Animorphs; The Stranger, K A Applegate

"The fight for the planet continues in this gripping installment -- and the Animorphs must make an exacting choice.

The last time Rachel and her friends entered the giant Yeerk pool beneath their town things went very bad. This time they plan to be careful, and sneak in as roaches, just to spy.

Once they're inside, though, the team gets caught. But right as things are looking their most dire, everything stops. Everything.

Then Rachel and the Animorphs hear a voice. It belongs to a very old, very powerful being, and it says it can save them. But if it does, the Earth will be defenseless."



The Stranger is the seventh Animorphs book, and as I've mentioned before, as a kid I was a little bit obsessed with this series. So when I saw a copy of this book (one of my favourites) for sale at a library clearance I picked it up for JJ's brother. It's actually an updated version of the book I read, re-released last year as part of an unsuccessful relaunch of the line.

The Stranger is Rachael centred and has a couple of plot threads. Kicking off with the discovery of a new entrance to the Yeerk Pool, and the Animorph's decision to infiltrate it with the intention of discovering the whereabouts of the Yeerk's Kandrona (the replica sun that they feed from). Whilst there they encounter the Ellimist (essentially an all powerful alien God) and get given the opportunity to decide the fate of humanity.

The B plot is Rachael being given an out; a chance to leave behind her life as an Animorph and relocate to a different state with her Dad.

The plot then is all about choices, Rachael is given the chance to end her involvement in the war by both her father and the Ellimist, and her personal struggle, as well as the decisions of the Animorphs as a whole are the main focus of the book.

It's a theme that comes up a lot in the books; more notably with Cassie and Ax who both face difficulties in justifying their role against their morality (Cassie) or duty (Ax). But for a series where the decision to fight and keep fighting despite all the horrors they have experienced was notably quick, it's nice to see the ramifications of these choices.

Rachael can sometimes be a very one note character in the books that don't focus on her, but she tends to be far more nuanced in her own stories. Between this and the David arc she shows far more compassion and fear than is normally the case, even going as far as to admit to it to the rest of the Animorphs.

The key thing here is that the heroes are given an explicit opportunity to choose their destiny. The heroes choice is a common trope in fiction, emphasising that these individuals knowingly give up on the things that would make them happy for the greater good (think Bruce Wayne sacrificing his reputation to maintain the Batman secret, or Spider-Mans 'with great power must also come great responsibility').

The Ellimist gives the series a chance to explore exactly what it means for these teens to be facing up to a potential lifetime of war, it's the first time they question what the future will look like should the war drag on and on.

The conversation between Rachael and Tobias represents an acceptance that their life can't be normal again;Rachael's decision to stay with the Animorphs and not leave foreshadows the fact that, (spoiler alert), she won't make it through this war. Her chance to get out rejected she will be in it to the end, and won't get to live beyond it. The tragedy is that here is the last point at which she could conceivably have escaped from the path laid out for her - rejecting the warrior she is becoming and returning to normality with her Dad.

By contrast the Ellimist presents a different choice; not a return to the status quo and abandoning the mission, but recognition that their cause it lost and choosing to save those they care about. Abandoning the war for Earth to save their families is a harder choice to make. Unusually, despite initial resistance they eventually make the decisions to do so. The fact that the Ellimist is playing a different game altogether is irrelevant: this is a book in which the heroes do come to the conclusion that abandoning earth to an almost certainly inevitable conquest by the Yeerk's is the best option. It says something about the stakes of the series that this decision is presented as almost certainly the best one; saving a few families and the species from extinction is better than allowing the entire population to succumb to enslavement. 

It absolutely blew my mind as a kid that just a few books into such an epic mega-series the heroes are so shell-shocked and traumatised that giving up and letting the bad guys win to save a few dozen people is not only considered a valid option, but actually gets chosen as the strategy.

There are some parts where it's clear that this is one of the earlier books, and the rules haven't quite been solidified yet; during the escape from the Yeerk Pool the Animorphs demorph to human to avoid being eaten by a Taxxon, something which is unlikely to happen in later books where the paranoia about being discovered to be humans has really crept in. Rachael complaining that a controller pushed her over is especially disconcerting; it would be hard for anyone to mistake a human girl for an andalite,    so if he's knocking her over you would assume he had realised that the guerrilla force the Yeerk's were hunting wasn't just comprised of blue alien centaurs with deadly blade tails. Clearly observational sloll isn't something that Visser 3 prizes.

We do get some great action sequences in the book that made it stand out for me when younger though; the inevitably future scene of Yeerk victory with dead bodies in schools and burnt out cars was one of my first post-apocalyptic scenes. Hands down the highlight however has to be Marco punching a security guard in the face through a reinforced window whilst in gorilla morph. It's up there with his driving the truck as a gorilla (in Megamorphs 1?) as a highlight for the character.

This is a pretty important book in the series introducing the Ellimist, Rachael's Grizzly morph and fleshing out the character so often written off as a gung-ho blood knight. More tha that though it's one of the most entertaining, and features some great moments and character development for almost everyone.

Also Try;

K A Applegate, Animorphs - http://animorphsforum.com/ebooks/

Michael Grant, Gone

R L Stine, Goosebumps

Kate Thompson, Switchers Trilogy

Animorphs: Megamorphs 3 - Elfangor's Secret, K. A. Applegate

"We found out who Visser Four is, And he has found the Time Matrix. The machine Elfangor had hidden in the abandoned construction site. The same place we met him on a night none of us will ever forget. Especially me. Now Visser Four has the Matrix and he plans to use it to become Visser One.

But Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, Ax and I can't let that happen. We can't let him alter time so that the Yeerks will win this invasion. So we're prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.   And, ultimately, one of us will lose this fight ..."









Animorphs is hands down my favourite series of books of all time, an epic set of young adult books detailing the war between five shapeshifting teenagers and their alien ally battling a massive invasion of brain-occupying slugs. It was the second biggest selling childrens series of the 90s (after Goosebumps) and had probably the best story arc of any childrens book series ever written.

Seriously. Because whilst Harry Potter may have killed off a lot of its supporting cast, it didn't have the chutzpah to kill of one of six main characters from the 50 books and then end the series with the implied death of all but one of the others as they go out against unbeatable odds for no benefit whatsoever.

Oh, and the romantic subplot was upended when one half of the ongoing will-they-won't-they became a war criminal responsible for the genocidal slaughter of thousands of prisoners in a last ditch attempt to stop the conflict dragging on for years more.

Years after I read them (they were first published from 1996) I still try and bore people with a full run down of individual stories and why I loved them. At some point, I will get round to blogging the whole series I'm sure, but suffice it to say that you should read them.

The holes in my collection of the physical books I'm always on the lookout to fill, and I picked this up in a charity shop. It's a short book - even the extended 'Megamorphs' won't stretch you more than an hour, but it's well worth a read, because this is a book that veers into my other favourite genre: Alternate History.

The idea is this; the war isn't going as smoothly as anticipated (mainly because of the guerrilla tactics of the Animorphs) so the Yeerks, the alien brain slugs, have decided to break up the course of human history. And they succeeded. So now the world is a fascist dystopia, slavery and genocide are accepted as normal and the war against the Yeerks will be over in a matter of months.

In an attempt to stop it the Animorphs are given the chance to pursure the agent responsible for changing the past back through time, encountering him at Agincourt, Trafalger, the crossing of the Delaware and the Normandy Landings. most of which end up being changed, to disasterous (and lethal) effect.

So you get a bit of information about each of these major historical turning points (Napoleon wins, America never breaks way from England, British Empire ends up going to war with a united Europe in World War Two) with little of the usual battles between aliens and people. It's a great introduction to history, and the idea of time travel and its repurcussions.

It's also the second Megamorphs in a row that deals with time travel, as Megamorphs 2 is about the Animorphs fighting aliens in the Time of the Dinosaurs. It's like these books were written for me.

Also Try:
K A Applegate, the entire Animorphs series - http://animorphsforum.com/ebooks/
K A Applegate, Everworld
Michael Grant, Gone
R L Stine, Goosebumps (or a review of all the Goosebumps books - http://www.bloggerbeware.com/)

Mars Attacks!, The Topps Company

Mars Attacks is a series of science fiction trading cards produced by Topps in 1962, depicting the gruesome invasion of Earth by Martians. The story unfolds over the course of the 55 card series, showing futuristic battle scenes with Martians, and their cruel, often bizarre methods of attack and torture. The series culminates with a human insurrection and the destruction of Mars. The short lived series retained it's devoted following and quickly became a collectors item and remains hugely popular and influential today. Tim Burton's 1996 movie adaptation of the story brought Mars Attacks back to the forefront of pop culture and the upcoming 50th anniversary in 2012 will do the same, introducing the story to a new generation of fans. Includes rare and never before seen material (sketches, concept art, test market materials), as well as an introduction by the series' creator, Len Brown, and an afterword by Zina Saunders, daughter of the original artist.

Like anyone with a vaguely geeky side, I love to collect stuff. As soon as there's more than one in a series, or multiple lines, I like to have them all. There's an element of completionist in anyone who's obsessive about their passions, whether that be Pokemon Cards (had every S1 card but Rapidash) or the Animorphs books (still missing much of the final set, but always looking).

For any child growing up in the UK, the first thing they will collect seriously are Panini stickers. These were the currency of the 90's playground. Before Pogs and Tazos, before YoYos and finger skateboards, stickers were the prized possession, with spares to be swapped, sold or bartered for those you still needed.

I have fond memories of the trip to the local corner shop to pick up pack of 6 Jurassic Park or football stickers (and then inevitably get 5 out of 6 I already own, made up for by a new shiny).

I am so grateful that we didn't have the American style 'cards' system that seems to have crept in since the big sticker companies folded. If we had, I suspect I would be living in a room filled with cards.

Instead, I live in a room filled with books, so the Mars Attacks! volume from Topps is the perfect purchase - collecting all of the initial 60's run of Mars Attacks cards, plus reproductions of the 1994 designs, and the 'lost' images that were never released.

Part art book, part oral history of the genesis and critical derision that greeted the cards, part record of a cult success that spawned comics books, action figures and a Tim Burton film, this is a great way of collecting an incredible collection cheaply.

The cultural history implicit in its pages is fascinating - the remaining first drafts of the cards show just how much had to be changed before they were released. Incredibly, the majority of the redesigns were less about the (incredibly rendered) gory violence, and more about the perceived immorality of scantily clad women. Scenes where people are decapitated by giant insects were altered to cover women's shoulders, whilst a burning dog, or spouts of blood escape censure (at least at first).

Also Try:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31558613@N00/sets/72157625601126001/ - Complete set of Mars Attacks! Cards on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nerdcoreblog/sets/72157622577125417/ - Complete set of Dinosaurs Attack! Cards on Flickr