The other day, I found myself thinking about something Ax says in one of the books (pretty sure it was #8?). Does anybody else remember the little story he tells, about how the Andalites used to have cities, but then they decided that they didn't like being cramped together, and they broke up the cities and moved back into the countryside? Something like that, anyway.
Yeah . . . something about that story had always struck me as seeming a little fishy. For one, societies really can't just unanimously decide that "hey this way of life isn't really working out for us, so let's completely overhaul the entire structure of our civilization and start over again from scratch, sound good?" That just doesn't happen.
And for another . . . where did all the extra Andalites go? The fact that they had a city-structure in the first place, like humans do now, suggests that their population at that time was at least reasonably close to the level of humans when we started building cities (as compared to the size of the Andalite planet, whatever size that is). But, a human-city-level of population on any planet, doesn't match with the whole family-scoop-where-everyone-gets-a-nice-big-pasture-with-enough-space-between-them-that-they're-basically-living-on-their-own lifestyle that the Andalites switched over to later.
That's when it hit me. That story was, pretty much, a big fat lie. Sure, Andalites used to have cities. But, I don't think it was a calm, reasoned decision to abandon them. I think the Andalite population hit such critical levels (as humans are close to doing, ourselves) that it became a planet-wide catastrophe. Pollution, overcrowding, starvation (Andalites, given that they don't depend on particular species of plants for food the way humans do, probably never learned farming, at least not on the massive scales that humans farm crops, and as such would have been screwed as soon as there were enough of them to over-graze the land),
yamphut epidemics, some form of climate change (probably not global warming, since there's nothing to suggest that Andalites ever came up with fossil fuels for energy, but any widespread technology is going to have its own set of environmental repercussions, maybe radiation or heavy-metal toxicity or the like), etc. And pretty soon the few remaining survivors of the catastrophe were back to living off the land again, slowly rebuilding at least some of what they had lost, but having learned enough to take their civilization in a different direction this time around.
When you stop to consider how long Andalites have been around, it would be almost impossible for them NOT to have had some huge near-extinction event at some point. This might have even happened more than once.
Of course, this apocalypse (or at least the most recent one) would have had to be long enough ago that revisionist history has taken over. Even if they hadn't simply forgotten what had happened (which is entirely possible given the scope of time we're likely talking about), Andalites, manipulative as they can be, would still have written such an event right out of their history books. And then they told all the youngsters that the reason for the ruined cities all over their planet is because the Andalites simply
decided to abandon them. And Ax, naive as he is, completely fell for it.
This also explains why Andalite technology lagged behind as much as it did (sure, some species develop slower than others, but given how long the Andalites have been around, even assuming they're twice as advanced as humans, that still means they're progressing at 1/50th the rate, and I really don't think that humans learn and invent new things
fifty times faster than Andalites do, that's a bit ludicrous). It also explains the population-control measures Elfangor mentions in TAC. And it explains why they got in the habit of taking as much of their home as possible into space with them (never know when you're gonna have to pick another planet to settle on).
Not to mention, the whole thing about Andalites supposedly inventing computers before books? Yeah, I don't think that's possible for a civilization to do, either. It's just that the books might have been lost to time or forgotten when disaster struck, whereas the computers were probably still salvageable and worth salvaging by the survivors. Revisionist history kicks in, and hey look they 'invented' computers but not books!
One last point. It's been pointed out before, that the only times we've ever 'seen' the Andalite homeworld in the books, has been in memories and re-creations. Never directly. What if, even now, it isn't quite as nice and happy and pretty as all the Andalites would like to imagine that it is?
What does anybody else think? Am I grasping at straws here, or does this sound like a legitimate possibility to anyone besides me?
