Narrator: The Ellimist
Interior tagline: This is where it all began....
Publication: November 2000
Publisher’s description:
He is called the Ellimist. A
being with the ability to alter space and time. A being with a power that will
never be fully understood. He is the reason Elfangor came to Earth. He is the
reason the Earth now has a fighting chance. And though his actions never seem
quite right or wrong, you can be certain they are never, ever what anyone
expects.
This is the
beginning and the middle of the story. A story that needs to be told in order
to understand what might happen to the future. The future of the Animorphs. The
future of humanity. The future of Earth.
He is
called the Ellimist. And this is his story . . .
* Well, I guess that’s ambiguous and important-sounding
enough to interest me.
* And what better place to begin than the beginning? (There
are probably a lot of better places, actually, since this book was written near
the end of the series (and the narrative bookends actually take place during
the very last book) and therefore assumes that the reader already has extensive
knowledge of this universe, but I don’t know where else to place it in my
reading order. I could use its publication date, but that seems pretty
arbitrary, since it has no connection to the books published immediately before
and after it. Besides, reading this book first creates a kind of bookend for
the entire series, in a way. The story begins with one of the Animorphs dying,
and ends when we finally see that death.)
* I guess technically all the “Chronicles” books tell
stories that came before Animorphs, but I won’t be
reading The Hork-Bajir Chronicles or Visser here because the pre-Animorphs content of those books are framed as
flashbacks, of a sort, whereas The
Andalite Chronicles takes place entirely before/during the first Animorphs book.
* And the framing narrative of The Ellimist Chronicles takes place during the last Animorphs book, so maybe I should have read The Andalite Chronicles first and The Ellimist Chronicles last. That
doesn’t make sense either, though, because if you read The Ellimist Chronicles after The
Beginning, you’d already know the identity of the anonymous dying Animorph,
plus The Beginning was written as the
final book of the entire saga. There’s no really satisfactory place to wedge The Ellimist Chronicles into the reading
order of the other sixty-one books.
* Jesus Christ, anyway…
* In this book, we watch the Ellimist turn into… some kind
of magic tornado? The miniscule size of the image and the darkness of the ink
don’t really help, but that’s what it looks like to me. Morph fail.
* There’s also an advertisement on the book cover telling me
to watch Animorphs on TV. No mention of any time or channel.
* Wow, I just spent like half a page on this book and I
haven’t even started reading it yet.
* The book starts with a prologue that is two thirds of a
page long. A human child, one of the Animorphs, is dying, and the narrator is
prevented from helping him/her due to the rules of some game. The human asks if
there was any meaning to everything he/she has been through, and demands to
know who the narrator is, what he is,
and claims that he/she deserves an answer. The narrator agrees, and promises to
answer both this question and the question that the human will ask afterward.
* It’s just two thirds of a page, but the entire prologue is
actually astonishingly powerful compared to what I was expecting. The opening
hook catches your interest right off the bat: “The human child called to me.
The human child was dying, and nothing I could do within the rules of the game
would change that fact.” The fact that the narrator, who is clearly an alien,
refers to the human character as a child is particularly chilling; he’s
standing there watching this child die, and it’s clearly within his power to
save it, and he clearly wants to save
it, but he chooses not because it’s against “the rules.” What’s more, it is a child asking this question, paraphrased
by the narrator: “Was it all worth it? The pain, the despair, the fear. The
horror of violence suffered, and the corrupting horror of violence inflicted,
was it all worth it?” The narrator replies that he cannot answer that, but to
the child’s question of who he is, he responds, “I will give all the answer I
know.” All of that’s pretty damn powerful.
* At least the prologue gets five stars.
First Life
* This part of the story is called “First Life.”
* Okay, so the first thing we learn is the narrator’s name,
and that name is Azure Level, Seven Spar, Extension Two, Down-Messenger,
Forty-one, which sounds more like an address and seems like a terrible science
fiction trope (a character with an obnoxiously overcomplicated name), but the
fact that it’s real words that actually mean something instead of gobbledygook
makes it kind of cool. Fortunately, the narrator won’t ever be referred to by
this name again, as he also has two other names: Toomin, his “chosen name,” and
Ellimist, his “‘game’ name.” He picked the name Toomin because he likes the
sound of the word, “which is all the reason you need for a chosen name.”
Ellimist also means nothing, but he notes that when he chose it, he never
expected it would follow him for so long and so far. Eerie.
* So among whatever species the narrator belongs to, your
full name is pretty much your address, your “chosen” name is the equivalent of
names in the real world (the only reason you’re called that is because someone
liked the sound of it), and your “game” name, as we will soon see, is basically
your screen name.
* I actually kind of like that. Along with other things
we’re going to learn about this species, it’s sufficiently alien to give these
characters a world and culture that is distinctly not human, but it’s not so
alien that it’s distracting. What’s more, these comparisons to human norms
aren’t explicitly drawn in the book; this reading was the first time I made
them.
* The narrator belongs to a species called the Ketrans. They
have wings and hands, but instead of feet they apparently have “pods.” This is a little distractingly alien. If
they’re the equivalent of feet, just call them feet. If they’re not, give us a
more detailed description of this creature’s biology so we understand what
“pods” are. They also have talons, but it’s not made clear if these are part of
their pods or a different body part all together.
* That said, I do like the verisimilitude of the narration.
Since the narrator is himself a Ketran, he doesn’t feel compelled to give any
great description of his species’ appearance. Still, though, the premise of the
story is that he’s narrating all these events to a human character. Throw us a
bone, here.
* Also, Ketrans apparently communicate by psychic e-mails
called memms (memes?). There is
apparently a kind of “inbox” in their heads that has to be checked before a
Ketran becomes aware that someone is trying to communicate with him. Or maybe
there are different kinds of memms,
like some you get right away and some just wait in your inbox. It’s not really
clear.
* Anyway, Toomin/Ellimist is observing and describing this
species called the Pangabans, whose planet is under an eternal cloud cover. We
initially think that he’s talking about a real species, but we soon find out
that they actually exist in a game that Ellimist is playing with a Ketran
chosen named Redfar and “game” (the book puts “game” in quotation marks every
time it uses the phrase game name; I’m not sure why) named Inidar, both of
which are fairly cool names. The object of the game is to goad a primitive
species into building a successful civilization using only the smallest
manipulation of the environment while your opponent does the same, then, when
the two species encounter each other, whichever player’s alteration made his
species most equipped to defeat the other is the victor.
* So it’s kind of like a psychic multi-player Civilization, I guess, only the player
manipulates the world, not the people. I’ve never played any simulation or
strategy games, though, so I could be wrong.
* Awful alienized Earth saying: “Step into my lair, said the
dreth to the chorkant.”
* Ellimist chooses the Pangabans, while Inidar chooses the
Gunja Wave, a rodent species living on the planet the Pangabans’ world orbits.
The Ellimist’s move is to part the clouds of the Pangabans’ sky, allowing them
to see the Gunja Wave’s planet and realize for the first time that there is a
universe outside of their world. After the two players have made their
respective moves, the game accelerates. Millions of years pass in seconds,
while displays and indices monitor things like DNA mutation, climate change,
technology, and population. Ellimist watches natural selection play out among
the Pangabans as they mutate and evolve, fashioning weapons and hunting the
three-mile-long carnivorous eels that live in their seas. Just when they seem
on the verge of completely conquering all natural opposition on their planet,
however, they go extinct in an eyeblink.
* It turns out that Inidar’s move was to boost the
reproduction rate of the Gunja Wave slightly, heightening their natural
aggression and limiting their food supplies. Inidar predicted that Ellimist
would part the Pangabans’ clouds, and that move allowed the Gunja Wave to see
that world, prompting them to travel there and eat all the Pangabans.
* Inidar chastises Ellimist for underestimating the value of
sheer aggression, calling him a naïve idealist. “It’s not the good and worthy
who prosper. It’s just the motivated.” Hmm, I wonder if this will ever come up
again.
* This game, which apparently has over a million scenarios,
seems like an awesome idea that could probably never be implemented properly.
Still, I’m surprised that the closest thing we have to it is Spore. That game was fun for like three
days, then I never saw it again.
* Ellimist then gives some more background on his species
and planet, “fairly self-evident fact[s]” that he says he is mentioning only
because of plans to open his people’s uninet (which I guess is the psychic
equivalent of the Internet on which memms
are sent and Alien Civilizations is played) to offworlders.
* This seems to contradict my thought that the book’s
narration was Ellimist telling his life story to the dying Animorph. The
narration here implies that the story, or at least this part of it, is being
told at a much earlier point in time.
* The Ketrans live on the planet Ket, the surface of which
is covered with acid seas, lava flows, and “strangle-vines.” The Ketrans
themselves live on massive crystals that float three hundred miles in the sky.
Ketran scientists speculate that their species used to live on land but two
million years ago they somehow evolved a “symbiosis” with the crystals: the
crystals give the Ketrans a home, and the combined lift of hundreds of thousand
Ketran wings keep the crystals airborne once they grow above a half mile in
circumference, at which size unmanned crystals usually crash. The circumference
of the oldest known crystal is seventy-nine miles.
* “Interesting how it is often easy to understand the
evolution of an entirely different species, and yet be confused by one’s own.”
So I guess Ellimist isn’t a Creationist, then.
* Ketran “visionaries” hypothesize building artificial
engines to keep the crystals afloat, which would cut down on dock time and
increase free-flight time from one tenth to one half. Technological innovation
= increased leisure time.
* So I guess the Ketrans spend nine tenths of their time
docked on perches, flapping their wings to keep their crystals from crashing?
Do they keep flying while they’re asleep, or is “dock time” like their job, and
then free-flight is however much time they have left between working and
sleeping to just dick around? That’s an easier human equation, so that makes
more sense.
* The Ketrans are aware of at least two extraterrestrial
races: the Illamans and the Generationals. The latter discovered the Ketrans
after they found no traces of life on the surface of Ket, then accidentally
flew one of their air-skimmers smack into a mast on one of the crystals.
(Apparently the crystals have several masts, spars, and yards. I guess the
Ketrans’ perches, or “niches” as Ellimist calls them, are located on these.) I
bet their reaction was something like “Why the fuck are there bird-people on
giant crystals floating in the sky?”
* What kept the crystals up in the air before the Ketrans,
you ask? Why, “atmospheric pressures and internal buouyancies,” of course.
Uhhhhhh… sure, okay.
* Seriously, though, I like this ecosystem. It’s cool and
pretty unique. I can’t think of any other science fiction stories with a planet
like this.
* Ellimist talks to his closest “up” neighbor, Lackofa,
whose name is pronounced “LACK-uv-uh,” the narration specifies. “I think it was
supposed to be droll.” That’s kind of funny, given Lackofa’s stick-up-the-ass
disposition, but I like the name better with the pronunciation “la-KOAF-uh.”
Which is totally irrelevant to anything.
* Lackofa is a biologist who has been assigned to Mapping
Crystal Quadrant Three, or MCQ3, or the EmCee, which will be exploring deep
space. The ship’s nonessential crew will be announced shortly, and Ellimist
desperately hopes to be one of them.
* Ellimist casually mentions Lackofa doing something with
his mid-hands, which is kind of disconcerting but also informative because it
lets us know that Ketrans have more than two hands, and possibly at least six.
We also learn that Ketrans can speak vocally as well as sending memms, so I guess memms really are just psychic emails or instant messages.
* Also, Ketran emotion is apparently expressed by a change
in color of their quills, which is alien yet biologically believable. I like
this species, too.
* “I was an idiot. I was wasting my life in game playing,
free flying, and face-face. . . . I’d steadfastly refused any intellectual
specialization. I’d told myself I didn’t want to limit my mind by picking one
particular discipline. Laziness, that’s what it was. I was lazy. I was a
daydreamer. I was a juvie at an age when I could easily be taken seriously as
an adult. The only thing I cared about was the game, and I wasn’t even good at
that.”
* Sound like anyone you know?
* Apparently you can only plug into the uninet and memm when you’re docked on your perch,
because as soon as Ellimist goes into free-flight, all his queued memms blessedly disappear, including
“‘why don’t you perch with us?’ memms
from the dam and sire.” LOL, I get it.
* No, that actually is kind of funny.
* At this point Ellimist confirms that he is an adolescent
Ketran, which I guess makes sense. This is a series geared toward children ages
nine through twelve, after all. At the same time, that reading level doesn’t
actually make sense because none of those ages are, in fact, adolescent. Of
course, I started reading these books when I was nine or ten, so I guess the
system works.
* There’s a funny bit with Ellimist flying around, goofing
off and checking out some girl. The way he describes his home crystal here
makes it sound even cooler: “as the crystal moved in a slow rotation the
sunbeams blazed, reflected, from a million facets. Ice-blue, palest green,
yellow, violet, and pink.”
* Toomin/Ellimist goes to hang out with his three best
friends, who also applied to join the crew of the MCQ3: Redfar/Inidar,
Escobat/Wormer, and Doffnall/Aguella. Aguella is a “rare female gamer.” Maybe
they’re not really that different from humans after all.
* In a nice touch, these four all refer to each other by
their game names (“game” is no longer put in quotation marks) in real life.
Nice in a cute, familiar way, but also in a “LOL nerds” kind of way.
* There’s some alien jargon and sayings here that I don’t
like or don’t get. These are bird aliens whose lives revolve around flying, so
it makes sense that “breeze” and “breezy” would be popular slang terms or
expressions, but I find it kind of annoying. And I have no idea what “four
globes, no clouds” means.
* Ellimist quotes Lackofa and passes his acquaintance’s
intelligence off as his own, something I can empathize with.
* We learn here not only that Ellimist thinks Aguella is
pretty, but that she’s more serious than her three male friends. She’s into
passive sensor theory and her designs were incorporated into the sensor array
of the MCQ3.
* This is treated as a throwaway line whose only purpose is
to show us how smart Aguella is, but why the HELL would you have a teenage girl
helping you design your experimental extra-planetary exploration vehicle? How
is she that capable and accomplished when she spends most of her time playing
WoW? This is baffling to me.
* Aguella is accepted to join the MCQ3’s crew. There’s a
funny moment where the Speaker announces her formal name and Ellimist stupidly
asks, in response to her mysteriously troubled reaction, “Is that you?” I like
that their names are so long and complicated they can’t even remember their
closest friends’.
* If you’re wondering why Aguella was troubled about being
accepted for this job that she applied for, don’t, because it will never be
explained.
* And in a twist that is completely surprising (to no one),
Ellimist is also chosen to join the nonessential crew. Inidar and Wormer try to
hide their disappointment, and there’s a strangely deep moment where Ellimist
realizes that “their reactions were already irrelevant. I knew it, and so did
they, sadly. The four of us were now two and two. Wormer and Inidar would stay
behind. Aguella and I would go.”
* Ellimist hurries back to his perch and tells Lackofa the
news: “I made it. I’m nonessential!” which is the perfect setup to a great
zinger, but Lackofa just goes for the obvious route and says, “As nonessential
as it is possible to be.” Boooorring.
* Lackofa then reveals that Ellimist made the crew because
Lackofa sponsored him. Ellimist wonders why he would do that; they don’t even
really like each other. Ellimist is just a gamer, and a losing gamer at that.
In fact, he is ranked one hundred ninety-fourth out of the nine hundred nine
gamers registered in his set. Which… doesn’t really seem that bad to me.
* Lackofa says that Ellimist is analytically brilliant
despite his penchant for losing. He loses because he plays the game different
from everyone else. He doesn’t just try to win, he tries to win with kindness.
What a lame way to express an important character trait. For some reason it
doesn’t bother me, though. I could see an asshole like Lackofa saying something
like that.
* Ellimist is embarrassed. He never realized that Lackofa
had been studying him that closely. I never realized what a stalker Lackofa
was.
* Lackofa further explains his motives thusly: “We have any
number of brilliant scientists, brilliant analysts, brilliant communicators,
brilliant theoreticians, brilliant physicists, brilliant techs, and brilliant
astronomers on board the MCQ3. I asked myself what we didn’t have, and the
answer came to me: We had no brilliant losers.” I ask: why would you want any?
* Time for the inter-crystal Dance By! We learn that there
are thirty-two populated crystals on the planet, each with its own individual
uninet and unique society. The crystals apparently follow regular orbital
patterns and pass close to each other every several years. The Ketrans on the
Polar Orbit High Crystal are said to
be working on a way to communicate between crystals, linking them through a
single uninet that would involve sending electrons through air instead of just
crystal, as well as possibly psychic powers. This whole uninet thing is kind of
ill-defined.
* The Polars are also rumored to be into artificial quill
coloring, which Ellimist finds weird. “I mean, you have the quills you’re born
with, why would you want them to be green or whatever?”
* LOL, he’s just a kid.
* Aguella comes to get Ellimist for the Dance By, and points
out the odd growths on the Polar crystal. They realize that the Ketrans living
on it are in the process of shaping it into an airfoil, minimizing the need for
Ketran lift without the society-destroying introduction of anti-gravity
engines. It’s a radical move that they’re sure their crystal’s council of Wise
Ones would vehemently oppose.
* I don’t understand how these crystals keep growing, and
how the Ketrans shape the growth of something so massive. Maybe I just don’t
understand crystals in general.
* Ellimist and Aguella head over to the Polar crystal.
Aguella, being female, is faster, so Ellimist follows behind her and checks out
her ass.
* LOL prose: “She was beautiful, well formed, sturdy,
intelligent, funny, beautiful, very beautiful. That was several too many ‘beautifuls,’ I said to myself.”
* Ellimist realizes that Aguella is spreading mones for him, which I guess is the
Ketran word for pheromones, even though it’s basically just a shortening of the
English word. This pisses him off. Why not just translate the word to
pheromones, since that’s obviously what it means? Why bother making it an alien
word at all when it’s almost exactly like the English word?
* “I was helpless in her slipstream. I cut left, clear of
her backwash.” Is it just me, or does that sound incredibly filthy?
* Ellimist is worried that she’ll be angry, but she
continues to let him know she’s hot for him, this time by flirting instead of
date rape. Again, I’m not sure why he’s so upset about this.
* On the other crystal, they meet two Polars, only one of
whom will be at all important. His name is Menno. They ask about the airfoil,
and Menno explains that they voted on it. Ellimist and Aguella have no idea
what a vote is. Fortunately, this “alien is bewildered by common human concept”
scene manages to avoid being condescending.
* At this point we learn that Ketrans have two pods, four
wings, four eyes, and two arms. So I guess I was wrong again. I have no idea
what that mid-arm business was about, then.
* Menno talks about how change is coming and something about
becoming the players instead of the played (foreshadowing alert). The point of
the games Ellimist plays is to make the smallest change possible, but Menno
represents a new gamer movement called Intruders, who believe they should they
should stick themselves right in the middle of the game and take over. Which
seems like more of a political philosophy than anything that would be practical
in Alien Civilizations.
* Ellimist and Aguella have to return to their crystal, but
as they go, Menno makes some kind of gesture with his hands and shouts,
“Intrude!” “It wasn’t a greeting or a farewell, it was a statement of belief.
It was a challenge.”
* It was also incredibly lame.
* Lackofa’s welcoming words to Ellimist when he first boards
the MCQ3: “Just try not to be a complete idiot, okay? That’s all I ask.” I like
Lackofa.
* Apparently the Ketrans ride on the outside of the MCQ3
when it’s in space. The whole crystal is protected by a force field, but still…
geesh. Lackofa says that if the force field should fail, everyone will have
access to a breathing tube that they should use until they freeze to death. It
seems like they could have designed this thing a little better. I guess that’s
what would happen if NASA was staffed by high school girls.
* Menno now reveals the dark purpose of the MCQ3, which he
orders Ellimist and Aguella to keep secret under penalty of closure, which is
being cut free from your dock somehow and left to free-fly until you die from
starvation. Two years earlier, Ketran probes encountered an unmanned alien
craft that came out of Zero-space (this universe’s equivalent of hyperspace, if
you watch Star Wars or anime) a
million miles from Ket. The craft opened fire on the probes but the Ketrans
were able to learn that it had been sent by the Capasins, an extremely violent
and hostile species from Quadrant Three. The MCQ3’s mission is to contact the
Capasins and try to arrange terms of peace, or, failing that, learn enough
about them for the Ketrans to mount a defense.
* Time passes, and the MCQ3 grows closer to launch. One day,
Ellimist and Aguella are hanging out on the ship, and their home crystal blows
apart. This is the chronologically earliest action scene in <span style=“font-style:
italic;”>Animorphs</span>, and it’s a doozy. It’s only two and a
half pages long, but holy crap. Ellimist, cut and impaled by shards of his
home, watches as a wicked-looking alien ship fires red beams of energy into his
crystal. The Ketrans who are still alive flap their wings frantically to keep
it aloft, but then the alien ship fires a burst of flechettes, “millions of
tiny shredding metal hooks.”
* Astonishing prose alert: “The flechettes sprayed for five
seconds, no more, but at the end of that time every unshielded Ketran was torn
apart. The entire crystal might have been dipped in blood. The bodies began to
fall away. The crystal itself began to fall. Straight down, down, and gathering
speed, with no one left to hold it up any longer. It would take a long time to
fall three hundred miles.”
* So basically everyone Ellimist has known his whole life,
except for this girl he likes and his boring neighbor, is dead. Awesome.
* The alien ship fires at the MCQ3, but its force field
repels the blast, so the ship launches a smaller craft that begins forcing its
way through the shield. The Ketrans possess no weapons, so Ellimist improvises
one from the spear-tipped end of an incomplete crystal spar. He drops this
through the canopy of the small alien ship, and the crystal spears into the
large head of the Capasin inside. Its engines finally powered up, the MCQ3 then
escapes to Z-space.
* More astonishing prose: “The small alien craft was still
with us. The alien I had destroyed still stared with beautiful blue eyes.”
* In Z-space, the Ketrans examine the captured alien ship.
“Well, come on, hero. You killed him,” Lackofa calls to Ellimist. I like
Lackofa.
* Here we learn the first two of the Ketrans’ Five Laws:
lift for all, and take no sentient life. I like that they’re in that order.
* Ellimist volunteers to be the first to enter the alien
ship, something all the Ketrans are reluctant to do because their species
suffers from extreme claustrophobia. Once he gets a hold on his panic, Ellimist
appraises the ship as laughably crude and backward, wondering how something so
primitive could have murdered his entire home. I don’t know about that, buddy.
At least the Capasins invented space lasers. You guys just fly around on giant
improbable crystals all day and play video games in your minds. Last time I
checked, you had no weapons, no concept of planet-wide communications, and
spaceships made of exposed rocks with a force field. Also, the primitive
Capasins just butchered your planet.
* Ellimist studies the ship’s controls and somehow
intuitively understands which buttons do what. That seems even more improbable
than the crystals.
* So the Ketrans take the MCQ3 back to Ket and start looking
for other crystals, only to find nothing but empty sky. In fact, two sentences
in a row end with the phrase “nothing but empty sky.” The sky is very empty.
* They finally come across the Polar Orbit High Crystal
trying to hide in a cloud bank while the Capasin ship watches sadistically.
Ellimist and Lackofa pilot their captured crate-like ship, which they
unimaginatively name Crate, into battle. There’s a cool little action scene
where they try to adapt to the ship’s controls on the fly. The language is very
kinetic and fast-paced, and does a good job of making you feel as if you’re
there in the Crate with them, hurtling out of control.
* Also, clouds on Ket are green for some reason.
* Ellimist acclimates himself to ship-to-ship combat by
telling himself that he’s only playing a game: “Don’t think of it as lives, actual lives. It’s only a game. When it’s
all over Inidar and I will laugh . . . Only Inidar was dead, wasn’t he? And
everyone . . . everyone.”
* *low whistle*
* In a nice touch, Ellimist realizes that because the
Capasins are surface dwellers, they still think in two dimensions, and fly
their ship accordingly. He is able to use the smaller, nimbler Crate to
outmaneuver the main Capasin ship. Firing on an engine pod, he cripples the
ship, and to Lackofa’s horror fires again until the Capasins explode.
* Ellimist goes to the last surviving Wise One, Farsight,
and begins to introduce himself as Azure Level, Seven Spar, etc., only to be
cut off and told that there is no Azure Level anymore. In losing his home, he
has also lost his name. This isn’t dwelled on at any length, but it interested
me.
* Using his gamer expertise, Ellimist tries to explain the
psychology of the Capasins, as well as the danger that remains from the other
ships he believes to be on the planet, systematically wiping out the crystals.
Of course, he is denounced as a dumb kid, and the Ketrans turn their attention
to more important matters, like the Polars who have just flown over to the MCQ3
and ordered its inhabitants to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Polars’
democratic authority.
* In an amusing bit, the entire scene devolves into a
shouting match of obscure legal precedents and similar untimely nonsense.
Ellimist wishes to himself that everyone would just shut up, only to realize
when they do that he actually said it out loud.
* Menno shows up and reveals why the Capasins are attacking
them. It turns out that the Polars have learned how to broadcast signals
through Zero-space, and one of those signals was Alien Civilizations.
* “These aliens are here to exterminate us because they’ve
seen our games and believe them to be real. They think we make toys of other
species. That we interfere with their development with utter indifference to
the results. They aren’t here to do evil. They’re here to annihilate what they
believe to be a race of murderers.”
* That’s… really horrifying, actually.
* Then three more Capasin ships appear and blow Polar Orbit
High Crystal out of the sky.
* The MCQ3 and the Crate “beat wing” for Z-space; running
away is the only move they have left.
* Astonishing prose alert:
“They’ll kill everyone. Everyone, won’t they? Every crystal,
one by one.”
“Not us,” I said harshly. “Not if we run.”
* Seventy-two Ketrans escape the destruction of Ket.
Second Life
* Too bad the Polar Ketrans didn’t just broadcast Second Life. The Capasins would have
stayed the hell away.
* Sixty-three years have passed. Studying the technology of
the Crate, the Ketrans have developed their own advanced beam weaponry, and
rebuilt the MCQ3 as the Searcher, an actual enclosed ship made of metal, which
makes a lot more sense than just a crystal floating in space.
* Ellimist has been the leader of his people for most of
their exile, with Menno as his second in command. Ellimist and Aguella are a
couple (awwww), but there have been no Ketran babies born since they left Ket;
there’s an unspoken agreement not to reproduce until the Ketrans have a home
again.
* This is the part that really gets me. For the last
sixty-three years, the Ketrans have been traveling from star system to star
system, looking for a new place to live. They’ve found several habitable
worlds, but have passed them up because they’re looking for another
crystal-based environment.
* Menno thinks this is just retarded. He says that the
Ketrans have adapted in almost every way, but in this, they are still
pointlessly clinging to the past. Surreptitiously, I give him high five.
* I also wonder why they don’t just go back to Ket. Would
the Capasins still be hanging around after decades? I guess they could have
destroyed all the crystals, even the uninhabited ones. (Were there any uninhabited ones? I’m enjoying this book so far but
there are a lot of things that could stand to be fleshed out further.)
* The Searcher arrives in a new system with two habitable
moons. One is completely covered in water, but Aguella notices something
interesting on her scanners. Leaving Menno in charge of the Searcher, Ellimist
goes down to check it out with Aguella and Lackofa.
* There’s the seed of a mutiny subplot here, but it’s just a
red herring.
* On the moon, Ellimist describes the wondrous sights he
sees: eels, colorful fish, a forest of tentacles…
* Those tentacles grab the submersible. The report comes
back that the creature attacking them extends beyond the horizon in every
direction. Still unconcerned, Ellimist gives the order to fight back, but then
all hell breaks lose, and suddenly water is coming into the sub, and those
tentacles are, too.
* This whole sequence is actually very frightening. Maybe
because I have an intense fear of drowning, but maybe being pulled inexorably
to your watery doom by some kind of horrible tentacle behemoth is terrifying no
matter who you are.
* Ellimist wakes up on his home crystal, playing a game with
Inidar. Aguella, Menno, and Lackofa appear before him, as does the Capasin
whose brain he opened with a spear. Menno, Ellimist’s rival, had brought the
Searcher down into the planet’s atmosphere to attempt to rescue the crew of the
submersible, but the Searcher, and with it the last of the Ketran survivors,
had also been dragged under the water. “I was killed, Toomin,” says Aguella.
“We all were. All but you.”
* Ellimist says he wants to see the truth, and briefly, he
sees it. He is underwater, kept alive by the tentacles growing into his body.
The mangled corpses of his friends float nearby, similarly tethered.
* So… every character we have met since the beginning of the
book, except for Ellimist, is now dead.
* Also, all of this is incredibly horrific.
* The tentacled monster who has killed them covers every
square inch of landmass on the moon. Unfathomably ancient—“He had been old
before the first sentient lit his first rocket.”—its name is Father.
* I really like that for some reason. It’s a perfect fit.
Almost biblical.
* Ellimist asks why, out of Father’s countless victims,
Ketran and otherwise, he alone has been kept alive. “I want to play a game,
Ellimist,” he replies.
* Of course he does.
* It’s also worth noting that this is the first time
Ellimist is referred to as the
Ellimist. Rather, he’s called “Toomin the Ellimist.” Father calls him this
through Aguella’s mouth.
* Father keeps Ellimist alive for centuries, playing him at
games culled from across the galaxy. Ellimist never wins, but the game is all
he has; when he refuses to play, Father switches off the illusion of his home
and leaves him hanging miles underwater with the preserved corpses of his
friends.
* Father fabricates an entire life for Ellimist back on Ket,
using memories pulled from his brain and those of the other captured Ketrans.
Ellimist and Lackofa become old friends together, and Ellimist and Aguella have
a family, but because the illusion is based purely on memory, their children
are vague and undefined and appear and disappear as Ellimist happens to
remember them. Again, this whole situation is incredibly creepy, not to mention
horrifying.
* One day Father introduces a new game taken from a Skrit Na
ship he recently caught (the Skrit Na and their habits will be further
explained in the next book). Aboard was a member of a species called the
Unemites, who brought the game of music.
* Astonishing prose alert: “The sounds were not mere sounds.
I don’t have words to explain. Maybe no one does. The sounds touched a part of
me I’d long forgotten. The sounds made me think of Aguella. Of home. Of the
stars and the sun and the clouds and of all the beauty, sadness, joy, and
laughter I’d ever known.”
* Father and Ellimist play some alien stringed wind
instrument, and although Father’s music is beautiful and Ellimist’s sucks, he
senses the potential to improvement, and counts on Father’s cruelty to force
him to play the game again and again until he does so.
* The whole next chapter, Chapter 17, is great. It’s only
three pages long, but almost the entire thing bears quoting.
* Father and Ellimist play their hundredth game of music.
Ellimist has hidden from him how much he has improved, how he has practiced the
instrument thousands of times in his head. Father, on the other hand, has
stayed the same: no improvisation, no advancement, no original thought.
* Although Father has a tentacle growing directly into
Ellimist’s brain that can read his memories and thoughts so I’m not sure how he
doesn’t realize what Ellimist’s been doing.
* Ellimist channels his loss and his loneliness and his love
and puts on a performance that the simulated Unemite audience goes wild for:
“It was Aguella who made the music possible for me, and the lack of an Aguella,
or anything like her, that would doom poor Father. You needed love to win at
the game of music.”
* So Father gets all huffy and leaves Ellimist floating
alone in the dead sea for years. Then he comes back with new games, but
Ellimist has learned from the game of music to trust his intuition and think
outside the box, something Father cannot do, and he begins to win these new
games, too, until Father can no longer beat him at anything.
* Ellimist hopes Father will kill him for his
transgressions, but Father only withdraws his mind again. This time, Ellimist
acts. He uses Father’s own neural net to touch the neurons in Aguella’s dead
brain, briefly restoring to her some semblance of life, switching her on like a
soulless biological computer. The dialogue between the two of them is kind of
awkward but still kind of powerful. Then Ellimist downloads everything in her
brain.
* Astonishing prose alert:
“I lowered the barriers between us. Felt the flood of
information come into me. Data, that’s all it was, the encoded data that,
deciphered, was all that made her Ketran. Her fear, her desire, her love.
“It all became a part of me and even in that terrible
moment, that hideous moment when I treated my one love like nothing more than a
uninet file, I gloated and thought, Ah,
Father, you were a fool to withdraw. Now I’ll come for you.”
* Then Ellimist downloads the rest of the Ketrans, and then
all the other species that Father has ensnared over the immeasurable eons.
* It takes Father time to realize what Ellimist is doing,
and when he realizes that for the first time in his entire evolution something
poses a threat to him, he begins to look for the source of this unease, and
finds only emptiness where once there had been minds that were a part of him.
* When Ellimist has taken half of what Father was, he
challenges him to one final game.
Third Life
* So ends our brief foray into the eldritch horror of
Father’s graveyard moon.
* The last mind Ellimist absorbs is Father’s, but he finds
that Father has no actual mind of his own. Father was just a sponge, the
composite of all the alien minds he had absorbed over millions of years. In
killing Father, Ellimist has become everything he was.
* Ellimist rips Father’s tendrils out of his body (They were
growing into his brain. How does this not kill him?) and swims to the surface
(He was miles underwater. How does this not kill him?). Once there, he finds
the island where Father dumped all the spaceships he’d caught over his
lifetime. Meanwhile, the millions of minds he absorbed are crowded within his
limited biological brain. He contains a multitude within him, accustomed to
living and thinking and seeing and hearing and moving in a multitude of ways.
Ellimist realizes that Menno had been right all along; in order to survive, he
has to adapt.
* He spends thirty years building steamrollers and junk to
clear the forests on this island, then building this massive spaceship out of
all the other spaceships, using the knowledge of the multitude contained within
his head. It’s kind of weird, what happens, but basically I guess he merges
himself with this ship somehow then opens the floodgates in his mind and pours
his collective consciousness out of his head and into the ship.
* Then he flies away and shoots the moon until it blows up
or its atmosphere burns up or something.
* At this part he says that he’d spent the better part of a
century on Father’s moon. But I’m pretty sure that earlier he said he was there
for hundreds of years.
* So then Ellimist just kicks around the galaxy for a while
in this ship (which is apparently more powerful than any other ship that
exists, somehow) and he comes across these two species in the middle of an
intrastellar war, so he steps in and interposes his invincible ship between
their weapons and goes “Your war’s over, bitches.”
* The Jallians are represented by some guy named Captain
Whee, btw.
* If Ellimist was playing Alien Civilizations, he notes,
he’d just change the planets’ orbits so each species’ primitive spaceships
wouldn’t be able to reach the other’s. But he’s not that powerful, so instead
he moves an asteroid field between the two planets, effectively creating an
orbital minefield. The Jallians and the Inner Worlders are unable to kill each
other anymore.
* So this is how the last Ketran in the galaxy finds his
purpose.
* The Ellimist, as he finally
comes to be known by the species he encounters throughout the galaxy, continues
his “third life” for one thousand years. He is determined never to allow
anything like the Capasin massacre of Ket to occur again.
* “I would intrude with exquisite sensitivity and the purest
motivations. I would create harmonies. Boldness allied with restraint and a
minimalist aesthetic, all in the service of moral certainties: that peace was
better than war, that freedom was better than slavery, that knowledge was
better than ignorance. Oh, yes, the galaxy would be a wonderful place under my
guidance.”
* The Ellimist is starting to sound like a huge dick now.
Leave my evolution alone, you bastard.
* So eventually he winds up back at the first star system he
ever interfered with, the one with the Jallians and the Inner Worlders. Eager
to see the results his handiwork has had over the last millennium, he is
dismayed to find that the Inner World dropped like seven hundred nukes on Jall,
then collapsed into barbarism due to the lack of an external challenge.
* “Not such an easy game to win, is it?”
* And with that, we are introduced to the ultimate evil of
the Animorphs universe: Crayak, the Unicron to the Ellimist’s Primus, the Man
in Black to his Jacob.
* An entire planetoid emerges from Z-space, and for the
first time in centuries, the Ellimist is afraid. He scans Crayak’s ship/mobile
planet, and there’s this odd bit of narrative:
* “My sensors showed lines of power, raw, snapping power
connecting this one creature to all the other life-forms [on the planetoid].”
* Um… what does that mean?
* The author assumes that we are already familiar with
Crayak’s physical appearance, so she doesn’t do a very good job of describing
it. Anyone starting the Animorphs series with this book
knows only that Crayak is part machine (like the Ellimist) and has “massive,
muscled limbs” and a “single, dominating red eye.”
* Now that I think of it, I don’t think he was described
that much more thoroughly in the rest of the series. In fact, I’m pretty sure
he was explicitly stated not to have any limbs at that point. Hmm…
* Crayak taunts the Ellimist for his failure here, and the
Ellimist realizes that he is still, after all, a brilliant loser. He even lost
to Father, in the end, by becoming Father.
* Atrocious prose alert: “I was but a high-tech version of
Father.”
* Crayak reveals that he’s been following the Ellimist
around the galaxy, observing his handiwork as the “Great Cosmic Do-gooder.”
Most of the time, his meddling led to peaceful, successful results. In those
cases, Crayak was forced to destroy the species himself.
* I like Crayak.
* I rather like this exchange. It marks the beginning of
everything that is to come, the entire series, in fact:
“Are you mad?!” I cried.
“No, I don’t think so, Ellimist. I’m just a gamer. Like you.
But with a perhaps different philosophy. I don’t play the game to save the
species, but to annihilate it. I play the game of genocide. This galaxy has
even more potential games within it than the galaxy I left behind. I will
cleanse this galaxy of all life, too. Then, when no sentient thing is left
alive, I will kill you, Ellimist. That’s my game. Shall we play?”
* So the implication here is that Crayak killed everything
in his home galaxy and has now come to our galaxy to repeat this
accomplishment. I don’t think this quite squares with the backstory we’re given
later in the series, but we’ll find out when we get there.
* The Ellimist chases Crayak around the galaxy for a while,
trying to save species that Crayak has put in impossible situations as a part
of this new game.
* “And I played the weaker side: I had to save; he had only
to destroy.”
* Their first encounter after their initial meeting takes
place in a star system with three separate planets inhabited by three separate
sentient species. That seems wildly improbable.
* One of these planets is the Capasin homeworld, so there’s
the potential for the Ellimist to face a really interesting moral dilemma here,
but nothing’s really made of it.
* As it is, the Capasin world is the only one that ends up
surviving. Of the other two, I really wish we’d gotten to see some more of the
species called the Folk. They are “obsessed by a eugenic vision that motivated
them to kill upwards of ninety percent of their own offspring for real or
imaginary defects.” That’s pretty damn creepy. Plus, they’re called the Folk.
Can we get John Carpenter to direct this movie?
* The other planet explodes when an asteroid strike causes
its landmasses to crack open and drain its oceans into its core. That sounds
ridiculous. Can something like that actually happen?
* These games go on for millennia, with the Ellimist always
losing: “My concern for the innocent wouldn’t let me walk away. Or was it just
my ego?”
* Definitely ego.
* So the Ellimist finally decides that enough is enough and
he’s not going to play Crayak’s games anymore, not until he devises a winning
strategy. But first, he’s really lonely, so he clones himself a body from some
alien species, downloads an abridged version of his own super-brain into it,
and sends it down to hang out with this species for a while.
* The name of the species isn’t given, but from the
description, anyone who’s read any of the regular series knows that the
Ellimist is now an Andalite. If you’re just starting the series here, though, I
guess this is your first introduction to them.
* It’s difficult to talk about this book as if I don’t
understand any of the references it’s making to the rest of the series, which I
supposedly haven’t read yet, so I’m not going to talk about how absurd I find
it that the Ellimist apparently brings the Andalites the gift of thought-speech
(telepathy).
* He ingratiates himself with the first tribe he encounters
by shooting a giant monster in the head with a laser gun. He also gives this
species a name: Andalites. The sentence that introduces their name is given its
own paragraph. Hmm, I wonder if we’ll be seeing this species again.
* The Ellimist marries an Andalite woman named Tree. Their
first child dies of disease, and there’s a fairly interesting passage where the
Ellimist ponders his power to eliminate disease on this planet, to save them
from predators and famine, to alter their biology for improved evolution… yet
he doesn’t do it. Toomin the Ellimist, finally, is learning.
* “More children, some live,” Tree tells him, and this is
how the Ellimist learns to counter Crayak’s strategy. Once his wife dies and
their son becomes a leader of the tribe, the Andalite Ellimist returns to his
full self and he returns to the larger galaxy with the intention to seed life
on two new planets for every one Crayak destroys.
* We then fast-forward one hundred thousand years.
* Jesus, the time-jumps in this book.
* The Ellimist creates a species that he designs to be
wholly good and non-aggressive, and tasks them with spreading life throughout
the stars. He names them the Pemalites, another species we’ll be hearing more
about in future books. No explanation for the Ellimist’s favoritism toward
names ending in “-alite.”
* The Ellimist has by this point grown beyond a single
body/ship/crystal into thirty-six of them. He’s just dicking around one day
when Crayak comes out of nowhere and starts blowing him up. But Crayak still
just has his giant planet-ship; he hasn’t grown at all in the millennia since
they last met, and now the Ellimist is nearly his equal.
* This is pretty much the coolest battle in all of science
fiction, ever. I’m not even going to try to describe how awesome Chapter 26 of The Ellimist Chronicles is. Badass.
* Basically, Crayak and the Ellimist chase each other around
the galaxy attacking each other with every weapon imaginable and destroying
countless sentient species in the process. As they fight, each grows more
powerful, learning from the other and adding to his own weapons and abilities.
They become almost symbiotic, neither capable of killing the other, each
forcing the other to grow and evolve through their constant conflict.
* Eventually, though, Crayak realizes that he’s going to
lose, so he sets a trap for the Ellimist, luring him into a black hole.
* At this point, the Ellimist consists of four thousand, two
hundred twenty ships. Just FYI.
* A lot of them are sucked into the black hole and crushed,
including the original ship/crystal with the Ellimist’s original Ketran body.
While the Ellimist’s mind is torn between real space, Zero-space, and the black
hole, Crayak sets about destroying the rest of his physical body (bodies).
* Except for some reason the Ellimist is now God.
* This makes no sense that I can fathom, but for some
reason, having his brain stretched and distorted between these three separate
media of reality has introduced the Ellimist into “the code of creation.” He
can see everything at once from all angles; with hands that don’t exist, he can
touch and reshape the fabric of space-time itself.
* The Ellimist no longer has any sort of physical form, yet
his consciousness lives on.
End Game
* This fourth section of the book is just six pages long
(excluding the epilogue), so I’m not sure why the author decided to make it its
own section, but whatevs.
* Ellimist takes a while (like, millions of years in real
time, literally) to process his new environment. Despite the unmatched
evolution he had achieved before his ascension (or whatever you want to call
it), he is still just a “mere mortal creature” suddenly bestowed with the
knowledge and powers of God. He exists outside of time and space; he has no
size, no form, and no relationship with the passing of time.
* He watches as Crayak’s darkness begins to spread
throughout the galaxy, and eventually Crayak arrives in a star system with nine
planets orbiting a yellow star.
* I’d think this was supposed to be our solar system, but,
you know, we only have eight planets. :(
* Two of the planets have life: the red one and the blue
one. The red planet is almost dead already, but the blue one is populated by
giant monsters in various forms. The Ellimist sees the potential for sentience,
however, in the planet’s population of small rodents.
* Crayak moves to destroy this planet, but the Ellimist’s
unseen godhand rescues it, physically moving it along its orbit so that
Crayak’s attack misses completely.
* And now here is the part that really gets me:
An absurdly rare event, a cosmic coincidence had fashioned
me. The odds? The odds were billions to one, trillions to one, incalculable.
But those were odds of this thing happening once. The odds
of it happening again were great. Crayak learned. Crayak watched. Once I
revealed myself to him, once I acted in such a way as to show myself, Crayak
would find the way to follow me here. And as I was unchanged in mind and
morality, so he would be unchanged.
* So, let me get this straight. The Ellimist falls into a
black hole, and somehow this makes him more or less omnipotent. Now what he’s
worried about is that Crayak is going to find a way to duplicate this
once-in-eternity nonsensically random coincidence. That is, falling into a
black hole and becoming God instead of just being killed. Right? Is that it?
* Huh, I guess he was right to worry, because in the next
chapter that’s exactly what Crayak’s already done. We don’t even get to see it
happen or how he figures it out.
* Not that I’m complaining; dramatically, I think it works
better this way:
“So here you are, Ellimist.”
“I’ve been expecting you, Crayak.”
* They realize that they can no longer directly harm one
another, and any damage that Crayak tries to do to the galaxy, the Ellimist can
simply reverse. If they keep up their war within the bowels of time and space,
however, they’ll just end up collapsing the universe and destroying themselves
along with everything else.
* Sure, why not?
* The Ellimist suggests that they just sit back and watch
creation unfold, but this is unacceptable to Crayak; he’d rather die than be a
passive observer. Good for you, Crayak.
* So they agree to play one final game. There must be rules
which they both agree on, and eventually, after millions of years, there will
be a winner.
* “Crayak smiled his hideous smile. ‘I’m not going
anywhere.’”
* Crayak has a mouth now? I mean, I guess he’s formless now
too and can appear as whatever he likes, but the Ellimist said he chose to
appear as he always had, and I don’t remember his big red eye monster body
having a mouth. Although I guess he was never described as not having a mouth...
* Question: why didn’t the Ellimist just kill Crayak before
he figured out how to do the black hole/god glitch? Would’ve made sense, saved
some time. Not to mention maybe all of creation.
* ’Cause we all end up in a tiny pine box
A mighty small drop in a mighty dark plot
And the mighty fine print hastens the trip to our epilogue
Epilogue
A mighty small drop in a mighty dark plot
And the mighty fine print hastens the trip to our epilogue
Epilogue
* Now the dying human child knows who and what the Ellimist
is. “You were a kid,” the human summarizes. “Like me in some ways, a kid who
got in way too deep and couldn’t get back out.”
* “A kid,” the Ellimist agrees.
* The Ellimist says that he didn’t intend for this person to
be one of “the six”; he/she was a happy accident. Presumably this whole “six”
business will make more sense once we get into the main series. There are six
Animorphs, right?
* Now the human comes to the second question the Ellimist
predicted he/she would ask. The Ellimist doesn’t know how everything will end,
if everything will turn out okay, so instead, the dying Animorph asks something
else.
* Last words of the book:
“Okay, then answer this, Ellimist: Did I . . . did I make a
difference? My life, and my . . . my death . . . was I worth it? Did my life
really matter?”
“Yes. You were brave. You were strong. You were good. You
mattered.”
“Yeah. Okay, then. Okay, then.”
A small strand of space-time went dark and coiled into
nothingness.
* That is just heartbreaking, and we don’t even know who
this character is.
* So, that was The
Ellimist Chronicles, the beginning (and end) of Animorphs. I
liked it a lot, actually. There was a lot of cool stuff and ideas, but the book
covers millions of years in two hundred pages, so naturally there’s a lot that
goes underdeveloped. Like I said, I like the environment of Ket a lot and I
wish we could have spent more time there. The first half of the story takes
place there, but I would’ve read an entire book set on that planet. I also
would have loved a novel about the Ketrans’ adventures during their diaspora. A
lot of potential there.
* Basically, so much in this book happened off screen. There
was a lot of summary, a lot of potentially interesting characters who were
never really fully developed, a lot of telling instead of showing. It was told
in an interesting, imagination-catching way, but there’s still so much more I
would have liked to see. This could have been a much longer novel, or even a
short series of novels. But I guess Animorphs is about the
Animorphs, and you can’t spend too much time away from them. Also, this is a
book for children.
* I also think Crayak was portrayed as too stereotypically
villainous in some scenes. I understand he’s the embodiment of evil in this
series, but as such, I don’t think he really fits the role of the wisecracking,
gleefully malevolent bad guy he frequently appears as here. It just makes him
seem too… human.
* This book was a pretty entertaining read, though, given what
I was expecting. If the rest of the series can maintain this level of quality
preteen entertainment, maybe I won’t hate this project as much as I thought.
**** out of **** stars.
* I was going to go back and edit this review, but I got bored
about a page in, so good luck.
Alien count
333
Breet
Capasin
Chan Wath
Daankin
Folk
Generational
Gofinickiliast
Grasper
Hayati
Illaman
Inner – Inner World
Jallian – Jall
Ketran – Ket
Laga
Mamathisk
Multitudinal
Unemite
Wurb
Planet count
Inner World
Jall
Ket
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