103 pages • 3 hours read
Rodman PhilbrickThe Last Book In The Universe
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Miles to Go Before We Sleep”
As a swarm of Monkey Boys chase them, the trio is driven in a takvee by a group of teks toward the Pipe. The takvee is high-tech and comfortable, with reinforced walls. Spaz says some of the most expensive takvees have their own intelligence. Ryter reveals he was bluffing regarding Mongo, which makes Spaz realize the old man did the same thing to him when they first met. Spaz thinks of Bean and the blood sickness, wondering how she is feeling right now. Then Spaz lies to Little Face in an attempt to calm him down, telling him there are stacks of choxbars where they’re headed.
After the teks dump them out of the takvee, they have to climb the rubble up to the Pipe, which Little Face does first. He reports back that it’s safe in that the Pipe feels familiar, predictable, and "not the least bit scary" (88) as compared to Mongo’s lair. Ryter quotes Robert Frost and introduces Spaz to “literary immortality,” explaining that once something is written down, "part of you lives forever" (89). Spaz thinks about the Pipe as having “moods like a living thing. Noisy moods, quiet moods, dark moods” (82). Ryder starts to tell Spaz about the Odyssey and Odysseus, but Spaz becomes upset when Ryder suggests he has a stupid name. Spaz tells him to be quiet, and for a long time they all are.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Fair Maidens Must Be Rescued”
At the end of the Pipe, the next latch is burning, including huge swaths of buildings, people, anything that can be set on fire, and the scene is noticeable from miles away. The smoke is pervasive. When they make it free from the Pipe, the trio stick very closely together through the smell and the smoke, until they hear the howling of a mob even more animalistic than the Monkey Boys.
They hear a girl’s voice, commanding the mob to keep their distance. It is Lanaya, the young proov who likes to hand out edibles in the latches, standing on her takvee being swarmed. Ryter distracts the mob and Spaz and Little Face convince Lanaya to get back into her takvee and command it to go. Ryter appears before the vehicle, and Spaz gets it to stop and open for him, which momentarily offends the proov. She remains unconvinced that the mob would have hurt her, a known proov. The mob continues the chase, so they zip at top speed, 200 miles per hour, to a “safe place” (91).
They don’t stop until they reach an area called the Forbidden Zone, a “gray, barren landscape” which is still mined and acting as Eden’s “first line of defense” (92). They can’t step outside of the takvee or any land mines they’ve dodged will activate, but the takvee has the codes to disarm the mines so that they can stay there safely, as long as they stay inside. Lanaya listens to their story about Bean and agrees to help them get to her before she dies of the blood sickness.
Chapter 15 Summary: “In the Zone’’
The quartet continues to ride through the minefield, which spooks Spaz but doesn’t faze Lanaya. She explains that Eden is at the center of the Urb, with the Zone surrounding on all sides, so she always uses the mines to get out to the latches and feed the people. Spaz spends some time ruminating on the relationship between normals and proovs. Ryter refers to Lanaya as having “guardians” (94) and wonders what they think of Lanaya’s beneficent behavior, but she declines to talk about them. Ryter announces his confidence in her goodness, which just upsets Lanaya more because she can’t believe he’s acting like her equal as she believes she is superior to normals. Little Face tries to engage with Lanaya, but when she tries to teach him her name, he becomes very shy. Ryter explains the concept of "a feral child" (97) to Lanaya.
The takvee warns Lanaya of an approaching patrol vehicle, which she’s able to evade through commands; if caught, she’d be reported. Before too long, they cross out of the Zone and into Bean’s latch, where the latchboss, Lotti Getts, and a swarm of her Vandals immediately surround them with jetbikes and splat guns, forcing them to stop. Spaz is not happy to see her.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
In Chapter 13, Ryter introduces Spaz to “literary immortality” (89), the concept of achieving a kind of life after death made possible by writing one’s own story down for anyone to access and remember. There are works of literature from before the Big Shake whose words Ryter remembers and can even recite, such as Robert Frost’s poetry, the Odyssey, and Don Quixote. This all intertwines with Ryter’s concept of future as introduced in Chapter 3, which is groundbreaking for Spaz, who has grown up in a generation where there is no real concept of future. Just as probes have erased access to the past for a majority of users, they have also nullified all reasons for entertaining the concept of future-planning. Probes allow for a constant now in which even the concept of the present is largely contained to one’s own current mental state, unrelated to the world or other humans.
Meeting the threshold of the second latch beyond Billy Bizmo’s authority, the trio encounter a world on fire: “It looks like the sun melted, and everything along the edge of the world went up inflames” (86).The motif of fire strikes as an agent of chaos or destruction. In retrospect, this concept was introduced in Chapter 8, when Spaz delivers Little Face back to the ’boxers sitting around small fires and before he knows it, they are chasing him in a half-formed mob. The connection in Chapter 14 is a lot more straightforward. The trio have just come through the nightmarish landscape of Mongo’s latch only to find this one burning down around them (i.e. in much worse shape than the previous latch). There are no teks, leaders, or even followers—just rioting. It is here in this part of the story that fire’s symbolism begins to solidify into chaos.
Chapter 14 also focuses on the theme of privilege, and the presumption that belonging to a higher class and possessing physical beauty would render one untouchable. The group re-encounter Lanaya, a beautiful teenaged proov, handing out edibles while nearly being swallowed up by a mob of normals herself. She cannot accept that the mob would have hurt her, while the others are convinced they got there just in time. Ryter alludes to “rescuing” (27) her, a concept initially explored by Spaz in his Coley Riggins 3D.
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By Rodman Philbrick
