Group Re-Read: #25 The Extreme

[Terenia]

Summary
Marco, the other Animorphs, and Ax have managed to find out where the Yeerks are planning to build their next ground-based Kandrona. That's a good thing. The location is supposed to be somewhere around the North Pole. That's a bad thing. The Animorphs and Ax know that the Yeerks are a "cold-blooded" species, but this is a little nuts! Who wants to be anywhere near the North Pole without Arctic morphs - and wearing spandex?
Even so, the kids know if the Yeerks succeed with their plan, Earth is pretty much done for. And Marco, the other Animorphs, and Ax aren't quite ready to give up the fight...


Questions
1. The entire premise of this book is that the Yeerks are building a ground-based Kandrona strong enough to essentially turn any swimming pool into a Yeerk Pool. If they had succeeded, what consequences would have come about as a result? Would it have been game over?

2. The Yeerks recreate the Venber race by splicing Venber and human DNA. These Venber are fully programmable, like biological computers. Is this better or worse than what the Arn do? Why?

3. Why does KA include the Eskimo kid in this book? Was it smart for the Ani's to let him go after he saw them morph?

4. Everyone always makes Cassie out to be this over-indulgent moralizer, but in the last few books she's shone a different side. What do you think has changed?

5. The Ani's eat in their wolf morphs to avoid starving. Does that food carry through when they demorph and remorph? Or do they go back to hungry?

6. Anything else.

Next Week: #26 The Attack

[Phoenix004]

1. The entire premise of this book is that the Yeerks are building a ground-based Kandrona strong enough to essentially turn any swimming pool into a Yeerk Pool. If they had succeeded, what consequences would have come about as a result? Would it have been game over?

I think it's safe to say that Earth would be pretty screwed. At the very least it would have made the end of the series very different, as destroying the Yeerk Pool wouldn't have been as damaging if most Controllers had access to their own personal pools.

2. The Yeerks recreate the Venber race by splicing Venber and human DNA. These Venber are fully programmable, like biological computers. Is this better or worse than what the Arn do? Why?

I'm not excusing the Arn, but what the Yeerks did was far worse. They made a mockery of an extinct species and used technology to enslave them to suit their purposes. Not to mention the fact that innocent humans were essentially killed in the process.

3. Why does KA include the Eskimo kid in this book? Was it smart for the Ani's to let him go after he saw them morph?

The guy was there for comic relief and as a plot device for finding the Polar Bear morph. It may not have been smart to let the guy go, but there wasn't really anything else they could have done. The Yeerks weren't interested in enslaving the people in that area so there wasn't likely to be any danger.

4. Everyone always makes Cassie out to be this over-indulgent moralizer, but in the last few books she's shone a different side. What do you think has changed?

I don't really get what you mean, but I suppose she became slightly less of an "over-indulgent moralizer" as the series went on because the war was starting to get to her.

5. The Ani's eat in their wolf morphs to avoid starving. Does that food carry through when they demorph and remorph? Or do they go back to hungry?

Difficult to say for sure. Logically the food should carry through a morph/demorph, since other objects are carried on (eg. bullets don't vanish, they just get pushed out of their bodies).

However, based on evidence from the series, we can assume that food does not get carried through the morphing process. In a later book (#49 I believe) Tobias morphs human to share a burger with Rachel, but then demorphs to eat in his hawk form. Also, the human body wouldn't be able to tolerate the raw meat of the seal the Animorphs ate as wolves, so they would have been very sick if the food had been carried through the morph.

[Chad32]

I'd say what V3 did was far worse than what the Arn did. What the arn did wrong was how they treated the Horks after their creation. They created the Horks to save their planet, which is not an evil thing. It's going to extremes to separate themselves, and trying their best to keep the Horks from becoming a developed species that's wrong.

[morfowt]

5. I don't think it does. Say you just a burger and it hasn't fully digested yet. Then you morph an ant. if the food stays, what happens to you? in #42, Ax said something about a danger if marco morphs while they're inside his body. the danger is probably getting sent into z-space along with all the other extra mass...

[Xan]

I've always wondered what would happen if you launched a nuke at that North Pole base tbh.

[AniDragon]

4. Everyone always makes Cassie out to be this over-indulgent moralizer, but in the last few books she's shone a different side. What do you think has changed?

I was actually pretty impressed with Cassie this book. At the time that it first came out, I thought it showed a lot of growth with her when it came to the whole "eating the seal" thing. It showed that though she can sometimes moralize a bit too much, she at least has her priorities straight. (this growth is completely slaughtered in later books, granted... but it was nice at the time)

[DinosaurNothlit]

5. I don't think it does. Say you just a burger and it hasn't fully digested yet. Then you morph an ant. if the food stays, what happens to you? in #42, Ax said something about a danger if marco morphs while they're inside his body. the danger is probably getting sent into z-space along with all the other extra mass...

I think we just solved the problem of where the extra mass comes from when you morph something bigger than yourself.  It's undigested food. 

Anyway, since I'm here, I might as well answer a couple questions while I'm at it.

1.  Yeah, that would pretty much be game over, at least until they managed to destroy the base and set everything back to how it was before.  With Kandrona everywhere, the Yeerks' biggest weakness would be essentially gone.  You'd have a heck of a lot harder time starving controllers (although, come to think of it, they only ever did that once anyway), and they'd be infesting new targets like crazy.  The Yeerks would just throw a big pool party, and everyone would leave with slugs in their heads.

2.  Way, way worse.  The Arn created a new race from scratch, and just set them loose and let them do what they wanted.  The Yeerks resurrected an existing race and mind-controlled them.  And don't tell me they just created them without free will in the first place.  They went over that issue in book 28, and proved that Yeerks don't know how to separate sentience from sentient creatures.  So, yeah, the Venber would have had to have been thinking, feeling, slaves.  Which is, granted, what the Yeerks have been doing all along, but when you resurrect a race to enslave them, that's just a whole new level of sick.

[ThinkAgain]

5. The Ani's eat in their wolf morphs to avoid starving. Does that food carry through when they demorph and remorph? Or do they go back to hungry?

With the whole Z-Space thing, also remember that they shift into morphs, they just don't pop into something new. Organs get shifted and changed, mass is changed, not being removed and then replaced. I think anything the morph has metabolized would have stayed as a human. I think this is why morphs don't starve (Think about how many hours Jake spent as a tiger; is he ever described as eating?) I think metabolized energy transfers between morphs. It is noted that, while flesh wounds are healed, hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep all remain.

Still, this leads to yet more problems. For instance, when something massive is morphed from human, it would use all the metabolized energy remaining in the human body in minutes or seconds or less. Would it then starve? Yet Cassie's whale is always fine.

Also, most arctic animals (polar bears, walruses, etc) Have a MASSIVE amount of Vitamin A in their livers. As in, you eat a sizeable portion of a liver from these animals, and you die from OD of Vitamin A. If you morph from human, with a far smaller amount of the vitamin, does the arctic morph instantly get sick from the lack of the vitamin, or assuming the body creates it, why doesn't the human get sick from all the Vitamin A now in the system when they demorph?

Assume everything needed is created by the body (which is probably impossible), and anything in excess is extruded into Z space. How do clothes morph then, while a tiny language chip (AC) or microprocessor (One with the Hammerheads) inside the body cannot? If I put something in my mouth, morph, would it be expelled from the body or transferred to Z space? How does it know to push out bullets but not undigested food? It could be claimed that only organic materials would go with the extruded mass (Food vs metal), but then why do the spandex (Synthetic fiber) morphing suits get extruded?

This isn't even getting into how age is determined from DNA or things like haircuts and nail length are maintained.

I feel it's safe to say that it's a work of fiction and there cannot be a foolproof explanation for every aspect.  :'(

[Chad32]

The thought just occured to me that Ax shouldn't be able to morph flea. I mean, how small is that translator ship in his head?

The only real solution is probably suspension of disbelief.

[ThinkAgain]

The thought just occured to me that Ax shouldn't be able to morph flea. I mean, how small is that translator ship in his head?

The only real solution is probably suspension of disbelief.

Ax does not have a translator chip. I forgot which book, but it's said that his generation of arisths has a translator cell. As in the size of a single cell, somewhere in the brain, not a chip.

[DinosaurNothlit]

Maybe stuff can go into Z-space, yet remain "in contact" with the morpher.  Like, how does a human intellect fit into an ant brain, unless the mind is somehow extruded into Z-space and yet stays in contact with the body?  It shouldn't be possible, otherwise, for the Animorphs to keep their human intelligence when they morph into small-brained animals . . .

And this makes some theoretical sense, when you consider that Z-space is a sort of dimension of space (except for being not-space), so things could be 'close' to other things, even when one thing is in Z-space and the other isn't.  Think of Z-space as a higher dimension, like our three dimensions; if two things can be touching in three dimensions, they can be touching in higher dimensions.

Also, this would allow some food to continue to be metabolized in morph, since it would still be 'touching' the stomach wall.  Thus explaining why morphs don't starve.

I feel it's safe to say that it's a work of fiction and there cannot be a foolproof explanation for every aspect.  :'(

Oh, come on.  That's a cop-out!

[Chad32]

The thought just occured to me that Ax shouldn't be able to morph flea. I mean, how small is that translator ship in his head?

The only real solution is probably suspension of disbelief.

Ax does not have a translator chip. I forgot which book, but it's said that his generation of arisths has a translator cell. As in the size of a single cell, somewhere in the brain, not a chip.

That's news to me.

[DinosaurNothlit]

The thought just occured to me that Ax shouldn't be able to morph flea. I mean, how small is that translator ship in his head?

The only real solution is probably suspension of disbelief.

Ax does not have a translator chip. I forgot which book, but it's said that his generation of arisths has a translator cell. As in the size of a single cell, somewhere in the brain, not a chip.

That's news to me.

Me too.  If you figure out which book that was in, let me know.  Because I've got most of them nearly memorized, yet I don't recall that ever being mentioned . . .

[Brad the Brit]

i nerveer heard of that everr

[ThinkAgain]

I can't remember... I KNOW I've read it, but it seems far away...