Thursday, March 18, 2010

In Which Our Heroine Appreciates The Sci-Fi



It's the fourth day of Author Appreciation Week and it's AAW creator Heidi's birthday. Happy Birthday, Heidi!! Anyway, today I am appreciating Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, the creators of the middle-grade series ANIMORPHS.

ANIMORPHS was a science fiction series about five teenagers who fought the world -- or well, the United States -- against parasitic aliens. These aliens crawled up and into your ear and then took over your brain. However, to the normal eye you would not notice this change. At all.

Can we talk about *creepy*?

Yeah.

Despite, the creepy awesomeness of the Yeerks (the aliens in ANIMORPHS), Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant created an awesome world. It was our world with CDs and mall trips and video games, but at the same time it wasn't. It took place in an unknown state in the United States, making it anywhere.

The books were everything good YA should be (and this was middle grade!): dark, funny, sexually tensioned, scary and powerful. Katherine, Michael and the ghostwriters brought a series of -- well, there is only one word for it -- awesome.

Although the characters never got "older," I did as the series went on so I pretended the characters did too. According to a timeline on some website I forget where, the five teenagers began as age thirteen and ended the series at age sixteen or seventeen. The series had 54+ books and held my attention for mostly all of them.

Not only did the series rock, there was a television series in the late '90s AND there was talk of a movie. But the best talk ever is that Scholastic is reissuing the series in 2011 with brand new covers. Word on the street is that they're 3-D!

Katherine and Michael and the series got me interested in writing. I have over 30 saved documents on a 1997 Gateway computer of Animorphs fan fiction. And after that came more fan fiction. And then eventually original writing. And then back to fan fiction. And then more original writing. But all in all, I owe it to these folks.

5 comments:

  1. Hmm blogger hates me and ate my original post for some reason, but I was saying that it's awesome how influential some of these series were to us.

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  2. I loved this series. Really, really loved. Till I read one, got carsick and was put off the whole thing. But I always loved Tobias, the falcon. Loved. <3

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  3. I remember Animorphs! The covers were awesome.

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  4. omgggg i remember animorphssssss

    totally took me down nostalgia lane, bestie.

    le sigh.

    great post, natch.

    <333 youuuu (a little bit more each time!)

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  5. I'm so glad you all liked Animorphs. Woot!! :-)

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