I know it seems impossible even to conceive of Andalites as traitors. I know the very idea makes any decent Andalite sick inside. But I am telling the truth. The Ascalin incident happened. We were betrayed by one of our own.

Quite the introduction, that.

Another high level person threatened with a Yeerkening. A mad plan to get in and turn it to their advantage…

And then suddenly yoink. You’re in a war on another planet, a billion miles away.

Turns out even vanishingly unlikely things can happen if you’re the protagonists of a book!

It’s a neat book. Shades our relationships with the Andelites a bit more, gives Ax some hard choices to make, and perhaps–just perhaps–gets a good word about what’s going on on Earth to someone that may be able to help.

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Another hit, and back to back with Lost City as well!

It’s a bonkers plot (aren’t they all?), based around the idea of ‘Nikola Tesla’s doomsday weapons were REAL’ (albeit assigned to a made up Hungarian scientist instead), evil anarchists inadvertently teaming up with the very elite they’re trying to overthrow, and… for some reason throwing mysterious cities and living fossils in for good measure.

The science is… messy at best. There’s a bunch of electromagnetism which they handwave as not directly causing a lot of the issues we see, but rather setting things that could otherwise have happened in motion, but… the sense of scale never quite works. The code work involved in the secret solution to it all is… just not good (it’s barely a code and there’s no way to tell they interpreted it correctly at that). The mammoth parts and new entire-field-of-archeology-upsetting discoveries are… convenient and yet barely make an impact.

Characterwise, ‘Uncle Karl’ here is such a delight. An old soldier trying to do the right thing one last time. He’s a fun contrast to the young action heroes in most of these books.

The action is, for the most part, fine. There’s nothing nearly as spectacular as the castle/island escape scenes from the last book, but there’s a nice sense of tension through this book.

And yet, it’s still a surprisingly good book.

Onward!

A secret weapon against the Yeerks?

Cassie suddenly laughed. It was a cynical laugh. I didn’t know she was capable of a cynical laugh. “And all the rights and wrongs, and all the lines between good and evil, just go wafting and waving and swirling around, don’t they?”

Yeah. Of course things couldn’t be that easy.

It’s another in the series continuing to dig into just how terrible some of the things these kids (and don’t get me wrong–they are so young for any of this) find themselves doing. For the most part, they’ve survived unscathed. And they have a certain amount of plot immunity. But even that, you can’t expect to hold out forever.

In any case, it’s an intense book, somewhat offset (and at times I would even say weakened) by the constant ridiculousness of said ‘secret weapon’. One strange bit, so far as I remember… it’s never mentioned again. Perhaps I’m just not remembering it, it has been a while, but it seems a weird thing to drop.

But worth the (re-)read.

Onward!

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The one with the (mid-90s) Internet.

So much of the technology in this book is weird and dated–primarily since it comes on the tale end of the AOL-style internet, with chat rooms and email clients baked into your connection itself and before the more free-for-all (glorious) mess of the early 2000s.

Still, bragging about 38400 baud modems. Talking about ‘code words’ instead of passwords. Associating cookies with your ‘screen name’. A search result (even for a weird ‘made up’ term) returning exactly one hit. It’s such a weird mix of now dated technology of the time–some done slightly wrong. And it’s

It’s also the one (of many) where they start to touch on the moral complexities of (teenagers fighting a) war.

“It was the best you could do,” I said. “It was all you could do. I guess it’s hard to fight evil without doing some along the way.”

We saw a bit of this in The Escape, but it’s really coming home now:

“I just want to get back to a life someday where I don’t have to make decisions that might get people killed.”

“Do you?” Now Marco’s smile was definitely of the mocking variety. “You really think someday we can all go back to being regular kids? You think after being the leader of the Animorphs you can go back to being Joe Average Student?”

“Yes, I do.” I said it forcefully. I meant it.

And… yeah.

It’s hard.

And it’s not going to get any easier over the remaining dozens of books.

Oy for them.

Onward!

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I recently listened to the ‘Cave of Bones’ episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind–a chat with paleoanthropologist Lee Berger all about his discoveries in a cave system in South Africa–and what it might mean to the history of human kind.

Interesting enough premise and hey, he has a book!

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And now things take a different take. We’ve dealt with it all. Vampires, weres, skinwalkers, aliens from other dimensions, thousand year old uber-vamps… now it’s time to let some witches shine once again.

And oh, how crazy things get. I’m so glad to see the Truebloods again. Pregnant Molly is fun. Angie Baby is scary and adorable. Evan is going to get himself revealed. And now we can good witch / evil witch with the best of them!

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Marco books have some of the best snippets.

I jumped in, feet first, around the eight-foot marker. I bobbed back up to the surface and said, “This is insane, Marco.”

To which I answered, “So I’ll be careful.”

To which I countered, “You’re talking to yourself, do you know that?”

“Oh, shut up,” I said.

And:

“You know, sometimes there’s just a very fine line between us and the Three Stooges,” I said.

<What are stooges?> Ax asked.

“A stooge is a guy stupid enough to run around inside a Yeerk stronghold wearing a pair of bike shorts and accompanied by a Deer-man from outer space and a mouse-eating Bird-boy. That’s a stooge.”

Also, SHARKS!

They’re the Hork-Bajir of the sea! Apparently literally. It’s an odd one to pair right fater The Unknown. Back to back books talking about non-human/animal Controllers, although with rather different outcomes. And now I want to look up the differences between shark and horse brains…

Plus, we get an appearance by a new, interesting race (mind reading amphibians!), more Visser One scenes (of course, it’s a Marco points of view)/Visser Three politics, and some underwater adventures, which are neat.

Overall, a decent entry. Up from The Change and The Unknown, I think.

Onward!

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HTMX. HTML, but better*!

<button hx-delete="/contacts/{{ contact.id }}"
        hx-push-url="true"
        hx-confirm="Are you sure you want to delete this contact?" (1)
        hx-target="body">
Delete Contact
</button>

Basically, the entire idea is that you don’t need quite so much (explicit) JavaScript everywhere. It should be possible to declaratively design pages that can automatically take actions (including HTTP verbs other than GET and POST) and replace (partial) content on pages.

That’s why I read the book.

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Rhai is a scripting language written in and generally used by the programming language Rust when you want something a bit more dynamic/don’t want to recomile.

The Rhai book is the mdBook style documentation that describes the language, gets into how to use it (in both straight forward and more complicated scenarios), and acts as a reference when needed.

It’s a bit of an odd one to read straight through, but I’ve been looking for exactly this sort of thing (an embeddable scripting language for Rust) so I figured I’d give it a chance!

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“And what do you want, Tobias?”

”You know what I want,” I said, almost choking on the words. ”You know.”

”Yes. But do YOU know what you want, Tobias?”, the Ellimist asked. ”And if you get it, will you still know?”

Yes. Spoilers. The Ellimist is around.

And since this originally released the same day as The Andalite Chronicles–and because it’s a Tobias book, you had to expect it.

In short, the Ellimist is (totally not 😉) interfering to free some Hork-Bajir. Tobias gets roped in. We do learn a lot more about Hork-Bajir (more than we will really until somewhat later in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles). It’s a good thing to be doing.

And yet, I still totally get Tobias lamenting getting jerked around like that.

But in the end–it was all worth it?

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