Animorphs

So the crippled guy never turns up again, despite having probably way more tech savvyness than Ax? Methinks he could be a huge advantage later when everyone's in hiding, especially with Marco's dad working on what he had.

Y'know I think the war with the Yeerks is pretty much the only thing keeping the Andalites from having some kind of resistance or downright intergalactic war against them happen.

Sure, they're enormous dicks to absolutely everyone in the universe, imperialistic and downright sociopathic - or at the very least extremely prejudiced if not callously racist - when it comes to the lives of other races that they "influence," but they're the only ones powerful enough to stop the Yeerks having taken control of everything decades ago, so we kind of need them.

Don't bother mentioning that the whole thing is their fault in the first place, though. They won't care.

edited 8th Jul '12 3:35:05 AM by KnownUnknown

What I don't get is why they never gave him morphing power.

He was allergic to it or something. Of course, that does raise a few interesting questions, like why the hell they didn't go to the Chee to see if they could help stop the disease the other one had got.

edited 9th Jul '12 2:13:23 AM by MattII

Isn't the term 'differently abled' generally considered offensive anyway?

It was written 10+ years ago. Back then it might not have been considered offensive.

The euphemism treadmill does tend to spin faster when the euphemisms are clunky and stupid. (What is in vogue now?)

Well in this case, the problem isn't being replaced by a new euphemism, it's the use of a euphemism at all. As I understand it, people who are disabled consider it offensive because it's condescending and because it pretends to ignore the problem instead of confronting it.

Anywho, today we have the review that I am sure you've all been waiting for this entire time.

Oh, wait, no. It's Alternamorphs 2: The Next Passage: [1]

Wow, I don't remember this at all...

I honestly don't know why this series was made if it was going to be such low quality. Alternamorph books are an interesting concept but based on their quality they seem to have been nothing more than blatant cash grabs.

Please remind me, is 41 the book where Jake wakes up in an alternate universe as Tom?

Man, and I got so excited for the Giant Tobias plot too...

edited 14th Jul '12 7:35:29 PM by Moth13

Hey, it could work. We already have shrinking technology; they just need to get it to go in the opposite direction.

There's the whole square cube law thing to worry about, though.

Gravity's going to have to get in line behind nuclear physics and biology, because one of those two has to go for getting shrunk to make any sense.

Worry not, friends. I have an explanation.

"Something... something... technobabble... Z-Space."

Doesn't morphing inherently violate the square cube law?

Conservation of matter only. They're morphing regular-sized animals.

Yes but what about the time Marco became a dog sized flea? That should have made him collapse under his own weight. I generally think that morphine violates the laws of physics.

Most hilarious misspelling ever!

Wow, how did I not notice that.

I wonder if I should leave that in just because it's hilarious or edit it out and let the quote block preserve it.

Well, it's not so much that you turn into the flea as that the flea emerges from a hole in space-time that connects you to zero space. Talking about the size of the flea during the morphing process is probably a bit wonky.

And when you 'acquire' a big animal, say an elephant or a rhino, where does the matter to do that come from?

I always imagined that the matter come from people or things that never came back from Z-space. Like, ships that got stuck, or people who died while in morph.

Alternatively (and less horrifyingly), Z-space just has some naturally occuring mass in there that you take away from.

But that violates what Z-space is supposed to be. It's meant as a giant blank void of absolute nothingness. Any mass there would have to have been deposited there so the Andalites probably threw a ton of random junk in until they felt they had enough mass to last all of them morphing repeatedly.

edited 18th Jul '12 7:18:05 PM by Kostya

I always thought z-space would have energy, even if mass does not naturally occur there. Energy is equivalent to mass, so therefore they are sucking z-space mass out into normal space when morphing something large.