yay the last chronicles book! It's weird, but even now, after doing all of these reprehensibly comprehensive, obsessive comments, I still can't decide how I rank the chronicles books. Like they're all magically intriguing, emotional, well-plotted in different ways, but also frustrating, stupid, and lazy in different ways. IDK I mean I know The Andalite Chronicles is still my favorite, but after that? I really don't know.
Anyway let's get started.
Okay, so I was sure when I first started reading this book was that my main thesis was going to be something like "100 pages of incomprehensible soft sci-fi do not an exciting story make," but now that I look at this, the whole beginning of this book, that was neither requested nor expected, is kind of a problem on a multitude of levels.
Let me just...ugh, okay. I think one of the reasons The Andalite Chronicles is my favorite is that, at that point, the whole conceit was sort of a surprise, right? Like, "oh cool! Yeah, I liked Elfangor when he was in the first book, I'd love to hear more about him!" And then we heard more about him, and HOLY SHIT HE'S TOBIAS' DAD? Like the whole thing wasn't yet an expectation, it was a surprise.
As the Chronicles books went on, they became less about surprises and more about expectation.
I think The Hork-Bajir Chronicles was still mostly surprise. Most of the plot of that book was stuff we knew nothing about, stuff that was legitimately new, an expansion of the universe we were already familiar with, not a clarification or unveiling of a part we knew about but hadn't seen. We knew nothing of the Hork-Bajir other than that they were sort of dumb, ate trees, and were really nice. This book offered new information.
But it did also explicate mysteries we already had. Mostly, the Quantum Virus. We learned about that in TAC, and here we see it played out. And of course that whole plot was handled with the same kind of morally ambiguous, awesome double-sidedness that we've come to expect from AppleGrant, but still--they fulfilled an expectation. They didn't invent a whole new world.
Move onto Visser. By this point in the series, we had more questions, especially since this was one of the first in-depth looks we get into not only the Yeerk psyche, but their whole society of it. I mean we got glimpses of it in THBC, but even then, it was more a tease than true development. So here, I would say, the balance was shifting. NOW we're LEARNING about MYSTERIES already ESTABLISHED. Now we get to see how the Yeerks started infesting good ol' Mother Earth, something that was part of the very premise of the series that we never got to see until right now.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-06-21 09:02 pm (UTC)Anyway let's get started.
Okay, so I was sure when I first started reading this book was that my main thesis was going to be something like "100 pages of incomprehensible soft sci-fi do not an exciting story make," but now that I look at this, the whole beginning of this book, that was neither requested nor expected, is kind of a problem on a multitude of levels.
Let me just...ugh, okay. I think one of the reasons The Andalite Chronicles is my favorite is that, at that point, the whole conceit was sort of a surprise, right? Like, "oh cool! Yeah, I liked Elfangor when he was in the first book, I'd love to hear more about him!" And then we heard more about him, and HOLY SHIT HE'S TOBIAS' DAD? Like the whole thing wasn't yet an expectation, it was a surprise.
As the Chronicles books went on, they became less about surprises and more about expectation.
I think The Hork-Bajir Chronicles was still mostly surprise. Most of the plot of that book was stuff we knew nothing about, stuff that was legitimately new, an expansion of the universe we were already familiar with, not a clarification or unveiling of a part we knew about but hadn't seen. We knew nothing of the Hork-Bajir other than that they were sort of dumb, ate trees, and were really nice. This book offered new information.
But it did also explicate mysteries we already had. Mostly, the Quantum Virus. We learned about that in TAC, and here we see it played out. And of course that whole plot was handled with the same kind of morally ambiguous, awesome double-sidedness that we've come to expect from AppleGrant, but still--they fulfilled an expectation. They didn't invent a whole new world.
Move onto Visser. By this point in the series, we had more questions, especially since this was one of the first in-depth looks we get into not only the Yeerk psyche, but their whole society of it. I mean we got glimpses of it in THBC, but even then, it was more a tease than true development. So here, I would say, the balance was shifting. NOW we're LEARNING about MYSTERIES already ESTABLISHED. Now we get to see how the Yeerks started infesting good ol' Mother Earth, something that was part of the very premise of the series that we never got to see until right now.