#high wizardry

[spoiler for a book you should most definitely read if you haven't already]

a human, in a last-ditch attempt to persuade the party of newborn sentient AI robots she built that organic life is worth preserving, provides a "data transfer" consisting of the whole of her life's experiences...

then despairs upon the realization that in so doing she has also exposed them to the pain that comes with life, the grief and fear and cruelty and hurting, and surely it's all over now, any chance of proving that "slowlife" is worth it has been irreparably lost...

but then, oh, but then.

“Now we see what these ‘heart’ things she gave us are for.” That was Gigo. Good kid, Dairine thought weakly, good baby. You tell ‘em.

“And what entropy does, and what it cannot touch, ever.” That was Beanpole, the silly looking thing—where did he get such a voice? “Not all the evils and deaths it makes possible can touch the joys that run through it. We will have those too.”

“We will not stop that joy,” said Monitor. “Not for a nanosecond.”

She utterly disdained the 'phreaking', the breaking and entering of electronic bulletin boards and systems that interested a few of her malicious classmates. It could get you thrown into prison. What fascinated Dairine was advanced programming, the true hacking – getting a computer to sing, or talk, or play involved and clever games, or make you a sandwich. All these things were possible, with the right peripherals and a clever programmer. That she was; and the computer – tireless listener, absolutely obedient to orders, and endlessly forgiving of mistakes – was the perfect companion. They worked well together. Even her teachers had noticed that the machines 'behaved' better around Dairine than around anyone else.

Spoilers for Young Wizards book 3, High Wizardry

Dairine is on Ordeal, facing the Lone Power, as you do, and she has temporarily tied herself in with a civilization of wizards who are electronic, and largely reliant on solar power. So the Lone Power kills the planet's sun. Dairine decides the solution to this is More Light.

In the original version of the book, she temporarily stops the expansion of the universe, and this causes the whole universe to fill with light. (This is explained via Olber's Paradox, which suggests that if the universe were infinite but static, every possible line of sight would eventually meet a star, and therefore the universe would be uniformly bright.)

When it was time for the revised (NME) edition, Diane Duane had learned that, unfortunately, this wouldn't work. Halting the expansion of the universe would have effects, certainly, but not within a matter of minutes (as it is shown in the book), and it wouldn't have the effects shown in the book.

So the NME edition instead has Dairine "rerun the lightshow from the first few seconds after the Big Bang". That is, it's not really happening. It's just a window into the past when it happened.

And we can quibble about "first few seconds", because photons weren't really doing much until like ten seconds after the Big Bang. But in my mind the main weakness in this version is that it's a step backwards.

The light in the original version was so powerful because it was all the starlight in all the universe, and the Lone Power was overmatched. The light in the NME version is just a replay.

So here's my fix: In the Recombination era of the cosmos (18 thousand years to 370 thousand years after the Big Bang) the universe had cooled enough that neutral (non-ionized) hydrogen and helium atoms could form. The cosmic microwave background dates to this era. It's the oldest light in the universe, older than the oldest of stars. And we can still see it with the right kind of telescopes. It's everywhere.

Honestly, your ask inspired me to get off my butt and finally compile a list of the books that I reference with my character names in Eleutherophobia, because in a lot of ways that’s my list of recommendations right there: I deliberately chose children’s and/or sci-fi stories that deal really well with death, war, dark humor, class divides, and/or social trauma for most of my character names.  I also tend to use allusions that either comment on Animorphs or on the source work in the way that the names come up.

That said, here are The Ten Greatest Animorphs-Adjacent Works of Literature According to Sol’s Totally Arbitrary Standards: 

1. A Ring of Endless Light, Madeline L’Engle

This is a really good teen story that, in painfully accurate detail, captures exactly what it’s like to be too young to really understand death while forced to confront it anyway.  I read it at about the same age as the protagonist, not that long after having suffered the first major loss in my own life (a friend, also 14, killed by cancer).  It accomplished exactly what a really good novel should by putting words to the experiences that I couldn’t describe properly either then or now.  This isn’t a light read—its main plot is about terminal illness, and the story is bookended by two different unexpected deaths—but it is a powerful one. 

2. The One and Only Ivan, K.A. Applegate 

This prose novel (think an epic poem, sort of like The Iliad, only better) obviously has everything in it that makes K.A. Applegate one of the greatest children’s authors alive: heartbreaking tragedy, disturbing commentary on the human condition, unforgettably individuated narration, pop culture references, and poop jokes.  Although I’m mostly joking when I refer to Marco in my tags as “the one and only” (since this book is narrated by a gorilla), Ivan does remind me of Marco with his sometimes-toxic determination to see the best of every possible situation when grief and anger allow him no other outlet for his feelings and the terrifying lengths to which he will go in order to protect his found family.

3. My Teacher Flunked the Planet, Bruce Coville

Although the entire My Teacher is an Alien series is really well-written and powerful, this book is definitely my favorite because in many ways it’s sort of an anti-Animorphs.  Whereas Animorphs (at least in my opinion) is a story about the battle for personal freedom and privacy, with huge emphasis on one’s inner identity remaining the same even as one’s physical shape changes, My Teacher Flunked the Planet is about how maybe the answer to all our problems doesn’t come from violent struggle for personal freedoms, but from peaceful acceptance of common ground among all humans.  There’s a lot of intuitive appeal in reading about the protagonists of a war epic all shouting “Free or dead!” before going off to battle (#13) but this series actually deconstructs that message as blind and excessive, especially when options like “all you need is love” or “no man is an island” are still on the table.

4. Moon Called, Patricia Briggs

I think this book is the only piece of adult fiction on this whole list, and that’s no accident: the Mercy Thompson series is all about the process of adulthood and how that happens to interact with the presence of the supernatural in one’s life.  The last time I tried to make a list of my favorite fictional characters of all time, it ended up being about 75% Mercy Thompson series, 24% Animorphs, and the other 1% was Eugenides Attolis (who I’ll get back to in my rec for The Theif).  These books are about a VW mechanic, her security-administrator next door neighbor, her surgeon roommate, her retail-working best friend and his defense-lawyer boyfriend, and their cybersecurity frenemy.  The fact that half those characters are supernatural creatures only serves to inconvenience Mercy as she contemplates how she’s going to pay next month’s rent when a demon destroyed her trailer, whether to get married for the first time at age 38 when doing so would make her co-alpha of a werewolf pack, what to do about the vampires that keep asking for her mechanic services without paying, and how to be a good neighbor to the area ghosts that only she can see.  

5. The Thief, Megan Whalen Turner

This book (and its sequel A Conspiracy of Kings) are the ones that I return to every time I struggle with first-person writing and no Animorphs are at hand.  Turner does maybe the best of any author I’ve seen of having character-driven plots and plot-driven characters.  This book is the story of five individuals (with five slightly different agendas) traveling through an alternate version of ancient Greece and Turkey with a deceptively simple goal: they all want to work together to steal a magical stone from the gods.  However, the narrator especially is more complicated than he seems, which everyone else fails to realize at their own detriment. 

6. Homecoming, Cynthia Voight

Critics have compared this book to a modern, realistic reimagining of The Boxcar Children, which always made a lot of sense to me.  It’s the story of four children who must find their own way from relative to relative in an effort to find a permanent home, struggling every single day with the question of what they will eat and how they will find a safe place to sleep that night.  The main character herself is one of those unforgettable heroines that is easy to love even as she makes mistake after mistake as a 13-year-old who is forced to navigate the world of adult decisions, shouldering the burden of finding a home for her family because even though she doesn’t know what she’s doing, it’s not like she can ask an adult for help.  Too bad the Animorphs didn’t have Dicey Tillerman on the team, because this girl shepherds her family through an Odysseus-worthy journey on stubbornness alone.

7. High Wizardry, Diane Duane

The Young Wizards series has a lot of good books in it, but this one will forever be my favorite because it shows that weird, awkward, science- and sci-fi-loving girls can save the world just by being themselves.  Dairine Callahan was the first geek girl who ever taught me it’s not only okay to be a geek girl, but that there’s power in empiricism when properly applied.  In contrast to a lot of scientifically “smart” characters from sci-fi (who often use long words or good grades as a shorthand for conveying their expertise), Dairine applies the scientific method, programming theory, and a love of Star Wars to her problem-solving skills in a way that easily conveys that she—and Diane Duane, for that matter—love science for what it is: an adventurous way of taking apart the universe to find out how it works.  This is sci-fi at its best. 

8. Dr. Franklin’s Island, Gwyneth Jones

If you love Animorphs’ body horror, personal tragedy, and portrayal of teens struggling to cope with unimaginable circumstances, then this the book for you!  I’m only being about 80% facetious, because this story has all that and a huge dose of teen angst besides.  It’s a loose retelling of H.G. Wells’s classic The Island of Doctor Moreau, but really goes beyond that story by showing how the identity struggles of adolescence interact with the identity struggles of being kidnapped by a mad scientist and forcibly transformed into a different animal.  It’s a survival story with a huge dose of nightmare fuel (seriously: this book is not for the faint of heart, the weak of stomach, or anyone who skips the descriptions of skin melting and bones realigning in Animorphs) but it’s also one about how three kids with a ton of personal differences and no particular reason to like each other become fast friends over the process of surviving hell by relying on each other.  

9. Sideways Stories from Wayside School, Louis Sachar

Louis Sachar is the only author I’ve ever seen who can match K.A. Applegate for nihilistic humor and absurdist horror layered on top of an awesome story that’s actually fun for kids to read.  Where he beats K.A. Applegate out is in terms of his ability to generate dream-like surrealism in these short stories, each one of which starts out hilariously bizarre and gradually devolves into becoming nightmare-inducingly bizarre.  Generally, each one ends with an unsettling abruptness that never quite relieves the tension evoked by the horror of the previous pages, leaving the reader wondering what the hell just happened, and whether one just wet one’s pants from laughing too hard or from sheer existential terror.  The fact that so much of this effect is achieved through meta-humor and wordplay is, in my opinion, just a testament to Sachar’s huge skill as a writer. 

10. Magyk, Angie Sage