The Enderverse (WAS: Finally! Ender's Game emerges from Development Hell!) — Page 2

I had gone chronologically in the Ender storyline, but now I've reverted back to the Shadow storyline, though I included Ender's Shadow in my first storyline to get a more complete picture of Ender himself and so I could remember details of Ender's Game as freshly as possible while reading its parallel.  As those who read my reviews know, I was not pleased with the portrayal of Julian Delphiki aka Bean.

Now, having completed Shadow of the Hegemon, I must say that this book left a far better taste in my mouth.  Bean is older, and yet he is more human and less calculating.  His character is far more believable and realistic, his flaws more apparent, his personality more relatable.  He is more subject to passion and personal goals than pure cold reasoning.  As a four to six year old, he was a computer, something I found horribly obnoxious.  Now as an older child, he is actually a human.  I find this not to be a character development, but an improvement by the author himself.  I wish he'd retcon his first book in this series a bit for this reason.

This story details the life of Bean after the war with the Buggers.  Though Ender set off in a relativistic journey, Bean returned home to earth, no longer united behind a common enemy of alien invaders, but instead filled with ambitious nations wishing to unite earth under a single government.  Bean, the brightest of the Battle School bunch, cannot fight this war alone, so he enlists the aid of Ender's older brother, who is filled with nothing less than arrogance, ambition, and a great deal of sadism.  But in this book, we see that in spite of his character flaws, he too is a redeemable and likeable person in his own way.  Interestingly, while Bean was extremely ambitious in his post Bugger War plans in the first book, he is explicitly described as not ambitious in this book, again, motivated by people he cares about rather than dominating the world and winning wars.

I like how this story played out.  The politics and war of the future are plausible and interesting.

SPOILERS:

Bean loses the woman who pulled him out of the ghetto thanks to his nemesis of childhood who has attained great political power of his own.  Bean also learns of his genetic alterations that make him superintelligent as well as small in size, but ultimately results in perpetual growth.  Bean rescues the only female mentioned in Battle School, Petra, who is clearly set up for a relationship in the future, should he be willing to join with any woman; he fears passing along his abnormal genes.

END SPOILERS:

I enjoyed this book far more than I remembered.  Possibly it has to do with my increased familiarity with geography and geopolitics than the last two times.  But I also liked the portrayal of our primary protagonist as well as his somewhat unscrupulous ally.  The antagonist is the only character I have a bit of a hard time believing in, considering the amount of power adults are willing to hand over to a child.  Nevertheless, this was a good book.

Just completed Shadow Puppets, the third book in the Shadow series of the Enderverse.  Last time I explored this universe, this was my stopping point, though one more novel existed at the time.  I have to say, I liked this much better than last time.  Again, I attribute this to an increased undersatnding of geopolitics, as the nations of the earth are fighting each other.  Card does a interesting job describing the way politics, ethnicities, and nationalities affect loyalties.  He shares an interest in peoples of the earth with me, and so I enjoy it very much.  However, some of his ideas are a little harder to swallow, though considering this is around 150 years (give or take, it's never made explicit) in the future, perhaps things will change.  For example, a Muslim man of Russian ancestry is an Israeli citizen in this Israel-Arab alliance, and he retains his Russian name.  I won't spoil too much, but the Muslim world renounces its extremism, makes right with everyone including Israel, translates the Qu'ran into other languages while considering them equally sacred (presently, only the Arabic Qu'ran is really the Qu'ran, and the rest are simply attempts at accommodating those too lazy to learn Arabic--I'm not even permitted to touch a real one).  Sectarian differences are cast aside.  Nationalities (i.e. the various Arab nations) don't prevent unity of action.  Neither do the ethnic differences, such as Persians, Arabs, Turks, Kazakhs, Indonesians, etc.  In another vein, he almost always describes a person's nationality or ethnicity, though such things are not always obvious.  A random, yet Vietnamese soldier walks into a room.  An Indonesian cab driver offers a ride.  How do we know these things?!  It's all a bit humorous, but it didn't really bug me.  Overall, it was still fun, though flawed.

SPOILER SECTION

Bean ages and marries that gal he rescued in the last book.  But his genetic abnormalities give him pause to have children, as they could be gifted intellectually like he is, but also subject to the same growth abnormalities.  He is convinced to proceed and provide in vitro fertilization, but his nemesis kidnaps the tubes containing the fertilized ova.  This nemesis is also losing influence in the world, and Bean ultimately defeats him.  Meanwhile, Peter lost much of his power as figurehead of the world, but is starting to gain it back.  Really, the biggest flaw in this book is the foolishness of the protagonists.  Bean has perhaps become too human in intellect now.  What I mean by this is that while he could perceive and prognosticate some unrealistically insightful conclusions at 6 years old, now he overlooks stuff that his wife (bright as she is, no one in the world is as bright as Bean) picks up on.  And Peter, in his efforts to conquer the world by reason and word, makes some extremely foolish political decisions that conveniently set the stage for the book

END SPOILERS

So I liked it.  Not without flaws.  Not always realistic.  Possibly not even interesting for everyone.  But for someone like me who loves to imagine the "what ifs" of a not-too-distant future of the world, it was satisfactory.  It's the weakest of the Shadow series so far, but last time I didn't even enjoy it much, so it's moving up.

Finally finished the next in the series: Shadow of the Giant.  It took me a while because I've been at this series for several months and it was getting a bit tedious.  Plus I was overworked at school and the story started a bit slow.  However, I am pleased to report an overall contentedness with the story as a whole.  In this one, the arch nemesis Achilles de Flandres is dead, but has left a legacy of ambitious nations.  Many of the former Battle School graduates accumulate power in their respective positions and turn on each other with their various supporting nations.  Meanwhile, Bean and his wife continue their hunt for what Achilles stole and hid throughout the world.  Bean's time may be running short.  And erstwhile, Peter continues his quest to consolidate his power, and ultimately marries Bean's divorced wife.

SPOILERS

Bean's condition will claim him soon, but they find all those babies distributed throughout the world in other women's wombs.  Some are found to have the same genetic condition as Bean, while others do not.  Bean then determines (with help in high places) to divorce his wife so she can remarry and care for the normal children while he takes his children on a voyage at near lightspeed in the hopes that low gravity and the granting of years through time dilation will prolong his life long enough for the earth-bound to find a cure and call him home.  All the actor nations in the previous wars in these books are still the primary fighters, only with shifting roles as to who are the good guys and who are the bad.  Peter succeeds in creating a very democratic system where various nations vote whether or not to enter his Free People of Earth (FPE) government, and finally has a credible military to support any territories dissenting from their majority-run government (i.e. Nubia from Sudan) in the desire to join the FPE.  A strange subplot was brought up, then swept under the rug, as if Card had intended to make more of it, forgot about it for a time, then remembered and just addressed it enough to say it was a hoax, in that Bean's creator supposedly engineered a dangerous virus that would alter human genetics, but had lied about the whole thing.  In the end, Peter is clearly on the path to a worldwide victory through peacekeeping and peaceful means, while the ambitious and destructive Battle School aggressors are on ships to govern foreign worlds where they will be the only queens in their games of chess, without any competitors, and therefore can rule effectively without competing ambition.

END SPOILERS

Overall I liked this one too.  It just took a bit for me to get into it.  I have problems with certain inconsistencies, though.  Again, Bean makes it clear that he *never* wanted to lead or fight or have any ambition, or even to be like Ender.  But clearly in Ender's Shadow, he deliberately mimics Ender to get ahead in the eyes of those in authority, with his eye particularly set on the future of earth.  Now you may argue that he didn't really want to be Ender, he was just pretending to get ahead, and I would agree that's probably true, but it does show he was ambitious enough to try to get ahead in the world by whatever means.  Again, Bean seems less omniscient than the 4 year-old we first got to know.  I'm surprised by this, but I like the fallible Bean better anyway.  Strangely, the noble Muslims who had seemingly forsaken all extremism in the previous book are now just as extremist as ever, or nearly so.  Many push the leader for war while he desires peace, and they go to some surprising lengths to pursue that end.  Peter is much more likable in this one.  In fact in each book he grows on you more an more.  Frankly his story is more interesting to me than Bean's and I sort of wish the books had been more focused on him.  However, he got a bit of Anakin treatment, i.e he was emasculated through retcons.  He was too tough and aggressive before for Battle School but was learning and maturing.  But now we learn that such was a lie and there is no such thing as "too aggressive for Battle School," and instead we learn that he is actually not charismatic enough (though most of the jerks in Battle School had utterly no charisma.

But in the end, I found it satisfactory.  Nothing compares to the original Ender's Game in my mind, but I still have enjoyed all these books.  Next up, Shadows in Flight, focusing on Bean's children on their lengthy voyage.

Shadows in Flight is done.  It was sort of a novella, only have as long as most of Card's other full-length books in the series, though longer than A War of Gifts.  It focuses on Bean and three children, two of them named after meaningful people in his life, and the third after a Roman dictator, all on a near lightspeed voyage in a small spaceship.  As you might expect, one of these children sort of felt left out.  They have all outlived nearly everyone they ever knew due to relativitistic effects from their trip.  Initially the relationship between the three children and their dying father is strained and impersonal, and they don't even call him father anymore, resorting to a more pejorative name based on his condition, a condition the children too are afflicted with, which is permanently coupled with their brilliance.  However, something drastic changes the course of thier lives.  All grow close together as they make some startling discoveries about the stuff that once filled their nightmares.

SPOILERS:

Bean dies in the end, having grown so large he cannot even survive with gravity.  The children discover a bugger ship that has been largely overrun with a particularly unadvanced brand of the buggers.  The queens are all deceased (except for the one Ender found at the end of Ender's Game, of course), but they were apparently able to channel their reproduction to produce genetically specific variants, which turned feral and overran most of the ship, but cornered away in a portion are surviving drones, the males that reproduced with the queen.  There was some weirdness in discussing the telepathic control queens maintained over their workers through specialized organelles in the workers' cells (sounds kinda like midichlorians!), but this discovery in the buggers led one of the brilliant children to discover how to utilize organelles to cure himself and his siblings from the giantism that affects and ultimately kills his father, while preserving the intelligence they have.  The end of the book sounds like a lead up to a Garden of Eden on a habitable planet.

END SPOILERS:

This book was interesting.  It was slow, but very personal.  In the end, I feel like I do enjoy Bean's character than I used to.  I don't like how he detracted from Ender, but he grew into a unique and interesting enough character in his own right that I am content with how the stories went.  Still, to me the stories are of varying canonicity to me, with the novel Ender's Game at the top.  But this was a worthy addition in my mind.

Card promises another book after this that will tie both the Shadow series and the Ender series back together called Shadows Alive, but I don't know how he will do so.  For now I am starting the most recent book, Earth Unaware.  It's a prequel story that discusses when the humans first encounter the aliens Ender takes on some 40 years later.  After that, it will be a break from the Enderverse till Earth Unaware's sequel Earth Afire or Shadows Alive comes out.

I loved how every single homeless child in Amsterdam had it in them to be super-intelligent-commando-dictators. 

The Bean Series got more silly with each one I read.

@TheBoost, I wasn't sure I wanted to reply, but I guess I will. In Rotterdam, there were really only two super-intelligent kids there. The other kids were just scroungers who'd become acclamated to their cruel world, but I don't think most of them other than Bean and Achilles were outside the scope of plausible.

@Frink, while I like the following books less than the first, there are a lot of aspects I do enjoy. What in particular was too silly for your liking?

There are no more Enderverse books left to read. This summer, another will come along in the prequel trilogy, but for now I have to read something else. I just finished Earth Unaware, the first in said prequel trilogy about the first alien invasion. It was the first of the Enderverse to be coauthored, so if I were to give my suspicions, the concepts were Orson Scott Card's, but the story was put into words by Aaron Johnston.

What to say, I finished a couple of weeks ago, so some of it is escaping me. The story starts with a family of "freeminers" mining for ore in the Kuiper belt. It sets up an interesting culture of clans who travel and remain in space their entire lives, given the difficulty in covering such vast distances with our relatively slow speeds (near light-travel is not yet attainable). One clan discovers an alien vessel approaching the Sol system, and as they prepare to get a message to earth, a corporate mining ship with its own (unrelated) agenda damages them. As a result, it becomes drastically more difficult to sound the alarm, and the good guys have to figure out an alternative while also attempting to interfere with the aliens' approach.

I won't provide any real spoilers in this one. I'll just say that the book pulls no punches. You grow to care about these new characters, and the authors feel little guilt killing off some of those you hope most to live, while allowing scumbags to survive. The brutal realities of the dangers of space travel are made quite apparent. In fact, I'd say this book is the most scientifically in-depth and accurate and descriptive (with believable technobabble) I've read in all the Enderverse's stories; I suspect this was a major contribution from Johnston. For those who enjoyed Ender's Game but felt all subsequent books were too cerebral and lacking in excitement, this one might better appeal to you--it really is action-packed and frightening at times. I recommend it.

Could Ford and his little buddy be any less enthused?

What the??? Who dares to post in my thread besides me?!?!  Which is actually my silly way of saying, 'Holy cow!  I'm not the only one posting here!  Yay!'

I admit there are changes I'm skeptical about.  But on the other hand, I still have high hopes.  Ender's size does contribute to the humor at his expense, but more important is jealousy of his aptitude and the fact that he's a Third.

A question for you Enderverse fans:

In which order do you recommend reading these books, by publication date, chronologically (could be difficult as I understand there are "parallel" books), or some combination of the two?

I plan on diving into this sometime this year, and I may be one of the few who hasn't read Ender's Game OR had the ending spoiled for them.

Read Ender's Game.  The read the Bean book that takes place at the same time (the parallel book).  Then stop.

;-)

TV's Frink said:

Read Ender's Game.  The read the Bean book that takes place at the same time (the parallel book).  Then stop.

;-)

If you want to be a casual fan, I agree with either what Frink or georgec said.  Ender's Game itself is the crux of the series and you must read it.  If you want a very different, less action-based, more thought-provoking follow-up, Speaker for the Dead is really an enjoyable book.  After that, the books following Ender's story became pretty weird and I can definitely understand why they wouldn't appeal to everyone.  If you wanted to stick with the action, you would probably like to follow up Ender's Game with Ender's Shadow, which covers many of the same events from a different character's POV (a little boy named Bean).  I enjoy the book as an independent story better than as a parallel story because I feel that Shadow undercuts Game somewhat, and it makes Ender a weaker, less likable character.  The books following Bean are pretty interesting in my mind and a little more fast paced, but again, I could see why the sequels are not as well received.  In my opinion, they do have broader appeal than most of the Ender books.

There are a couple of new Ender books squeezed in there long after the fact, namely A War of Gifts and Ender in Exile, both of which take place in Ender's youth.  To fully appreciate Ender in Exile, you must read the Bean series almost completely, as some events tie them together.  This aspect of the story really didn't appeal to me, and I think that book could have wrapped itself up quite well a couple of chapters early and would have been better.  But in any case, it's hard to include that story in the chronology, and would probably fit better in order of release.

I've written reviews on the whole series in this thread and I've tried to keep each one spoiler free, but if you know nothing about the series, particularly any surprises, I'd almost prefer you wait until you've read Ender's Game itself before reading any of them.  After that I wouldn't mind as much.  I hope you enjoy the series.  I really enjoy every book to some extent, though some more than others.

Thanks for the insight guys, hopefully I'll be able to commit to this.

georgec said:

Speaker for the Dead is an absolute must.

I challenge you sir to a duel.

I've said in other threads, but my distaste for SFTD borders on mouth frothing hatred.  Every character is overwhelmingly stupid. The "scientists" are the worst. 

Let me summarize every exchange in the novel.

• CHARACTER ONE: I know something pivotal, but I'll never tell you! 
• CHARACTER TWO: It doesn't matter, because I'll never ask! 

There's a couple of interesting sci-fi concepts hidden behind the layers of stupidity, but if the characters weren't all knuckle dragging cretins there simply wouldn't be a plot. 

ps.

But I did like the first couple Bean books.

georgec said:

I like how Ender is the tallest kid now. They basically miss the entire point of the book.

This movie might be entertaining to the masses but I think the book lovers are going to hate it.

I put that on how hard it is to get good performances from little kids. 

On the other hand, could they digitally shrink him like they did to Captain America?

I WAS IN THE DIGITAL POOL!!!

Hey, up your, georgec!

I mean, everyone is entitled to their own opinion of course ;)

Oh "up your," how I've missed you.