Since the re-release of the series was announced people have wondered what changes, if any, will be made to the content of the series. All that has been confirmed thus far is new 3D morphing cover-art; and KA/Grant have stated that they are not (at least at this point) behind such decisions and are not even involved in the re-release; and that current Scholastic staff were mostly not around back when Animorphs was first being released.
I myself would guess that the content will largely be the same, with editing of mistakes made as well as perhaps minor changes to 'modernize' material that has become outdated. Still, with a fair amount of time (about a year) before the publishing date there is still certainly room for that to change as current Scholastic editors/publishers familiarize themselves further with the series. Some fans have wondered whether there will be additional stories or further developed back-stories. Others have expressed enough dissatisfaction with the ending of the series to hope that it is changed. There is also the possibility of changing existing content not just for outdated material but to correct KASUs, though this could be limited to some types and not others or large sweeping changes (changing large storyline aspects to create more reasonable or plausible situations or simply changing early minor stray bits of dialog/narration to reflect later established canon material).
Anyways, as I started to reply in the
http://animorphsforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=5243.30 thread, I started to mention on the side what I think would be the best single, simple change that could be made; but it developed into its own rant (which I will keep in spoiler tags here for those who don't care to read my thoughts and my change) and cause me to wonder about what changes Ani fans would like to see most in the series and conversely what things to you fear re-releasers will change that you couldn't bear to see?
[spoiler]
The rant is this: The single greatest thing an editor could do in the Animorphs re-release is get the text of the entire series in a single document, hit Ctrl-F and "Replace All" the word 'sentient' with 'sapient' (and 'sentience' with 'sapience' and so on); then casually insert correct usage of the term sentient in a few appropriate conversations throughout the series. I know being too nit-picky can be annoying, but the misuse of the term 'sentient' is the most annoying ongoing problem in sci-fi for the last half century.
'Sentience' describes having a sense or senses and a consciousness that allows one to perceive/feel/experience that sense subjectively (what is referred to as experiencing 'qualia');as opposed to other aspects of being a conscious entity such as being self-aware, intelligent so on.
'Sapience' describes what is often simply called 'wisdom', a level of intelligent thought and the ability to use that intelligence to make judgments on the values of something (either in terms of right/wrong values or useful/useless). This can be distinct from intelligence itself, but it is generally meant to imply an average human or almost human-level intelligence as a basic requirement.
Clarifying examples:
Humans are sapient (by virtue of the fact that we defined the necessary level of intelligence if nothing else) and they are also sentient.
If an alien is encountered who is capable of interacting with us on our level of intelligence, we can say determine that they are not only sentient (have senses) but sapient; so we can think of them as being their own persons when we normally only us the term 'person' for humans.
A machine may be said to have 'senses' in a loose use of the word in that it is able to accept some type of inputs (electrical or otherwise like a temperature or motion detecting probe), but even if you say that it has a set of 'senses' and is capable of preforming a predefined set of responses it doesn't follow that it is sentient because it did not actually have a consciousness that could 'experience' the sense (even storing the input in some form of 'memory' doesn't make it so in and of itself) and those studying AI and computing wonder about developing a machine that has either sentience or sapience.
Dogs, Cats, Rats and most animals that immediately come to mind are sentient because we can observe enough awareness (but not necessary self-awareness) of the things they experience (they experience it); but they are not sapient.
Scientists studying dolphins might debate whether they, though not as intelligent as humans, are conscious enough in a way to deem them sapient (allowing a definition that isn't quite as high an intelligence as an average human), but dolphins are clearly sentient.
Scientists studying ants would have no problem concluding that they are not sapient, but might debate whether ants are even sentient, because even though they live and function biologically in an individual sense their brains may not have enough capability for them to be even truly aware, it might be that their brains just function as a simple automatic set of responses to various stimuli (a biological version of the above described machine).
Anyways, the confusion between these clearly different terms in sci-fi started more than half a century ago and I presume that it happened something like this:
In the mid-20th century, in the dawn of computing, sci-fi authors began studying the possibilities of the science of computing to develop to the point of machines taking input with complex enough sensory probes and making decisions with complex enough systems of routines and calculations with so many layers of sub-routines and abstractions that the machines were in no way distinguishable from consciousness, intelligence and all the other aspects that makes a human a 'person'. In short, sci-fi authors dreamed up the idea of robots.
These sci-fi authors had a reasonable amount of scientific (and perhaps in some instances philosophical as well) knowledge to have narrations and dialogs with vocabulary that involved terms that describe these robots; such as having characters discuss whether there were ethical obligations or needs for laws to give robots rights because they had gradually gained sentience, they might even debate whether this sentience meant that the robots were actually 'alive' and what exactly it means to be living.
This was also a time when sci-fi was beginning to reach large general audiences rather than the limited niches of science and sci-fi magazines. Their readers, many themselves potential aspiring writers picked up the term 'sentience' from the use in early 'robot' sci-fi, but since the term 'sentience' was used about fictional robots who were not only conscious in a way that allowed debating their sentience, but also were able to understand and interact with 'sapience' readers without scientific backgrounds added the term 'sentient' to their vocabulary thinking it implied what should be called 'sapience'; and without any everyday usage in their lives they had no way learn the correction to this misunderstanding.
This lead to new aspiring writers to take this term that they picked up and use it; sometimes correctly by chance that the cases they were using them in were also to describe something that was both sapient and sentient, but often incorrectly discussing things being sentient or not when they should be discussing whether they are sapient or not. Perpetuating this leads to authors like KA, who is fascinated with the philosophy of behind the subjective experience writing about the subjective experience of animal bodies and minds; she has need more than many sci-fi authors before her to be able to correctly describe these things; but instead, having been mislead by years of mistake within sci-fi, she constantly uses the term 'sentient' when she should use 'sapient' (They should say 'The Hork-Bajir aren't that smart by human standards, but they are sapient' or the Drode should say 'It turns out that Orca falls just this side of sapient by our terms and is protected within the terms of the Ellimist/Crayak game and should go out of their way to discuss the relative levels of understanding, awareness and
sentience of their morphs, particularly the simple ones like ants and termites).
Now in this forum and other mediums for discussing both the sciences and philosophies about life and intelligence everyone uses the term 'sentience' incorrectly and doesn't even have the word 'sapience' in their vocabulary; through no fault of their own inadequately describing aspects of alien sapience and animal sentience. It is particulary annoying in threads like the
http://animorphsforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=5243.30 thread, where we are both discussing the Yeerks choice in hosts and various aspects of their sensory abilities and intelligence with inadequate terms to discuss one while misapplying one word to the other concept.
[/spoiler]
So, there was my change as well as quite the rant about why it really is that big a deal when it could be seen as a silly nit-picky thought. So what do ya'll think? Would you desperately love to see the ending change, or are there those who were plenty dissatisfied about the ending but wouldn't want to take the author's creation away from her? Should those outdated references be preserved as quaint, but beloved nostalgic memories or updated to relate to a new young audience? Other thoughts or suggestions on possible changes you'd be interested in seeing that I haven't thought of?
