. Book-suh. That word is pleasing to my mouth-parts."

One choice can transform you—or it can destroy you. But every choice has consequences, and as unrest surges in the factions all around her, Tris Prior must continue trying to save those she loves—and herself—while grappling with haunting questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love.

Tris’s initiation day should have been marked by celebration and victory with her chosen faction; instead, the day ended with unspeakable horrors. War now looms as conflict between the factions and their ideologies grows. And in times of war, sides must be chosen, secrets will emerge, and choices will become even more irrevocable—and even more powerful. Transformed by her own decisions but also by haunting grief and guilt, radical new discoveries, and shifting relationships, Tris must fully embrace her Divergence, even if she does not know what she may lose by doing so.

-synopsis and cover art courtesy of goodreads.

Atmospheric Analysis: This is an absolutely stunning graphical cover which improves on the already very cool design elements introduced in Divergent. Publishing, I would like to see more covers like this, please.

Planetary Class: Futuristic dystopian.

Viability Rating: Some of the elements that were problematic in terms of feasibility in Divergent are still present here, but Roth is so tireless in her exploration of the sociological impact of the factions system that it really didn’t much matter anymore. The world felt realer and better realized than the first volume; the people within it acted believably.

Mohs Scale: The Divergent series rates a 3 on the Mohs scale for physics plus. Roth invents some speculative science here, but it’s refreshingly grounded in real neurology.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: Insurgent continues to develop Tris’s strong, riveting voice. I only had one (very) minor quibble with the writing–the repeated use of the word “breaths” when “breath” would have sufficed. It never failed to take me out of the story. Is this a regionalism that I’ve missed living on the east coast?

Expanded Report: I had some hesitations with Divergent when I read it last year. While I enjoyed Tris, our narrator and heroine, and the strong, well-paced prose, I found much of her story in the first book trifling. As Tris chose a faction in her dystopian world and moved through Dauntless initiation, she spent much of her time zip-lining and jumping off buildings and acting like a hooligan. Realistic, maybe, for a teenage girl, but at times I was a bit frustrated at her refusal to pay attention to the war blossoming around her.

I had high hopes for Insurgent, though, which promised to begin with Tris’s Dauntless training behind her and with the more significant global problems of her universe instead. And I was far from disappointed.

Insurgent deepens the themes of the first book in several significant ways. First, Roth tirelessly explores the sociological and emotional impact of the faction system. Tris and Tobias travel through their futuristic Chicago in this volume, visiting the various other factions; we are able to perceive the differences between the people within them in greater depth. Much of this is achieved through Roth’s deft hand at characterization. She creates surprisingly vivid characters in a very short span of time. More, these characters all manage to display not only their chosen faction traits, but the underlying traits of their factions of origin. And no character is better drawn than Tris herself.

In Insurgent, Tris mourns her parents. However, their deaths not treated cavalierly, but rather informed just about everything Tris does and experiences. There were many small, moving moments–like when Tris glances in a mirror, and realizes that her mother will never see the woman that she herself is becoming. It was touching, very human, and nicely executed. But more, the depths of Tris’s grief–which has her realistically contemplating suicide–also reflect the values inculcated in her during her Abnegation childhood. This omnipresence of the worldbuilding, evidenced in the way that each character was conceived, made the world feel very real. It swayed me, in a way that I wasn’t quite convinced through the first book.

And Roth pushes all of her characters to their emotional extremes. There’s a war going on, sure, but Tris and Tobias in particular are also forced to face some uncomfortable truths about themselves. Some of this is brought about through what can only be called a plot contrivance (truth serum), but the emotions that they work through at this stage of their relationship still rang very true to me.

The science is made deeper here as well. The plot is more significantly concerned with the simulations, which were more of a side-note in the first volume, as well as the neurological differences between the Divergent and the rest of the populace. And the neurology was refreshingly sound! There’s even a completely accurate description of mirror neurons. I may or may not have squeed.

If I had any reservations about Insurgent, they concerned the novel’s opening. Roth includes almost no recapping–a conscious choice, apparently, but one that simply didn’t work for me. The cast of characters in this series is quite large, and I found it hard to find my footing. Despite the brisk prose, it wasn’t until I was about a hundred pages in that I really found my rhythm. I didn’t need a lot to help me out, but a simple “Caleb, my brother,” for example, would have sufficed.

I also suspect that some readers might find the endless discussion of the factions, and the differences between them, to be a bit exhausting–but to be honest, I didn’t. It was just so well-executed in the particulars. For example, the religion of Amity resembles Quakerism; Abnegation worship like Protestants. These little details made the world feel very real.

And finally, the ending was just fantastic. It features a great science fictional twist that will likely be controversial but which I whole-heartedly enjoyed. Unlike many second volumes, Insurgent accomplishes much more than moving around plot pieces. It felt like a necessary part of the story–and a deeper part, too. I look forward to the third book.

Insurgent comes out Tuesday and is available for from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and your local indie bookstore.

Your mother hollers that you’re going to miss the bus. She can see it coming down the street. You don’t stop and hug her and tell her you love her. You don’t thank her for being a good, kind, patient mother. Of course not—you hurdle down the stairs and make a run for the corner.

Only, if it’s the last time you’ll ever see your mother, you sort of start to wish you’d stopped and did those things. Maybe even missed the bus.

But the bus was barreling down our street, so I ran.

Fourteen kids. One superstore. A million things that go wrong.

-synopsis and cover art courtesy of goodreads.

Atmospheric Analysis: This moody, atmospheric cover does a good job of both describing the bleak tone of the novel and transferring one of its most iconic scenes to a visual medium.

Planetary Class: Near-future apocalyptic disaster story. However, the near future elements are slight; blink and you’ll miss ‘em.

Viability Rating: The universe that Laybourne builds is mostly very believable, but some of the more science fictional elements felt tacked-on (like the continent-wide computer network), implausible, or convenient. This was especially true for the chemical virus released at the novel’s first quarter mark, which impacts different blood types differently, conveniently separating the kids according to their reactions later in the novel.

Mohs Scale: The science here isn’t quite as hard as it was in Mike Mullin’s Ashfall (to which Monument 14 will undoubtedly be compared), though Laybourne gets points for getting the sociology of a make-shift culture of kids down pat. I’d place it somewhere between a four and a five on the Mohs scale, depending on whether you buy the above mentioned chemical weapon and its effects.

Xenolinguisical Assessment: The stylistics were a major stumbling block through the first half of Monument 14. It’s told in a flat, simple style that sometimes felt downright affect-less. Compounding my difficulty was the fact that narrator Dean is supposed to be a budding author. He just didn’t sound like one.

Expanded Report: I began Monument 14 with some difficulty. Following a gripping second-person introduction, we’re plunged into the life and voice of Dean, a tenth grader whose world falls apart on the bus to school one morning. Massive hailstones dent the ceiling of his bus, and cars swerve from the road. There are explosions. Soon, the world is a wreck around him and he finds himself ushered in to a local big box store by a grade school bus driver who soon leaves for help.

Fourteen children are left behind. They watch the news of a mega-tsunami over an old television screen. This all sounds pretty gripping, and it should have been, but at first the story–told through Dean’s simplistic and somewhat bland narration–felt stiff to me. The characters (a jock, a bully, a beautiful girl, the new kid, the foreign kid, a pair of twins) were like cardboard cut-outs.

But I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did. Slowly, over the course of Monument 14‘s spare three hundred pages, Dean and his companions began to come to life. Holed up in the megamart after a chemical weapon is inadvertently released by an earthquake following the tsunami, they begin to carve out a meager existence. Their days are filled realistically. Sometimes they enact ingenious plans; sometimes they get drunk and play laser tag. Soon, the older kids are plunged into romantic drama. Dean loves Astrid, who disappears after a chemical-induced freak-out. When he finds her again, he learns she’s canoodling with Jake, a popular athlete. Leader Niko loves “mother hen” Josie, who loves Brayden, a bully, and so on.

There are questionable moments in the narrative, like when a thirteen-year-old girl puts on a sexual show, apparently to gain the approval of the older boys–or when Dean himself uses the term “gay” to describe a poem he’s written. But Laybourne (and Dean) mostly present these moments without narrative comment. She’s not endorsing or judging this behavior. She simply presents it realistically, and leaves the reader to make moral judgments, or not, as he or she sees fit. Contrary to my initial beliefs, these weren’t simple, cliched characters. As I came to see different sides of the children, I began to believe they were all very nuanced in their conception. If they seemed stiff at first then, well, it was only because Dean himself didn’t know them very well.

There are a few lapses here. The ending is unsatisfying, though true to the character of a schlub like Dean. The science fictional and science elements were also sometimes silly. This is a near-future world, one with a massive computer network that soon goes down. I was never really convinced that this was a necessity. If Laybourne meant to warn us about the dangers of cloud computing, well, I’m not exactly about to give up dropbox.

But those details really weren’t important. What carries Monument 14 were the strongly-conceived, spot-on teenage characters; the fascinating setting (who hasn’t dreamed of holing up in a Walmart for awhile?); and the complexity with which Laybourne deals with human nature. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s a strong, interesting one, and well worth a read.

Monument 14 comes out on June 5 and is available for preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and your local indie bookstore.

Our regularly scheduled programming has been interrupted by THE TV SERIES POST, also known as ‘That thing I’ve been threatening to do since I started this feature’. See, the Animorphs TV show has something of a reputation among fans of the books. It’s not that it’s unrelentingly terrible, and there were certainly other shows around at the time that managed to acquire a cult following despite their questionable (at best) quality. The problem is that the books are so much better, and a lot of people feel that the show was either superfluous or a disappointment given what might have been.

My own introduction to the TV series was a bit complicated. I was living in Ireland by the time I read the books, and we didn’t yet have access to the cheese delivery system known as Nickelodeon. Or maybe we did, but you needed satellite or whatever to watch it. I can’t remember. Anyway, I found out about the show somehow, and immediately decided that I had to have it. It was like that time I discovered there are a few unpublished Calvin & Hobbes strips available online; suddenly my knowledge of this thing I loved was incomplete. A few months later, my dad sent over some tapes of the first few episodes of the show from America. Happy days!

Well, not quite. If you remember VHS, may God help you  you’ll no doubt recall what a colossal pain in the ass it was to get region-locked tapes to work properly even on a player that was supposedly multi-region. My aunt owned such a device, so I went over to her place, inserted the first tape into the player, and….

Uh. I’m not sure what happened after that. I vaguely recall watching a few episodes and thinking that the special effects were really terrible, which is saying something given that this was around the time I thought that Power Rangers movie was the cinematic equivalent of the Sistine Chapel. Mostly I just remember feeling profoundly indifferent. Not even disappointed, which would have been understandable given how long I’d waited to watch the series, but genuinely indifferent. I can’t remember if I watched the second tape, but if I did, it must have left no impression on me whatsoever.

That’s one reason why I was curious to try the series again. The books have held up far better than I expected, and it’s been enormous fun to reacquaint myself with them. Will the series be as boring as I remembered, or will it prove to be an unfairly-maligned attempt at adapting a fairly extravagant kid’s SF series to TV with minimal resources? Let’s find out…

If I remember correctly, this (along with the full word 'Animorphs' in the same style) became the de facto logo for the entire franchise.

My Name is Jake starts things off with a two-parter. It’s ostensibly based on The Invasion, but manages to leave out roughly half of the book’s content. If you think that sounds ominous, you would be right.

The book starts off in an arcade/comic-shop, which is a thing that apparently existed back then. The TV episode starts off in what appears to be an alien space ship:

Yeah, I have no idea either.

Watching this scene was like having an IV bag of pure nostalgia plugged directly into my carotid artery. I remember watching a ton of shows back in the day that all featured these weird, ‘futuristic’ arcades where the main characters would hang out and play games that clearly weren’t arcade games. (In this case, it’s the Transformers: Beast Wars game for the original Playstation. I’m sad to say that I didn’t have to look that up.) The Animorphs rendition of this archetypical establishment is a particularly fine example: everything is green, the decor looks like it came from either a theme park, and if you look in that screenshot up above you’ll notice some sort of glowing blue doohicky just sitting in the middle of the table for no discernible reason. We’re less than a minute in, and already this doesn’t feel like it’s taking place in any version of the real world.

Oh, but I forgot to mention the series’ theme song. All I’ll say is that it is exactly what you’d expect from a kid’s show made in the year 1998. You can watch it here.

The intro also gives me a good chance to mention the actors:

JAKE, looking nothing like Jake. (And it it's S-E-A-N. Americans can't spell anything right.)

MARCO. He looks a LOT older here than he does in the actual episode, for some reason. I think it's his hair.

CASSIE. She also looks completely different in the episode itself.

RACHEL. With what appears to be a lion in the background. Why not a grizzly bear D:

TOBIAS. I imagine there was a nation-wide search to find an actor worthy of playing the greatest character in the history of fiction.

So, there they are. Of all of them, Nadia Nascimento (Cassie) and Brooke Nevin (Rachel) look the most like how I pictured their characters. Boris Carbera and Shawn Sean Ashmore look absolutely nothing like how I imagined Marco and Jake, respectively. Ashmore in particular looks more like how I would have imagined Tom than Jake.

But anyway, back to the episode itself!

The kids all leave the arcade/alien HQ, but in the show they wind up going through the construction site of destiny for a different reason than in the books: Homer is with them, and he runs off into the site while they’re walking past it. As we’ll see in a minute, there’s a good reason for the change.

For the next few minutes, everything plays out the way it does in the book. They see a bright light in the sky, it turns out to be an alien spaceship which subsequently crash-lands, and we get our first glimpse of an Andalite.

Uh.

So, here’s a quote of something K.A. Applegate said in that Reddit thread I’ve mentioned a few times:

We were not huge fans of the TV show. We wanted it to be animated because with kid actors, animals and FX it had every expensive thing in Hollywood. We knew Nick didn’t have the kind of money to make it good.

This is a tactful way of saying ‘We knew it would look like crap’. And boy, were they ever right. Elfangor’s initial appearance isn’t too bad. We get a shot of his hooves (which look like real horse hooves), and then for the rest of the scene he’s mostly a  close-up head in shadow. It’s an obvious cop-out, but it’s the kind of cop-out most kids will readily accept. Unfortunately, we get to see Visser Three in a bit more detail. Behold the alien overlord threatening the entire human species:

I got nothin'

Where do I start? His stalk-eyes look ridiculous (although they were always going to be a tough sell). His face-eyes eyes appear to be pointed in different directions. And why is he so fuzzy? We also only get either a view of his upper body or an extreme close up of his face, meaning that it isn’t immediately clear that Andalites are built like centaurs. I could imagine someone who hadn’t read the books being extremely confused about the shot of Elfangor’s hooves. Oh, and there’s no scorpion tail on display either. I am disappoint.

I will say that they got his voice down perfectly, though. He actually sounds menacing, unlike in the books where a lot of his dialogue comes off as too over-the-top. So well done on that, I guess.Things play out more or less like they do in the book: Elfangor gives the kids the ability to morph, Visser Three shows up and eats him (off-screen), and the kids hide from a bunch of Hork-Bajir. Oh wait, no, they hide from a bunch of human Controllers and a single Hork-Bajir. It looks like this:

Marco actually laughs at it rather than being terrified like in the book. I'm going to call that an acceptable change.

There’s an extended chase sequence, during which Jake eventually hides in a big metal tube. Homer runs in after him. Remember how I said Homer’s presence was going to be important? Well, here’s the payoff: Jake acquires and morphs Homer right there and then, rather than waiting until later like in the books. This removes the cool ‘Discovering their powers’ section from the first book, but I can see why they needed to speed things up for the show. Oh, and in this case at least, the morphing doesn’t look too bad. My only major complaint is that everyone can consistently morph full sets of clothing in the series, but that’s another thing that was obviously changed for the sake of convenience.

After making their escape, the kids meet up in school the next day to talk about the fact that they’ve been entrusted with the survival of every species on Earth. Chapman walks past them, and Jake realises that he was at the construction site the previous day. Duh-duh-duuuuh, Chapman is a Controller.End episode.

No really, that’s where it ends, having gotten through something like the first third of The Invasion. Luckily, it’s a two-parter! The second part mostly deals with the kids trying out their new abilities and acquiring their first few morphs. It also provides a brief introduction to their home lives.

One thing I didn’t mention before is that in the TV episode, Elfangor tries to give Tobias some sort of ‘Andalite disk’. This is presumably based on Elfangor’s mental connection to Tobias in the book. The disk takes up the second half of the episode, with the Animorphs trying to retrieve it from the construction site while avoiding Controllers. There’s not much to say about it, except that it’s a good indicator of things to come in terms of the producers trying to reuse sets as much as possible.

The second part of the first episode ends after covering barely half of the content in The Invasion. There’s been no mention of the Yeerk Pool, no major fighting with any Controllers (get used to that), and nothing about Tobias getting stuck as a hawk. In the next post, I’ll cover the rest of the first half of the first season and then move on to hit some ‘highlights’ of the series’ cost-cutting efforts. For example: remember how the book where they go and rescue Ax is really cool, what with all the underwater shenanigans? It’s not quite as good in the series.

See you next time!

Spoiler Inside	SelectShow
I CAN SEE INTO YOUR SOUL.