Finally finished the series last week for the first time and my god. I feel like from the moment I knew for certain someone was going to die in The Ellimists Chronicles I knew it would be Rachel, she just seemed least likely to be able to handle a post-war life.

That said I love how they managed to wrap everything up and still deliver on who dies in this book early enough to really show us the fallout after the war. I think the my favorite sequence in the whole series is definitely the tense negotiations between the animorphs and andalite high command when Marco points out that if they back down on those negotiations then the andalites will own them, because he is completely correct.

All in all a fantastic conclusion to a great series and I haven’t even touched on the final fates of the yeerk pool, the animorphs reserves, or the yeerks aboard the pool ship. But I can’t appreciate enough how much screentime they gave to the weight and truth of Jake’s actions as a war criminal during the fighting and how that affects him.

Only fitting that the antagonist right at the end is just a bigger and more advanced version of the same existential threat the yeerks pose: being swallowed up and assimilated by an entity that doesn’t want to kill you, just take away all free will and use you and your knowledge/memories to expand its reach.

Holy shit, finished this one earlier today and I did not expect it to escalate that significantly. I figured they might recruit a second team, not quadruple their numbers and then that last brawl at the school for the blind was both awesome and kind of terrifying to actually imagine, really drives home how potent any sizeable force with good battle morphs can be, the sheer mayhem of that much going on at once was incredible. Kind of reminds me of the scene in LotR RotK when the gondorians are getting ready to defend the gates and then its trolls that come through, but this time it was the good guys busting it down.

Man, I’ve had the wrong Boole in my head this whole time? Guess I have a 0 somewhere that I should have a 1

The math fun fact I remember best from college is that Charles Boole invented Boolean algebra for his doctoral thesis and his goal was to create a branch of mathematics that was useless. For those not familiar with boolean algebra it works by using logic gates with 1s and 0s to determine a final 1 or 0 state and is subsequently the basis for all modern digital computing

I’ve been listening through all of the audiobooks since December and just finished this one. I never managed to get through the whole series as a kid, so this one was a first for me and Wow.

Safe to say after this one that the safe episodic status quo has been completed shattered, I know the series does a good job with serializing most of its big elements to be regular parts of the series like the chee and the elemist and krayak etc, but this one definitely feels like the start of the end game

The short story version is called Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang

I would think that the Miller ghost that the protomolecule uses to interface with Holden is a perfect example of it being changed by the process of outcompeting. The interludes in Cibola burn are a very good example of how despite still functioning the protomolecule has been permanently changed by what it did in Sol system and the humans it assimilated in the process

If i had to guess I would say it likely comes down to how the rice and bean plants fair in low G. If they’re eating real rice and fake beans I would think its because the rice is either grown on or near ceres as well as the yeast and fungus substitutes that make up the fake beans, whereas real beans would have to be imported in

While possible I think the relative acceleration and maneuverability of a ship constrained by human passengers compared to a missile means that you can point your drive plume at it but the missile will already be programmed to come in on an arc intended to avoid the plume and with its better maneuverability it will still be able to hit its target effectively.

Would you care to elaborate on why that is? I would say it’s easily the best piece of star wars media to come out since Disney took over, and arguably prior to that. It doesn’t get overly bogged down in trying to reference or shoehorn in references to other star wars characters like parts of The Mandalorian or the sequel trilogy and it tells a compelling and emotional narrative about the path one man takes to become a dedicated member of the resistance