- Post
- #616884
- Topic
- The Enderverse (WAS: Finally! Ender's Game emerges from Development Hell!)
- Link
- https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/616884/action/topic#616884
- Time
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.
