Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: Richard on January 29, 2010, 12:08:23 AM
-
One question per person will be posted until Michael Grant / K.A. Applegate responds.
Please do not repeat questions (http://animorphsforum.com/forum/index.php/topic,1343.0.html): they will not be posted to be answered.
Please PM me (http://animorphsforum.com/forum/index.php?action=pm;sa=send;u=1) to ask the question.
-
My name's Taormina, but most RAFians know me as Myitt (my old Yeerk rebel character, very Han Solo-wannabe). Thanks for writing such a great series that really influenced my childhood, and keeps on influencing the way I think about the world. I'm really glad that Animorphs is going to be back on bookstore shelves and influencing a new generation of readers. I'm curious to know if any of the '90s-centric stuff in the series is going to be updated, like 56k modems and PlayStation Ones and so on? Do kids these days even listen to greats like The Offspring and "Nice Is Neat" anymore, or is it all Hannah Montana? (Please, no, wait--forget I ever said anything ::) )
-
We don't know how much updating there will be. We hope there will be some but honestly Scholastic doesn't talk to us much. The decision is entirely theirs. Yes, this sounds a little odd, but right now that's where it stands. None of the people who were at Scholastic during ANIMORPHS are there now -- our editor Tonya Martin is long gone, and the boss of bosses, the series queen herself, Jean Feiwel, (Goosebumps, Babysitters Club, Animorphs) now runs an imprint at Macmillan.
The editors there now are not very familiar with ANIMORPHS. Although we think they're familiarizing themselves with the series.
The biggest updating problem by the way isn't Offspring (which admittedly did not hold up over time) but the ubiquity of cell phones and especially smart phones. They'd screw up many a plot point.
-
Thanks for that MG/KA....
On the same topic:
How do you feel about the upcoming Animorphs Re-release(assuming this was Schoolastic's idea and not your own) and rumors about it being used to make a fan base large enough for an Animorphs movie?
-
We're happy about a re-release. With some caveats.
Our preference would be for a book re-release of a limited number of books -- there's no way they can redo all the books in paper -- accompanied by an e-book re-release of all the books. In an ideal world we'd see e-books going out for $3.99 or so.
We'd love to see a movie. We'd be working to that end but Scholastic has essentially shut us out of any discussion or consideration of such a thing. We are not updated, we are not consulted or involved.
Michael has a great deal more involvement in and control over movie prospects for GONE than we have over ANIMORPHS.
-
Hi KA and Michael,
Thanks so much for answering our questions again! It's awesome that you guys are so cool to such nerdy fans.
Anyway, now that it's been almost ten years since the series ended, us nerdy fans have obsessively scoured and examined every inch of the series. Though I don't expect you to look back with this level of scrutiny, now that this time has passed, would you have done anything differently with regards to the series? Character arcs, plot arcs, distribution schedule, anything at all?On a related note, if the Animorphs continuation is picked up, would you incorporate any of these changes?
-
There are some "inside baseball" changes maybe, like spreading the morphs out over more time. By the end we were about ready to start morphing slugs because we'd run out of cool animals. And we probably wouldn't have done MEGAMORPHS with shifting POV's like that -- they were hard to follow.
We might also have given Cassie a bit more edge as a character. But maybe not. And the Ellimist may have been too much, too powerful, too superman.
Good question, we'll think about it.
-
It has been ten years since the end of Animorphs, and the fanbase is still going strong. Your work has had a huge impact on a generation, and with the re-release it will influence the new. When you were writing Animorphs, when did you first realize that you had crafted the new Hardy Boys, the new Nancy Drew? When you did see this, did it change your writing style, giving it more an eye to posterity?
Also, in the new release, please use better glue. My copy of #21 is in a looseleaf binder.
Finally, I thank you. Your books led me to be an engineer, and introduced me to Heinlein.
(The Stranger was next to Stranger in a Strange Land.)
-
We never did realize it was having that much impact. Not until we were done, actually.
We have a powerful aversion to self-importance and we hate to ever sound like those full-of-themselves writers who babble on about their craft and their sacrifice and their baring their soul and blah blah blah. We're two people with jobs as writers, no better than anyone else with a job, no better for that matter than we were when we were waiting tables or pushing a vacuum.
So it's good to hear such respect for our work, but we can't look each other in the eye and take ourselves seriously. As far as we're concerned we're still a couple of dumb-asses who can't keep the house clean or pay bills on time or raise our kids competently.
We will however take credit for introducing you to Heinlein who was Michael's personal god growing up.
-
Hey, just my questions for KA.
1. How do you get the science to fit properly into the story so it makes sense?
2. What science fiction (or any genre) do you think influenced you when writing Animorphs and Remnents?
3. What do you think really happened during the 'regreening' process in the last Remnents book?
I loved, loved, loved Animorphs growing up, but was totally blown away by the Remnents series which I just finished reading. Love you so much!!!!
First of all, thank you so much for writing a series that's stayed with me for so long and for agreeing to answer our (probably too focused on minutia) questions.
I'm passing along a question from clibanarius at the Animorphs Livejournal community:
What happened to Qaufinijinivon and the Hork-Bajir DNA he obtained (IIRC) did he grow new (and hopefully smarter) Hork-Bajir and did they take back their planet?
Again, thank you.
-
1) Ah hah hah hah, good one. We just make stuff up. Katherine took a physics course once and instantly forgot all of it. Michael's a high school drop out. It's why we write fiction: it requires so few actual facts. By odd coincidence we were just sitting here quizzing Jake (our son, not the character) on a physics book he's reading. He's home-schooled for now, so we wanted to be sure he's actually reading the stuff. He just rattled off a five minute spiel on probabilities and light hitting glass and of course we understood not a word. But we were convinced he read the book.
2) Michael was always the sci fi guy. Katherine was the animal person. (Oversimplifying a bit.) M read all the old classics -- Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Dick. But actually a greater influence was probably philosophy, especially epistemology. We both studied a bit of existential phenomenology and always were concerned with the nature of experience. That probably had the greatest practical impact since we were very interested in the experience of seeing the world through animal eyes.
3) To tell you the horrible truth we don't remember. By the end of REMNANTS we were utterly burned out and running on fumes. We'd written something like 5 million words in ten years, we had a baby after many years of being a childless couple, we were getting no sleep and we sort of staggered to the finish line like delirious marathoners. We realize that's not a pretty picture, but you need to understand that in addition to Animorphs and Remnants we had Everworld and all the earlier series we had written -- endless numbers of books, characters, plotlines -- all crammed into our heads. And because Jake was a lousy sleeper and had health issues we were getting 4 hours of sleep a night. That last year was a sort of blur. There's a reason we quit when we did.
The passed along question: We never speculate about what would have happened in some theoretical continuation of a story. It's the reader's job to decide what happens next.
-
Thank you so much for coming around to answer our questions; I think you know how wonderful you two are.
Part of why your books are just as important to me as a college student as they were in elementary school is because you deal with a lot of very dark topics and refuse to offer any easy answers. Was there ever times when your publishers asked you to leave out darker parts of the books or make them more kid-friendly? What were they? Did you?
Hi! Firstly, I'd just like to say how much I love your books. They were pretty much the thing I was obsessed with as a kid, and when I re-read them all again recently...well, let's just say as a 23 year old I have now gotten obsessed all over again! So thanks so much for writing them.
As for my question...I'd like to know if you decided on last names for any of the Animorphs other than Jake. And if you did, what are they?
-
Neither of us can recall any time when Scholastic asked us to cut anything. Partly this is because we don't think they were paying much attention after about book #4. The monthly book thing was tough for them to keep up with.
We are both addicted to ambiguity. We just kind of hate simplistic answers to complicated questions. And we also really hate lecturing or acting like we have all the answers. In most cases we want to lay out the facts, lay out the issues, and let the readers figure out what they think. There are issues where we take a stand -- on racism, for example since we don't really think there are two sides to that -- but in most cases we think it's boring to say, "Here's what you should think."
It's very cool for example that religious readers and non-religious readers have written us letters saying, "I've taken your books to heart." Much the same with the GONE series by the way, which deals with a lot of "political" and moral issues but which doesn't really say "this is what you should think."
Not our business to tell you what to think, it's our business to tell you to think.
Now, we have a question which you can repost in some better location: Digital publishing makes the monthly series possible again. (Bookstores hate them, but in digital we don't have bookstores.) Would you -- or your younger incarnations -- buy and read digital books released on a monthly basis? And when you think about it, what price seems fair?
This is a new area and we're trying to get a handle on it.
-
One of our members started a thread / discussion to talk about the digital publishing question you brought up. You can follow the discussion here (http://animorphsforum.com/forum/index.php/topic,4566.0.html).
It's maybe not a question you've been asked before, (certainly not one of the more popular ones), but did you ever think about making a character gay? Not as in, to have a token character, but just as a purely creative decision? Or, did you, but as it was a series aimed at kids/young adults, Scholastic wouldn't allow it? I read on a fanfiction a while ago that the writer claimed he talked to you years ago, and you said Tom was meant to be gay, but Scholastic wouldn't allow it, (even though I discovered he was BSing) but it got me thinking. Like one episode of the Animorphs TV series (which you probably haven't seen) where Ax and Marco danced, as Jake and Cassie and Tobias and Rachel were dancing. I thought it was pretty gutsy to have a reference to gay boy scouts in book #23, and this also led me to wonder, as I'm sure there are some gay fans of Animorphs out there.
-
The closest we got in ANIMORPHS was Ax who was, in his human morph, a combination of male and female DNA. That was a sort of veiled thing, but beyond tweaking people's sensibilities we never went anywhere with it.
So no, we never did have an openly gay character in ANIMORPHS. It's a shame. We don't know whether Scholastic would have had a problem with it or not, and of course sex was way, way off the table with Ani so in some ways it was irrelevant. But we could have done it, we should have, but we didn't.
In GONE of course Michael has one major character who is openly gay -- Dekka -- and her seemingly doomed love for Brianna is discussed in LIES and more in PLAGUE. There's another major character who will likely be revealed as gay.
In writing ANIMORPHS (and other K.A. series) and in GONE we have jointly and severally tried to talk politics and philosophy without showing our hand, without preaching. But we are nevertheless strongly of the opinion that the United States does not -- or at least should not -- have different classes of citizen. All Americans should have the same rights without reference to color, religion, gender or sexual orientation. We hope we will soon see the day when gay Americans have the same rights -- including the right to serve openly in the military and marry the people they love -- as straight Americans.
We could have made a small contribution to that but we didn't. Not our proudest moment.
-
When Animorphs was being published, when the internet was AOL homepages and it took three hours to download an eight-second audio file, fans weren't all that aware of the writing relationship between Applegate and Grant (at least not in my circles). So now that we know you got each other's backs, I was curious. Just how much Michael Grant is in Animorphs? Conversely, how much K.A. Applegate is in the Gone series?
-
ANIMORPHS was an equal collaboration from the start. But that collaboration started much earlier.
Part of the confusion came because we were actually not just two different writers with two names, we were two writers with 11 names. Beth Kincaid, C. Archer, Pat Pollari, Katherine Kendall, Nicholas Stevens, Katherine Michaels (heh), A.R. Plumb and others we can't even remember. Actually "Michael Grant" is yet another pseudonym -- it's actually Michael Reynolds.
Neither of us could even begin to parse out who did what and when and why.
The reasons for pseudonyms are various. Our first book was for Harlequin which in those days (early pleistocene) took ownership of the author's name. So: pseudonym. Then for a while we were ghostwriting for Francine Pascal, so another name. We worked for Disney for a while and we were writing so much of their list it was embarrassing to them, so they asked us to conceal the extent of our involvement with various pseudonyms.
Are you bored with this answer yet?
And then there was Barf-O-Rama. A sort of self-evident excuse for a pseudonym. Meanwhile, just to make things more complicated, Michael was writing for newspapers as "Michael Robinson."
Then we went into YA romance with OCEAN CITY and BOYFRIENDS/GIRLFRIENDS and Michael really didn't want to have his name associated with the writing of breathless make-out scenes between teens. Because "Eeww." Neither did Katherine but too bad: someone had to take the blame. We wrote those as "Katherine Applegate."
By the time we started ANIMORPHS "Applegate" was a semi-established name as far as publishers and bookstores were concerned. So it made sense to stick with it. We thought about using two names, but it makes it hard for readers to remember. So, no.
We assumed we'd eventually use Reynolds or some Reynolds-esque pseudonym because of course we didn't know ANIMORPHS was going to be 63 books. We figured six or eight and off we'd go to the next thing. But of course ANI spawned EVERWORLD and REMNANTS.
Then we quit.
Then we ran out of money so we un-quit. But enough time had passed that we didn't see a huge advantage in "K.A. Applegate" as a name. Katherine thought quite a bit about dropping Applegate altogether but in the end decided to keep it. But we were no longer interested in writing together. Katherine wanted to do younger and/or more literary stuff. Michael wanted to do GONE. The writing partnership ended upon quitting REMNANTS.
That being said, of course we talk about work all the time. We bounce ideas off each other, we help each other work through POV or plot questions. We just write different things.
The best we can tell you in terms of who did what is: if it was lyrical, descriptive, or romantic it is slightly more likely to have been Katherine. If it was violent, political or funny, it is slightly more likely to have been Michael. But even then if you guessed a particular scene you'd probably be wrong -- and god knows we wouldn't remember.
-
First of all, I'm going to add mine to the slew of thanks that have piled up. Animorphs was my fondest companion through elementary and middle school. As a result of many years spent in the world of Yeerks and Andalites I decided to pursue a career in English, which eventually led me to becoming a high school AP English teacher. I can honestly say that it is one of the best jobs in the world and it never would have happened if not for you. I also probably would have never ended up living in Texas, so I mentally curse you every day it is above 90 degrees. :P
I have two questions:
1) At what point did you realize that Animorphs had made it big in the world of monthly series? How did you guys react to the success? Did you ever expect the fandom to endure as long as it did?
2) I have heard (don't remember where) that Michael is particularly good at reading the market as far as publishing is concerned. I was wondering if he had any tips to share with aspiring writer's, especially in a world where the publishing industry is so precarious with the gradual shift to ebooks.
Again, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your writing has truly been one of the guiding forces in my life.
-
When ANIMORPHS hit the Publishers Weekly bestseller list we thought, "Hmmm. . ." And then we started seeing very large royalty checks and that was definitely very cool. But we're both wary and always waiting for the next shoe to drop. We're also sort of self-deprecating about our work, we really try never to take ourselves seriously, so our attitude was always, "Yeah, we sold a million books, but RL Stine was much bigger than we'll ever be." Because of that character trait (or mental weirdness) it didn't occur to us that anyone was even getting the sort of moral, philosophical, political substructure of ANIMORPHS. We wrote the "deeper" stuff for each other's amusement and out of a sort of vague feeling of moral obligation -- and mostly just because it worked for the story. But we figured maybe 1 reader out of a 1000 was paying attention to anything beyond Tseeew Tseeew!
So it's only been recently that we've come to accept that we had any lasting impact on readers.
As for the market. Always look for what isn't there. Everyone told us to go into horror when GOOSEBUMPS ruled but we thought: no. Stine owns horror, we need to go a different way. Like, say, science fiction. As we were looking at a second series we counter-programmed ourselves with fantasy in the form of EVERWORLD. We were right about fantasy, as JK Rowling (not us) proved.
Right now we see two huge holes in the market: straight-up middle grade horror is one. Comic-adventure is another. THE MAGNIFICENT 12 is aimed at that second segment.
-
Thanks, I was asked to repost this question because you apparently skipped it:
Hi! Firstly, I'd just like to say how much I love your books. They were pretty much the thing I was obsessed with as a kid, and when I re-read them all again recently...well, let's just say as a 23 year old I have now gotten obsessed all over again! So thanks so much for writing them.
As for my question...I'd like to know if you decided on last names for any of the Animorphs other than Jake. And if you did, what are they?
-
No, we didn't. We didn't want to write it as a "ta da!" kind of moment. "His last name is. . . drumroll . . . Jones!"
It would have to be part of the story. As best we can recall we needed Jake to have a last name in the story and never came to that point with the others. The 1st person voice sort of eliminated the necessity.
In any case feel free to imagine any name you like. Maybe your own name.
-
You can't believe the impact this series had on my life. Thanks. Now onto nerdiness.
I have always wondered about Tobias' Human Morph of himself. Since he acquired himself at approximately age 13 and morphs don't age, after the following 2 years of the war is he a 16 yr old morphing into a 13 yr old body? If so, would that have affected his relationship with Rachel since she was aging normally?
If I can ask an auxillary question, in the original rough draft of Animorphs, what was Jake's, then Matt, little brother Joseph character like. All we get online from searches is that he took Cassie's place. Can the community ever see this draft?
-
Answer to wolfev that got eaten:
Ooooh, most excellent nerdliness. You are absolutely right about Tobias' human morph. And this is the first time we've realized it's kind of an issue. I guess we'll just have to say that Rachel likes younger men? Er . . . Hmmmm . . .
Neither of us knows what you mean by an ANIMORPHS draft with a Matt or Joseph character. Can you elucidate? (We use 'elucidate' to distract from the Tobias KASU.)
-
"There are a few things conspicuously absent from the last book of Animorphs: the fate of the auxiliary Animorphs, interaction between the Animorphs and their parents/siblings, etc. Were these omissions deliberate, or was the ending cut shorter than you'd have liked due to space constraints?"
-
Well, we had basically a 140-160 manuscript page limit. So length is inevitably an issue. And we wanted it to transition from sort of normal to after-the-war. But we never really wanted to answer every question, dot every "i," cross every "t." We are both sort of averse to facile answers.
We both sort of hated the kind of ending that they had on the first Star Wars or on some of the Star Trek movies: big parade, medals, everybody happy. Wars only end that way for the civilians far from battle, they don't end that way for the people in the war. We have this illusion that's how World War 2 ended, but I doubt the survivors of Dachau or the soldiers who lost body parts from bombs, or traumatized soldiers threw much of a party.
Everyone hated book #54 because we didn't have that complete, happy, everything's-good-now, ending, but for us the last thing we wanted was some artificial closure. (We both hate that word by the way.) So we decided that some, like Marco, would come through it all just fine, and some like Cassie would actually find a positive meaning from it. But others, like Tobias and Jake would sort of never get past it. And one would be dead.
Doing all that in 160 pages we didn't have much room to address everything.
-
We have held some discussion on RAF as to what exactly you meant by "You may now demorph," the closing line of your letter to readers at the end of #54. Could you elaborate?
You can view our discussion thread here (http://animorphsforum.com/forum/index.php/topic,4145.0.html).
-
To us it felt like we were all in a conspiracy together, us and the readers. Co-conspirators. Us against them, whoever "them" was. It felt like we were at the end of something transforming, something kind of intense, like a sports team at the end of the season or an army at the end of a war. Or like we were all being crazy together. Anyway the feeling was, "You guys have stayed with us from book #1 through book #54 and you have been incredibly loyal, we are incredibly grateful, but we understand you're going to see other writers now."
-
Thanks well here is my Question
Well for starters Like everyone else here your books have touched our hearts. As an English language learner reading your books was more than just fun. When I write my own stories I usually get into character and try to think like the character. Sometimes I get a little to exited or angry depending on what is happening in the story. So I was wondering how much into character did you get while writing your books?
-
Neither of us ever had a process per se. There are parts of writing that each of us kind of has to work at -- for Michael it's description, for Katherine it's plotting. But we never had to think much about how a character would "sound." Mostly these six characters were just very clear in our imaginations.
If you do a character well as a writer then not only you but your reader can anticipate what they'll do and say in a given situation. Let's take Michael's favorite example: Captain James T. Kirk. It doesn't matter what situation you put Kirk in, the viewer can tell you exactly what he'll do and what he'll say. We know Kirk.
So basically when you really get to know your characters and feel them as real people in your head, their dialog or actions or thoughts come naturally.
-
It's awesome that they're doing this! So cool. Thanks for hosting this Q&A.
The Andalite Chronicles is one of my favorite books of all time. I really enjoyed the way that the book fleshed out Elfangor, the series' ultimate hero, by showing that even though he was brave and good, he was once a kid who made mistakes. And of course his doomed love story with Loren (who is omg, so awesome) is wonderful. My question is: did Elfangor's hirac delest ever make it to the Andalite Homeworld, or was the transmission completely destroyed with his ship in book #1? And while we're on the subject, do you remember why you decided to have Tobias tell the others the truth about his father "off-camera," and if so, would you mind sharing?
-
That falls into the category of theoretical "what happened next?" questions. We have no answers. There is nothing outside of the books from our point of view. Anything that exists "outside the frame" so to speak is up to your imagination, not ours.
-
hey, KA/MG!
i'd like to thank you both for coming to RAF to answer our questions.
so, according to the book jacket, 9-11 was the target age for animorphs when it was first released. i can imagine that quite a few parents would have disallowed their children to continue reading if they had known the terrors of blood and slavery and psychological damage that their kids had been discovering behind those innocent-looking covers. many of your fans, myself included, appreciate the apologetically gruesome and disturbing nature of animorphs, but how do you respond to critics who say the series was too dark for the prescribed reading age?
-:goom:
-
First off as parents we'd say what kids read is the business of their parents first and foremost.
That being said, we think people worry way too much over the content of books, movies, music, TV and websites. We live in an age of irrational fear. We've never been healthier or had longer lives but we run around obsessing over what we eat. The statistical odds of any of us dying from terrorism are close to zero, but we're all worried about it. We worry about second-hand smoke but there's almost no hard evidence it has any effect. Women are terrified of breast cancer and oblivious to heart disease. Which kills more women? Heart disease by far.
Fear has a sort of fashion cycle. It has nothing to do with the rationality of a given fear. Some fears just suddenly become popular. Fear of media was a big one in the 90's as we recall. Explicit lyrics, smutty TV shows, violent video games, they were all supposedly driving kids off the deep end. The fact that youth crime actually declined as violent video games became more popular of course did nothing to calm irrational mediaphobia.
Adults believe that kids are "impressionable" and easily upset. That's no doubt true in some cases and again, mom and dad make that call. But in general kids are very hard to scare. Michael's GONE series scares the hell out of . . . mommies. It doesn't seem to be causing nightmares in actual kids.
The fact is older people are easier to scare because they have more buttons you can push. in HUNGER there's a lynching scene meant to evoke the old south and in other ways the Kosovo and Bosnia ethnic cleansing. How many 14 year-old readers get those allusions? Almost none. Their moms and dads get it because it's part of their frame of reference. The parents are more disturbed by the scenes than the kids because the parents get the context.
Also parents just don't get how media savvy their kids are. Kids old enough to read ANIMORPHS don't have a problem differentiating fantasy from reality. There's not a single kid who ever actually believed their parents were Controllers. Fantasize about it? Sure. But mistake reality for fantasy? Nah. And we're pretty sure none of our readers morphed into redtail hawks.
It's bizarre that a parent will blithely tell a four year old a story about children being abandoned in the woods by their parents, entrapped by a gingerbread house, threatened with cannibalism, and top it all off with the triumphant resolution where the children burn a witch alive . . . and be upset when a 12 year old reads ANIMORPHS.
-
I actually always assumed the Ellimist had tweaked Tobias's morph so it would age with the others. Not the most elegant solution, but there you have it. :)
A couple questions:
How did the series backstory evolve as you wrote it? I've been rereading them and it's pretty clear there are some underlying assumptions in the early books that you later rejected, like some of the things about thought-speech and the whole Hork-Bajir being wired to go on the warpath" thing, but is there anything more subtle that you eventually tossed out the window?
What did you think of the job the ghostwriters did on the second half of the series? I thought most of them did an excellent job, but there are a couple books I just can't read anymore because the narrator seems so out of character (which is more noticeable if you're just reading that character's books instead of the series in sequence).
-
I actually always assumed the Ellimist had tweaked Tobias's morph so it would age with the others. Not the most elegant solution, but there you have it.
Yeah. Yeah, that was it. This is why we hate answering speculative questions -- you guys always have better answers than we do.
Regarding discarded ideas you want to bear in mind that ANIMORPHS was a very hectic thing from where we sat. Most writers put out maybe a book a year. We were writing 14 ANI titles plus other projects (Barf-O-Rama, some leftover stuff from previous gigs, later Everworld.) Plus having a baby who was a preemie, moving from Florida to Minnesota then to Chicago. Also we were running just six months ahead of publication so that any delay -- a vacation, an illness -- would mean no book for a given month.
So the things you can now read at leisure were not written at leisure. There's an old classic bit from I Love Lucy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wp3m1vg06Q
It was more like that than it was us sitting around sipping wine and having deep thoughts. Normal authors can spend all day working out the exact wording for a pungent metaphor. We had maybe 30 seconds. Plus of course ANIMORPHS just generated an amazing amount of backstory. Dozens of characters, dozens of species, time travel . . . So basically anything you read that looks contradictory or stupid wasn't secretly clever or brilliantly thought-out on our part, it was probably just stupid. Jake was born during book #11 as we recall and for the year after that neither of us ever slept, so the most likely explanation is: they were stupid tired.
-
Hi Katherine and Michael,
I can't say how thrilled I am after all these years to be able to tell you how much I appreciated your books as I was growing up. Much like everyone on this forum I'm still a fan of the series and I can never quite measure the impact that it's had on me.
There's dozens of questions I'd like to ask you, mostly on factual information from the books, but I'll limit myself to just one that I find most important.
You answered in a previous question that you consider the idea of existential phenomenology as an inspiration for Animorphs. I find this really intriguing as I've considered myself an existentialist for years and looking back I can certainly see how some of the themes that hit home with me in Animorphs have shaped this belief (in a moment of utter geekiness I remember once saying my ideal thesis to write would be 'Existentialism in Animorphs'). Would you be able to elaborate at all on how you feel it had an impact on and/or how it was included in the series?
PS. Another used asked about the original Animorphs draft with Jake being named Matt. This was revealed in the AniBase, an infodex that Jeff Sampson wrote for Scholastic after the end of the series. "In the original manuscript for this book, back before a proposed trilogy called "Changelings" became the Animorphs series, Jake was named Matt and had a little brother named Joseph. Cassie didn't exist at all! Good thing for Rachel this was changed later on -- she would have been totally outnumbered by the guys. Of course knowing Rachel, she would have handled it just fine."
-
Well, that's a big question. Existentialism covers a lot of ground but it's basically the idea that meaning comes from choices made by the individual as opposed to coming from God or society or from reference to an outside authority. There are religious existentialists but for the most part it's a secular approach to life and the meaning thereof.
Phenomenology is an epistemological approach -- a system of knowing how we know what we think we know. Again this is like down the rabbit hole in terms of explaining it, but it's about seeing the world as it is, as a subjective experience, but one stripped insofar as possible of presuppositions.
That answer would earn a solid "-D." But we're throwing it out there just as background for people who are reading this and think WTF?
Basically we're saying that we wanted to show the experience of being in animal morph with as much truth and as little assumption as we could, not in some cutesied-up, anthropomorphic, Disney way. We wanted to create a universe that was independent of God or other external authority. We wanted rational answers. We wanted characters to face decisions between life and death, not between this type of existence and some theorized alternative. We wanted to face moral choices squarely, to lay the alternatives out for readers and leave them to reach their own conclusions. We didn't want to become self-appointed moral or philosophical authorities, we wanted to say, "Look, here's the situation, here's how this character handled it, now you decide if it was right or wrong." We mostly avoided mysticism or the supernatural.
Probably the most basic thing for us was letting readers make basic decisions about right or wrong. We tried to avoid preaching for the excellent reason that, who the hell are we to be preaching? We didn't always succeed in keeping our mommy/daddy voices out of it, but we always intended to make you, the readers, responsible for deciding the right and wrong. So you could say we were inviting you to be the existentialists.
-
Hi, not sure if this has been asked but, would you's ever think of re-releasing the original tv series onto dvd for the huge fans all over the world.
Question for K&M:
RaSkipper here. I think it's amazing that you guys are dedicated enough to the fans to do stuff like this. Thank you so much.
1) If Scholastic ever gets around to 'Animorphs 2.0' as it's being called, would you want to have the books be a monthly 150 page volume like it was, or would you like to try making much longer books once a year or so in the vein of Harry Potter and other book series being released now?
2) Did you ever think about writing a book from David's perspective?
3) In Megamorphs #3, the Animorphs keep the human host's parents from never meeting, erasing him and keeping the Time Matrix from being found. My question: If the Yeerk itself put two and two together about where it was hidden, why would having a different host body change anything?
-
1) We've tried on a couple of occasions to convince publishers that the monthly series concept can still work if we go digital.
Basically the problem is that bookstores hate monthly series. So publishers abandoned the idea. Our position is to say, look, we're shifting to a digital marketplace where the real estate of shelves in bricks-and-mortar stores are less important. So we can either go fully digital or a hybrid -- some dead-tree books, some digital.
But all of this is scaring the publishers. They don't know how to handle the move to digital. Everyone is confused and weirded out and most react by sticking their heads in the sand or by making half-assed efforts.
It's not easy for the publishers because they have to maintain a pricing model that works with bricks-and-mortar stores and not undercut it with the low prices that digital will end up wanting. Here our position is to say that if we want digital to work, and we want to minimize piracy, we should keep the prices of e-books low. And rather than trying to artificially prop up digital prices publishers should be moving to enhanced books (text with video, music, backstory, etc... as links) and setting premium prices for those.
But to be fair the pubs have a lot of voices yelling conflicting advice. It's a weird time in publishing.
2) No. We knew things weren't going to work out for David. And we had an established pattern of rotating the stars.
3) Without re-reading the book neither of us remembers.
-
Well well, I must say it is quite a pleasure and an honour to finally ask a question of the author of animorphs. first off I must simply say well done. You created sixty four amazing books, a TV show (It wasn't your fault it was that bad), millions of fans and of course with fanbase! Well done and thank you for the books and the inspiration! I was and am quite an avid reader of yours and can't wait until the reprint(?) For Mr. Grant you're GONE series is quite marvelous and i eagerly await to get ahold of HUNGER. Now for my questions.
1. Human military. Now, I am very patriotic of the humans and a bit of a gun nut. I love the series and all, but I think you understated the human military, especially in the last books. for example, in book 46 when the yeerks are assaulting the Aircraft carreir and duking it out with the Marines, I think maybe you should have mentioned the bloody losses those yeerks would have taken. The HB controllers and Taxxons had only dracon beams, hand held dracon beams. The humans had M-16s, .45s and other auto-semiautomatic weapons, plus the fact that someone opened up with the gatling gun which would have torn those slimy slugs to slimy shreds. General doubledays army in book 54, after the pool ship ceased fire, wouldn't they have slaughtered the yeerks constructing the new pool? Lightly armed Taxxons and HBs versus tanks, helicopters, automatics, snipers, the works! And even at close range, combat shotguns would blow those alien bastards to pond scum. Like I said, love the series, but I think the human military was a bit understated there.
Thank you for taking some of your busy tiem to answer my musings and ponderings.
Much thanks and regards,
OH CANADA!
-
It depends.
As you probably know, technological mismatches have profound effects on military strategy. For example, the First World War, where neither side at first understood the crucial role of machine guns. Human wave assaults that might have worked against rifle fire were utterly futile against machine guns. It took the development of the tank late in that war to begin to cope with machine guns.
Bottom line is that beam weapons -- presumably with smart targeting -- could have fired from beyond M16 range. They could also have fired through barriers. And there's the shock value of regular troops facing unknown weapons. The Indian bow and arrow was superior in many ways to the arquebuses used by early European colonists, but the surprise of facing a weapon that could kill without visible means shocked and dismayed the Indians.
Also, it was ghostwritten.
-
Hey folks,
As a now-journalism major, minor in psych (specifically post-traumatic stress-disorder victims), I always wondered about your progression of the Tobias storyline. I understand that his ultimate reconciliation was after he ultimately defeated Taylor mentally, but it always felt like it was a too quick of a turnaround. He was withdrawn in #37, stating that he was unfit to lead, but he seemed almost himself (minus Marco's reference to him being off in his own world) in other books between Taylor narratives. Care to comment on him only seeming screwed up for those two book?
(Also, and this is merely a fan thing, I simply loved #25, which I feel is the most undermentioned/underrated book of the series. Just saying.)