Who is Maximum Ride? -:- Maximum Ride 是谁呢？

Maximum Ride was the leader of six kids and a talking dog. These six kids were special - they had wings and could fly. Max or Maximum (Max is f - female) was fourteen and the others were:

Fang, fourteen, (m - male);

Iggy, fourteen, (m - male) who was blind;

Nudge, eleven, (f - female) a motor-mouth;

Gazzy, eight, (m - male); and

Angel, six, (f - female) who could read minds and at times control them too.

Angel’s clever and quick-thinking talking dog was Total (not sure whether m or f) and Total could fly too.

All of the ‘gang’ were the result of scientists (called whitecoats) who played around with recombinant life-forms where they grafted different species’ DNZ together at the head office of ITEXICON in Florida, United States of America (known to them as ‘The School). They have 2% of Avian DNA infused to their human DNA. They took flight around the world trying to discover their origins.

The management of ITEX was not pleased with them and sent out half-lupine (wolf DNA combined with human DNA) guards called Erasers, after them.

 

Let us read several excerpts from the book “Saving the World and other extreme sports”.

“… … “Fans still hanging on your every word?” Max asked sleepily some time later.

“Fang looked up from his blog. He didn’t know how much time had passed. The slightest tint of pink on the horizon made the rest of the world seem blacker somehow. But he could clearly see every freckle on Max’s tired face.

” … “Yep,” he said. Max shook her head, then relaxed into the crook of a large branch. Her eyes drifted shut again, but he knew she wasn’t yet asleep - her muscles were still tight, her body still stiff.

“It was hard for her to relax her guard. Hard for her to relax period. She had a lot to carry on those genetically enhanced shoulders, and all in all, she did a dang good job.

“But no one was perfect.” :::::::: page 17

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0825283/

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhQiwVi3jdo

 

Maximum Ride is a series of young adult fantasy novels written by James Patterson and is well worth getting our younger generation of teens to read, just to expand their minds and to learn to imagine things.

Maximum Ride is now a 2016 movie.

 

Read about the characters of this series from Wikipedia:

Maximum Ride

Maximum Ride (simply known as Max) is the title character and the primary protagonist of the series. She is a 14-year-old (15 in Fang, Angel, and Nevermore) Bird|avian-human hybrid and the leader of the Flock. Her hair color has differed throughout the books, being described as dark as sun-streaked brown (MAX) and as light as blond (School’s Out Forever, Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports). She has peachy skin and brown eyes. Max is 5’8″ and weighs 97 pounds, as described in The Final Warning. She has a 15-foot wingspan and is half Hispanic as described in Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports. Her wings are light tan, with brown spots, and cream and brown streaks. Max’s powers are to fly up to 350 mph, she is the strongest of the flock, she has great leadership abilities, is a master fighter, has a voice inside her head that is sometimes Jeb and sometimes who knows what, and she develops gills at the end of MAX. In MAX, Max talks with Fang in the desert after talking to him about Nudge wanting to cut her wings off. Later, the Flock meets Dylan, who, according to Dr. Gunther-Hagen, is Max’s “perfect other half”. Max begins to feel an attraction for Dylan when Fang leaves. In Angel, she and Dylan, an 8 month old clone with 2% avian DNA, grow closer, confusing her feelings about Fang, who begins to grow closer to Maya, who is Max’s clone. Max is one of the two members of the Flock who found her parents; Iggy is the other. However, she is the only one to like her parents, as Iggy leaving his after only a week or so (they wanted to put him in a freak sideshow). She is stunned when she learned that Jeb Batchelder (a “white coat” who helped them escape from the school and then raised them) was her father. Dr. Valencia Martinez is her biological mother. Max trusts Dr. Martinez completely, but remains wary of Jeb. She is also close to her half-sister, Dr. Martinez’ daughter Ella, who Max first meets when trying to save her from some bullies in the first book. Max dislikes Ari (Her half-brother and Jeb’s son) until she learns that they’re related, with whom she is constantly fighting, but then he joins her “mini-flock” that was created in Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports for a short time after rescuing them from the School where they were going to be killed.

Fang

Fang is 14 years old (15 in the last three books). He is second-in-command of the Flock and Max’s best friend (later her boyfriend). He is only four months younger than Max. Fang is able to virtually disappear by staying very still and quiet. He is somewhat stronger than the rest of the flock, often sustaining near-fatal wounds, as in books one and two. He also develops gills at the end of MAX. Fang almost always wears dark clothing and always seems to be sneaking up on Max. He has dark, blue/black hair and eyes with olive skin. He is believed to have DNA of a raven because of his black wings that have a purple/blue shimmer. He has a fourteen-foot wingspan. In The Angel Experiment, he found out that the School took him after he was born. When his mother had him the doctors told her that he had died. Fang decided that he didn’t want to find his mother, she wasn’t much older than his own age when she had him. He is somewhat reserved, but cares deeply about the Flock. He is usually very silent, and seems quite mysterious, always hiding his feelings. He runs a blog about the Flock’s adventures that proves useful in several books, such as in School’s Out—Forever. In The Angel Experiment, Max kisses Fang when he is injured. In School’s Out—Forever, he is seen kissing the “Red-Haired Wonder,” Lissa. He and Max fight about this, but afterwards they make up. In Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports, he kisses Max. In The Final Warning, Fang seems to like Dr. Brigid Dwyer, who worked with the Flock in their mission to Antarctica, and Max becomes jealous resulting in tension between the two. In Saving The World And Other Extreme Sports, when Ari joins the flock, Fang decides to lead half of the Flock and leaves Max with her half-brother. He later comes back, reuniting at the end of an epic battle made up of an army of his blog’s followers, in which Ari “expires”. Fang leaves the Flock again at the end of Fang because of Dylan, Max’s “perfect other half”, and because Angel has predicted that Fang would be the first to die; therefore, because he knows that by dying, he would put the others in danger, he leaves. (Mostly to protect Max.) Everyone is upset by this, especially Max, but she finds a letter later that he wrote to her saying that if in 20 years, the world hasn’t come to an end, he’ll meet her on the cliff where they learned to fly like the hawks. (In a previous book.)

In Angel, Fang becomes the leader of a new Flock (aka ‘Fang’s Gang’) which includes Ratchet, Star, Kate, Holden, and Maya (Max’s clone), who help him try to stop the Doomsday Group. When he realizes he cannot stop the Doomsday Group on his own, he enlists the help of Max’s Flock. Max and Fang seem to grow apart and start to like different people. Also, Fang starts having feelings for Maya, trying to replace Max. However, he then realizes that Maya is different from Max, and begins to treat her differently, although in his heart, he still loves Max. After the planned D-day, Fang leaves with his flock, leaving Max and her flock in the rubble of Paris, searching for Angel (who is missing).

In “Nevermore”, Fang hears the ‘Voice’ and comes back for Max, after breaking one of his wings. He and Max grow back together after he comes back and abandons his ‘Gang’. It takes some time, but eventually they love each other again. Fang manages to kill several erasers and see Dylan kill Ari. It is after that, when Dylan attempts to kill Fang, Max really realizes that she wants to be with Fang for the rest of her life. When Doctor Martinez (Max’s mother) takes them and the Flock to a paradise island, he and Max resume their previous relationship. When he and Max escape to a perfect perch, he tells her that he loves her for the first time, just before they are hit by a tsunami. When they are both rescued, Max tells Fang that she loves him as well. Then they kissed.

Iggy

Iggy is 14 years old, six months younger than Max (15 in the last three books), and third-in-command of the Flock. He is usually sarcastic, 6’0″, has extremely pale skin, whitish-strawberry blonde hair, very light icy blue eyes, and a wingspan of 14 feet. Iggy is described as very handsome, especially because of his “unseeing, yet captivating, eyes”. He is one of the only two flock members to have met his parents, the other being Max. His real name is revealed to be James Griffiths. When he found his parents, he learned that he was kidnapped by the School when he was about 4 months old. At first, Iggy decides to leave the Flock to live with his parents, but later leaves when he learns that his parents didn’t want to have him back and only wanted to use him to make money off his story. Due to the whitecoats’ experiments to enhance his night vision, Iggy is effectively blind, though he can see if his surroundings are white and can identify people by feeling their fingerprints and the feel of their wings. He can also feel colors. Despite his blindness, the Flock often leave things up to him that require precision or detail, such as cooking and doctoring. His senses are also the best of the flock due to his blindness, although he occasionally suffers resentment of his blindness and the resulting dependency of the Flock it creates. He and The Gasman are best friends and have a habit of building bombs out of almost anything and blowing things up, including alarm clocks. Iggy and Ella, Max’s half sister, also showed signs of growing affection towards one another in Angel, which ultimately cumulated in a shared kiss in Nevermore.

Nudge

Nudge (later found to be called “Monique”) is 11 years old (12 in Fang, Angel, and Nevermore), has brown skin, and has wild, curly, long, dark brown hair. She likes Max over Fang and can’t live without her. Her wings are often said to be tawny-brown, almost cream. Her real name is revealed to be Monique and she managed to track down who she believes to be her mother because of the resemblance in skin tone, but never meets her because she is attacked by Ari. She is a “motormouth” as said by Max several times in the book. The Flock calls her the Nudge Channel because when she’s awake it’s “all Nudge, all the time.” She likes fashion, especially about hair, clothes, and make-up. Nudge can hack into computers with her ability to sense leftover emotions, also called psychometric, and she can draw metal towards her by will, like a magnet. In MAX, when Jeb offers the Flock to stay at a day and night school, Nudge wants to stay and get her wings cut off. Of the flock, Nudge is the one who most longs for the normality of the lives of other kids their age. Nudge is described as Max’s best supporter and the peacemaker.

The Gasman

The Gasman (Gazzy) is 8 years old (9 in Fang, Angel, and Nevermore) with blond hair, blue eyes, tan/light brown wings with a 10-foot wingspan. He is Angel’s biological older brother, and they are the only blood related siblings of the Flock. He has a mischievous nature and makes fun of Max sometimes. He and Iggy are experts at constructing and setting off bombs and explosives, as Max states, “You could lock the Gasman in a padded cell with some dental floss and a bowl of Jell-O, and he’d find a way to make something explode.” It is revealed that his parents sold both him and Angel to the School when they were very young. The Gasman’s most useful ability is to perfectly mimic any voice. Max and Fang find a picture of baby Gazzy when they go check out what they think was Gazzy and Angel’s old residence; the Flock sees the picture many times accidentally and sometimes purposefully throughout the series. He is called The Gasman because he passes gas a great deal, owing to a problem with his digestive system. Additionally, he later develops a “skill”: he can produce large “mushroom-shaped” clouds of gas.

Angel

Angel is 6 years old (7 in Max, Fang, Angel, and Nevermore), with blue eyes and curly blonde hair. Angel is also the biological sister of The Gasman (Gazzy). Her wings are pure white and are 8 ft (9 ft in Fang) across. She obtains seemingly random powers at random times, but her most eminent power, lasting throughout the series, is the ability to read and control minds. In The Angel Experiment, she uses her powers to convince a woman to buy her an expensive teddy bear that she names Celeste. She acquires the ability to hold her breath underwater and swim in deep water at pressures that would crush a normal human, change her appearance into a ‘bird of paradise’ form and change her skin and eye color, although after the initial introduction to this power it is never mentioned again, except when she gets trapped under a snow pile in The Final Warning and tries to change form to escape; however, the attempt was unsuccessful. She is usually mistaken to be powerless and innocent, but she is truly extremely intelligent and dangerous. Her ability to control people’s minds gives her extreme power. In Fang, Angel believes that she is the strongest of the Flock, and holds a vote, temporarily kicking Max out of the group. She also has a ‘Voice’ in her head, like Max, but this is not revealed to the reader until Fang, and the Flock doesn’t know this. Angel is portrayed as calculating, ruthless, and unstable in Fang, and has pointed a gun at Max to make enemies back off. In Angel, she seems to have calmed some of the extreme changes of her personality that occurred in Fang, and helps Max to balance her feelings for Fang and Dylan. She appears to be content with her role and no longer bids for power, but advises Max, who is still suspicious of her. In the end, she volunteers to go undercover in a new evil organization (The Doomsday Group). She goes missing after she and Gazzy fail to defuse a bomb, and the others think she is dead. In fact, she is being held captive in an unknown location, and is continually told she is “most superior”. In Nevermore, Angel is captured by the school again. After many tests, they show Angel a video. Angel starts to cry as she realizes the video is of Iggy. She watches people prod and cut open Iggy’s eyes until a whitecoat walks to her and tells her they will be performing the same operation on her. Angel loses her sight temporarily and nearly dies in a fire until Max and the Flock come to save her. When they escape to a ‘tropical paradise’, the world is being destroyed and she admits to Max she is the Voice, and she has been for years.

Dylan

Dylan is an avian-human hybrid who joins the Flock in Fang. He is said to be Max’s “perfect other-half”, causing Max to refer to him as “Mr. Perfect”, although Max and Fang are quite in love when they meet. He is six foot two inches tall with a 15-foot wingspan and chocolate coloured wings, and is usually described as handsome, with dark-blond hair and turquoise eyes, and is said to have a beautiful singing voice. He is in love with Max, but he was programmed by the scientists to feel that way. Because of this, he and Fang do not see eye-to-eye until the end of Nevermore. He was also made in a lab, created from a clone of a boy who had died in a car accident in the country of Canada. He is 8 months old in Fang. He learns how to fly when Max teaches him by pushing him off a roof. His relationship with Max is complicated, but she does eventually start to like him. In Fang he is portrayed as somewhat meek, but appears to grow a backbone, even arguing with Max in Angel. The most notable argument in Angel starts at the beginning of the book with Dylan and Max arguing about how miserable Max has been since Fang left her. Dylan can heal himself almost instantly by placing his own saliva on his wounds and putting pressure on it. In addition, he has extremely good vision and clairvoyance.

In Angel, Max finds a new appreciation for Dylan, and a romance is sparked, though Max is usually confused and therefore harsh. The first time Max allows Dylan to comfort her is in the desert where they embrace. Although she is confused, she allows him to get closer and closer to her.

Later, in the book Nevermore, Dylan is told by a ‘Voice’ that he must capture Max’s heart with all his might, so he takes her to a treehouse he made himself and kisses her then. Later, Fang re-appears after his own clan had been destroyed and Max realizes her mistake, choosing to be with Fang instead of a clone with programmed feelings. Dylan goes on a rampage, destroying part of a town and even attempting to kill Fang. Dylan is nowhere to be seen, so Dr. Martinez seizes her chance and whisks the original flock to a tropical paradise. Dylan appears and states that he will be there for Max when the world ends so they would die together. Max is irked but doesn’t respond to him. Since a meteor is coming to demolish some of the planets, Dylan goes to herd mutant hybrid kids into elaborate underground caves. In the end, Dylan helps pull Max from the water after the apocalypse.

Phoenix

Phoenix is the daughter of Fang and Max, she is conceived and born in the ninth book, Maximum Ride Forever. Phoenix has Fang’s black hair and wings and Max’s brown eyes, though her wings are more blue-ish and her eyes are light.

Total

Total is a black Scottie whom Angel saves from the Institute at the end of The Angel Experiment. He is described to have the characteristics of a Scottish terrier. When Total is rescued from the Institute, he is described as looking similar to Toto from The Wizard of Oz, which would make him a Cairn terrier. Total’s character is not fully developed until School’s Out Forever, when it is discovered that he has the ability to talk. He is often humorous and dramatic, exemplified when he gets shot in the tail and isn’t hurt largely, but still exaggerates the injury. Despite his dramatic nature, he can be mature when he wants to be and will not tolerate getting treated like a normal dog- even going as far as eating at the table with the rest of the flock. In the end of Fang, Total marries Akila, an Alaskan Malamute whom he met in Antarctica in Maximum Ride: The Final Warning. It is discovered Total thinks Tricia Helfer is hot in Angel when they are going to go to the ComicCon in San Diego. He is known to be a fan of culture, including theater and cuisine. He has the ability to jump to great heights, and eventually grows his own tiny wings. At first, he has trouble flying but soon gets the hang of it.

The Erasers

The Erasers, created by the School in Death Valley, are half-human, half-wolf hybrids that were bred by the School to be guards, but their larger mission later involves hunting down and even killing the members of the Flock. Their powers are superhuman strength, but they also eventually gain wings that are crudely grafted onto their shoulder blades. They have a life span of about 4 years to reach maturity and approximately a year or two to hunt the Flock. Jeb’s son, Ari, who was turned into an Eraser at a very young age, is one of the last to die when Itex ‘retires’ all of the Erasers and replaces them with the Flyboys, robotic Erasers with synthetic skin attached to their robotic structure. The Erasers are originally killed off because they ‘expire’ very quickly, but they make a surprise appearance in Fang when they attack all of the flock but Max and Fang, who are not at the house with the others. It is believed that when Itex was disbanded, some scientists took Eraser DNA with them, creating these new Erasers, though they are never mentioned after the events of the surprise battle. They are always armed but rarely use their weapons after The Angel Experiment and later novels in the series.