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Sequel To 'Ender's Shadow': ' Shadow Of The Hegemon' 64

Posted by Hemos from the more-reading-to-do dept.
enthalpyX writes: "According to The Philotic Web, Orson Scott Card's series, which began with 'Ender's Game' didn't end quite yet with Ender's Shadow. Due to be released January 2, 2001, 'Shadow of the Hegemon' will delve into Bean's life helping Peter rule the "old world" Ender left behind. You can read the first five chapters over at hatrack.com."
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Sequel To Ender's Shadow: Shadow of the Hegemon More

Sequel To Ender's Shadow: Shadow of the Hegemon

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  • In return for letting me read a sneak peek of your book, I will purchase a hardcover copy when it is released.

    Its important to reward authors using the new mediums when so many are poo-pooing e-books and the web.

  • Orson Scott Card has to be one of the best writers of *anything* to come down the pike in a long time. He's as moral as Asimov and Heinlen, as original as Frank Herbert, and such an interesting writer. Right now I'm in the middle of the Alvin Maker series, which is a great fantasy Alt.History. Read it!


    "Blow up your TV/Throw away your paper/
    Move to the country/Build you a home"

  • Call me crazy, but .. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    .. I still think Orson Scott Card's greatest work was The War of the Worlds.
  • Didn't Slashdot already have a story on this?
    http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/30/1018246.shtm l [slashdot.org]
  • I must say, and I hope I don't incite a riot by saying this (it's just my opinion), but I personally consider the Ender's Game set (counting however many books there are now) to be my favorite large story in book form. It's right up there next to my favorite large story in audio-visual form, that being Babylon 5, of course.

    (My friend loaned me her copy of Ender's Game one Friday night. I read it cover to cover the next day, and bought the whole set the day after. Had them all done in less than a week. I can't wait to read more.)
  • Since the story you cited is clearly about a different book (in fact the predecessor to the book under current discussion), the answer is no.
  • You are right while Card rocks in many ways and most of his books are great. Also I'm from Utah where he has a special place in all our geek hearts. I have to agree that Ender's Game should have been the first and last book with young Ender in it. I think that instead of this I will read Treason again. Although I have yet to click over to the preview and it might change my mind I'm not hopeful.
  • "Orson Scott Card is at it again. Hot on the tail of Ender's Shadow, he's writing another sequel to the Ender's Game story. This one seems to cover the story of the immediate history following the original story when all of the children return home. Called Shadow of the Hegemon, it should give us some of the story of what happened to Peter. The first five chapters are already available online."

    Sorry, you're wrong. It is talking specifically about Shadow of the Hegemon.

  • Oops... you're right... doh!!
  • Nope, sorry, Greylark was correct, this is a repeat of news that was already old the FIRST time slashdot posted it. I hate to be one of those idiots who complains about the news slashdot posts, but this one is pushing my limits.
  • I find that a lot of people say that. Being a philosophy major, I found the post-Ender's Game books (except for Ender's Shadow) quite interesting. He certainly has some interesting philosophy that good to ponder, but wouldn't cut crap in the language and mind philosophical circles (even though some, such as Daniel Dennett, with whom I study under, would agree with him).

    The conceptual and ethical ideas of a self-conscious computer make great SF corallary reading to all the dry texts that I read.

    If you take the time to try to pick up these tidbits, I'm sure you'll enjoy the AI philosophical side (along with the other phil tangents that OSC takes).
  • Well, you've stated your opinion, so I'll state mine.

    I read Ender's Game. It was good. Really good. Finished it in a day or so. Got Speaker for the Dead. Gagged. Took maybe a week to get through it. Didn't touch the others. I don't know why, but Speaker just really sucked for me. Maybe it was all the Portugese names, or just that the story didn't agree with me.

    So obviously I haven't read the whole story, but IMO it doesn't really compare to Lord of the Rings, or the Foundation trilogy. (Yes, trilogy; it's perfectly complete with the original three, and anything more than that just ruins it.) But obviously these books must be at least halfway good, because there sure are a lot of people buying them.
  • Let me start by saying that I have read Ender's Gamer at least six times, and Speaker three or four times. I sat through the Xeno/Children one-book's-worth-of-plot-in-two-covers. I am a HUGE Ender fan.

    However, "Ender's Shadow" was terrible. Admit it. Didn't you start really biting your lip when "the light on Bean's console began flashing, indicating that he should take over the attack on the bugger homeworld." Weren't you horrified by the reverse temporal lobotomy performed on Ender? Didn't you want to cry when all of the original Bean/Ender interaction was twisted beyond recognition?

    I'm not reading the next book. It will be difficult for me, but in order to preserve what enjoyment I have left in the originals, I must stop now. Please, Mr. Card, consider doing the same.

  • What is the general feeling to a continuation to the Alvin Maker series ? Does it feel "complete" after five books. - Slightly offtopic I guess but it IS Orson Scott Card. Maker is just as good as Ender, IMHO.

    MRoeder
  • Ender's Game is without a doubt my favorite single book, followed closely by The Hobbit. The Ender Series is my second favorite series (following The Lord of the Rings and followed by The Wheel of Time. It is truly original, in my opinion; the idea of consciousness governing everything was new in Ender's Game, to be repeated in Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass and His Dark Materials (another of my favorites).

    I must say that it has come to change my outlook on life. I've converted from agnostic to Wiccan since then. I want more than anything for the universe to be conscious--it would be incredible. Orgasmic.

    Read this series if you haven't. I'm going to check out the last two books (Ender's Shadow and The Shadow of the Hegemon) as soon as Christmas comes around and I finish reading the ninth book of the Wheel of Time. Also make sure to check out Pullman's The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. Excellent books with a similar viewpoint.

    Aciel
    aciel@speakeasy.net
  • I disagree... I enjoyed Ender's Shadow quite a bit. Not as much as Game, but still worth the read/buy.
  • i just finished writing a paper on searle vs dennett, man those guys really dont seem to like each other very much at all... :p ... it seems that searle is on the right track moreso, at least for suggesting the irreducibility of consciousness. dennett probably wouldn't agree though. stupid functionalist.

  • Criticisms of the new series. (Score:3)

    by 2nd Post! ( 213333 ) <gundbear@pacbe l l .net> on Friday November 17, 2000 @09:06PM (#616308) Homepage
    I own Ender's Shadow. I've read the 5 online chapters...

    It seems to me that there is entirely too much self exposition by the character towards the readers. It makes it entirely too dry, to analytical, too heavy handed.

    The first book had this way of grabbing you, of making you feel for Ender, of making you feel like you could be Ender.

    I didn't have any such feelings for Bean (though he is admittedly difficult to relate to, given his nature), and no such feelings for Petra.

    I don't feel any synergestic sympathy for the characters.

    In fact, the person I felt the most for/with in the online chapters was Peter; if he becomes the main character in this book, perhaps we can recapture the same energies as the original Ender's Game.

    The nick is a joke! Really!
  • The series went downhill after Ender's Game. I read Speaker, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender's Shadow in that order. Don't get me wrong, they *were* good books. But Card just couldn't top Ender's Game. I read through Speaker and Xenocide hoping it would somehow take off and once again be the book that I originally loved. It didn't happen. Ender's Shadow is the better of the 'quels. Bean is *so* cool.
  • Hell yes. The books got progressively worse as the series went on.
  • A bit off topic, but... I read the Ender's Game and thought it was one of the greatest books ever, but the sequels seemed to be like trying to milk as much cash as possible, or worse, running out of fresh ideas.

    On the other hand, I liked the subtle ways in which Neal Stephenson's books could be considered sequels/prequels to one another. Apart from avoiding any hint of trying to establish a franchise, it also made readers think more about the future possibilities of plotlines. Not to mention it being a great source of topics for arguments if the Diamond Age and the Snow Crash share any characters :-).

    -----

  • My understanding was that Card plans two more books before finishing off the Alvin Maker series. The sixth book, which he is currently working on is called "The Crystal City" (Card's Bibilography [hatrack.com]). Hmm, and I can't seem to currently find info about book seven, maybe there's only going to be six . . .

    Is the Alvin Maker series as good as the Ender's Game series? Well, they're really pretty different. I like both series, the Ender's series is a nice philosophical debate while Maker series is a nice historical fantasy about America. Heh, if it's by Card, it's probably good . . .

  • Card explained why he started writing the sequels in the intro to Ender's Shadow. He was going to start farming out the Ender "universe" to other authors, and let them write from the point of views of other characters from the story. He'd even got someone who was interested in doing this. But, then, the more he thought about it, the more jealous he was of the guy who was going to get to do this. Eventually, he decided to swipe the project back.

    Now, of course, you could say that's all a smoke screen. But it sounds to me like he did it for one reason: fun.
  • In fact, the person I felt the most for/with in the online chapters was Peter; if he becomes the main character in this book, perhaps we can recapture the same energies as the original Ender's Game.

    Well, the title is Shadow of the Hegemon, so one assumes we'll get at least as much Hegemon (Peter) as we saw of Ender in Ender's Shadow. Likely more, as we already had Ender's Game to give us info about Ender, but we don't have much on Peter, really.

    I heartily agree with you, though -- Peter is the high point of the first five chapters so far.
  • I've gotta agree. Card actually wrote about the history behind the books -- Ender's Game started as a short story, and he was pressured into turning it into a full-length novel by his publisher. The same is true of the sequels; each was pressured by his publisher.

    I think that by Children of the Mind, he had just plain run out of ideas. Ender's game was great, Speaker of the Dead was good, but the rest just didn't come up to spec.

  • criticism of the first 3 and a warning (Score:3)

    by lyapunov ( 241045 ) on Friday November 17, 2000 @11:02PM (#616316)
    I feel the Ender's Game is five star science fiction (e.g. Dune, just the first one, and the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove). It is a well written fast paced story, appeals to both young and old. The second, Speaker for the Dead, was again five star science fiction and superbly written. It has a slower pace than the first and dealt with politics. And then we have the third book, Xenocide.

    This book had some great ideas (I was particularly impressed with the people that where way out of control obsessive-compulsive (even by obsessive-compulsive standards)), the story was good for a while, but there was damning flaw. I feel that Card wrote himself into a corner and pulled the old deus ex machina to get out of it. I was so PISSED. The story in Xenocide was good (not as good as the first two) and then it was severly dicked up in the ending. After that I never even bothered to pick up any of the rest, Ender's Shadow, I was a Teenage Ender, etc...

    The reason I am bringing this to your attention is that those 5 chapters maybe wonderful (I don't know as I have not read them yet) but unless he has improved you might find yourself pissed off, and out 20 bucks if you buy this book based off of those first 5 chapters.

    I think that Card is a very talented author but he needs to move on to greener pastures and stop beating this dead cow even more.

    With the abundance of books to read and constraints on time I find myself very picky in what I read, and once an author pisses me off, it is very unlikely that I will read anymore of their work. I know some of you will disagree with my criticisms of the series. I could be wrong, but I have not heard any arguments convincing enough on why I should pick up the series again. So if you have any please enlighten me.
  • and a damned funny one, but way over the heads of this crowd apparently, seeing that it was even marked down to 0..
  • Slashdot picked up another Kuro5hin story. I just wish the book was closer to being released. So here are my comments, from there to here...

    Yeah, I've seen Card talk about [his movie plans], too, (since I live in North Carolina :) but realize that he's been talking about it for years. I, for one, hope it happens sometime soon, but even if it happened tomorrow, it'd probably be at least three years before we saw anything.

    I'd love it if they could film the two at once, because then you'd get all the same cast at the same time. There aren't really any other decent sequel possibilities that wouldn't be completely different, and otherwise, they'd screw up Ender's Shadow.

    I really like almost everything in that series, but everything after Ender's Game originally is pretty different. They're good books, and they aren't a rehash of Ender's Game, either, like Ender's Shadow is, (even though I love that, too :) but they're slower, and they have different characters, and most importantly they aren't necessarily what his audience was expecting out of him...

    Card writes a lot of stuff, and some of it hits the mark; I liked the Harmony series, and I really enjoyed Songmaster and A Planet Called Treason. Most of his short stories are really good, which is funny since he claimed that he can't write short stories decently. I didn't like the Alvin Maker series as much, but maybe I just wasn't expecting American Historical Fantasy... :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • I want an Ender Badge... (Score:3)

    by MustardMan ( 52102 ) on Friday November 17, 2000 @11:30PM (#616319)
    Hegemon, I choose you!
  • I never read the sequels. "Ender's Game" caters to the "there will never be such a thing as Artificial Intelligence" crowd. If I remember right, the story was about a boy that had a certain intuitive feeling about war, so that he could defeat aliens if he thought it was all a game, but if he ever suspected the batle was for real, he would lose.

    Bullshit. If I had the computing resources he had, I would write a software that could defeat any enemy, human, alien, or machine, that had less computer power at hand, claw, or interface. Let's face it, "intuition" isn't about magic, it's just software that runs in a computer made of approximately 1e11 neurons, each with about 1e3 synapses and capable of doing some 1e2 computations per second. Yes, software can be made more efficient, but it cannot do magic, you need hardware power as well.

    It's just plain stupid to assume that the human mind has some magic power. It just runs on hardware that hasn't (yet) been duplicated in the lab. The Wright brothers didn't achieve supersonic speeds in their first flight either.

  • Excellent book, took me 2 days to read it! Of course, now we've gotta wait another year or two to get volume 10 :(
  • I have to agree about Xenocide. I think the O/C planet didn't work so much for me, but I don't really remember. What I do remember was that the book was fully of gem-like quotes, mostly from the conversation of the fathertree and the hive-queen. And that the ending was... yes, deus ex machina. I mean, you have what have been a bunch of highly political and philosophical novels, and suddenly magic physics comes in out of nowhere to save the day. Very unsatisfying, at least for me.

    For random contrast, Look to Windward arguably had a deus ex machina ending. But the Culture has well-established machinae whose job it is to be dei, so it fits. Plus it didn't require magic, just someone being way too sneaky. But that's part of their job too.

  • While I'm anxiously awaiting any new Orson Scott Card issue, I've noticed several persons suggesting authors or titles they feel to be of parallel quality with Card's "Ender" series; I'll add my two cents worth! Do yourselves a favor and check out Christopher Hinz's AWESOME "Paratwa" series! EASILY on the same level as Card, Asimov or Herbert. The three Paratwa titles should occupy space on your sci-fi shelf: Liege Killer, Ash Ock, and The Paratwa, in order. I only wish Hinz, who has not been heard from in YEARS, would write again - If not something new, a continuation of the Paratwa series would be MOST welcome! : )
  • Orson Scott Card is an incredible author, one of my favorites. Right up there with Heinlein, Moorcock, Zelazany, Asimov, and about a trillion others I will save you from listing here. (Dar, me like bookie things.) He is a difficult author to classify to a genre because he so effectively blends science, fiction, and fantasy with modern problems and scenarios. As an added plus he's enjoyable to read!

    That being said, I would like to take this opportunity to recommend that you read the other two or three dozen novels/series/sagas he has written. Those who liked _Ender's Game_ but not the sequels will definitely enjoy _Treason_, the first few _Homecoming_ novels, _Songbird_, and potentially a few others. YMMV, browse around. If you liked _Speaker for the Dead_, _Xenocide_, et al, you will probably enjoy reading everything this man has ever written, including _Alvin Maker_, _The Worthing Saga_, _Redemption of Christopher Columbus_, and probably most of his shorter novellas, like _Hart's Hope_.

    Be forewarned, if you care about this sort of thing, he is a Mormon and there is a very strong, spiritual undertone to almost all of his books. Probably the most obvious example of this is _Lost Boys_. No, nothing related to the vampire movie. But a great story nonetheless. {grin}

    Good luck. Check out http://www.hatrack.com for more info about OSC. I hope you enjoy his works as much as I do.

    Alakaboo

  • Ender's game was fabulous. One of the few other books that have gripped me was On the Wings of Eagles. Except that it isn't fiction. It's a real story about how Ross Perot got together a team to break his employees out of Iran during the hostage affair. Quite gripping...I had a terrible time trying to put it down. I mention it because it's one of the few books that really pulled me in and it is also involves a lot of strategy in a warlike setting.

    After I read Ender's Game my friend told me not to bother with the sequel because it wasn't supposed to be good. Sounds like there are a lot of opinions here agreeing with that...though I've always thought that Children of the Mind is a fantastic title! Too bad it sounds like it's a so so novel.

  • I never read the sequels. "Ender's Game" caters to the "there will never be such a thing as Artificial Intelligence" crowd.
    I think you've seriously misinterpreted the book. I don't think Card is even remotely saying that there will never be AI. Instead, in the fictional future of Ender's childhood, AI is simply not advanced enough to do what you are thinking (the book is supposed to be set not very far in the future). In addition to that, if you had read any of the rest of the books, you would know that one of the main characters in the series actually is an AI.

    Here's my take on Ender's Game. Ender was a genius, one of the most gifted human beings alive at the time, and through intense training became a formidable military strategist. It had nothing to do with intuition. The reason why he could not know he was actually involved in a real war was that he had studied the aliens so closely, and learned to identify with them so well, that he would have been overcome with guilt and would not have been able to wipe them out of existence. This really is the main theme running through the entire Ender series: if you can truly understand another being (alien or human), you cannot hate them, because you would see their motives, even the despicable ones, as being not too different from your own. This is what Ender comes to believe (and presumably Card believes as well), though whether it is true I'm not completely sure.

    ---------------------------
    "The people. Could you patent the sun?"

  • I agree. I couldn't stand Ender's Shadow, and not just because of that. Not only did I not care about Bean, but the premise of the book was basically that Ender was nothing special, and everything that he thought he did that was out of the ordinary was really done by Bean. So it shifted the focus from a character I did like to one I couldn't stand.


    -RickHunter
  • And then he suddenly he retroactively becomes inferior to Bean in the last book.

    Inferior? They're just different, better than any other person in some things, worse than the other in some others. Like real people. In the final analysis, who gave the decisive order in the battle? It wasn't Bean. He even admitted so in the final scene of Chapter 23 of Ender's Shadow.

    I must say I liked Ender's Shadow. I even wept when reading the final battle description. That didn't happen with Ender's Game.

  • Exactly - I remember seeing this back in April, and when I saw that the first five chapters had been posted, I read them. Got completely hooked.

    Then, I looked for the release date - January 2001! Auggh!

    I'm really looking forward to this new line of sequels - I thought Ender's Shadow was a very thoughtful and engaging retelling of Ender's Game.

    The best part is that it's not just a repeat of Ender's Game - the part of the story where Bean and Ender coincide is a much smaller percentage of the book than I initially thought it would be.

  • Heh. My girlfriend alerted me to the existence of the newest book -- I wrote up an article for kuro5hin, and after I finished, I thought -- hey, why not try posting to Slashdot and see how hard it is to fight through the submission queue?

    Not quite as difficult. Not quite as fulfilling, either -- but that's not the point. =)

    I'm from NC, too. Where did you get to see OSC give a talk? I'm curious...

  • They have something of a personal animosity to each other that leads them to seemingly deliberately misread each other. Searle doesn't believe that consciousness is indecipherable, only that it hasn't been deciphered, and most importantly isn't computational or informational - that it is a biological property of animal brains, and that no moving around of symbols or representations can generate it, anymore than a blackboard can understand the words that are written on it.
  • **Warning! Possible Spoilers!**

    Got ahold of an "uncorrected advance copy" through ABEBooks.com, and I must say that this book at least lives up to the standard of Ender's Shadow, if not Ender's Game. Card goes into the battle between Peter and Bean vs. Achilles, you find out something...interesting about Ender's parents, and Peter Wiggin's character finally becomes a little more 3-dimensional. I won't say more than that, other than that I read this book in something like 3 or 4 hours flat...it's that good.

  • Orson Scott Card will be the Guest of Honor at LOSCON 27 [loscon.org], the Los Angeles Literary Science Fiction Convention, from November 24 through 26. The convention is at the Burbank Airport Hitlon in Burbank, CA. Other guest include Ray Bradbury, J. Michael Straczynski, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and many more...
  • The Ender series is one of my favorites, so I was really eager to see a movie made of it. I heard OSC speak at a booksigning, tho, and he didn't talk about that movie at all. He talked about a different movie he's writing the script for called Dogwalker - it's based on a short story he wrote. Anyone read it? I don't know anything about it and have been prowling around trying to find info for a while.
  • yes i'd say that sums up searle's view well. the biggest issue for me vis a vis the nature of consciousness comes into play once we have actually unlocked the machinations of the brain itself, i.e., even with a highly detailed realtime MRI of every single neuron, synapse, neurotransmitters, etc. we still wouldn't be able to derive the subjective states of consciousness. we might be able to poke someone with a sharp stick, watch the neurons fly in response to the stimuli but we'll never ever be able to get a grip on the quale of the experience. when dennett goes and tries to say that we shouldn't count qualia as existing exactly because of their subjuctive nature is ridiculous. they may be subjective, yes, but that doesn't negate their property of being the appearance of reality to the thinker. this, it seems, is what searle was trying to prevent from happening when he argues for the irreducibility of counsciousness.... trying to cut dennett off at the pass, as it were. (btw, we need more philosophy on /.) hehehe. canadaman
  • Hey, cool... :)

    I'm in the Raleigh/Durham area, I saw him once at a Barnes & Noble in Durham, when he was signing Homebody, and once in some (I forget exactly which) bookstore in Raleigh when he was signing Ender's Shadow.

    Each time, I went up to him later, and asked him a question, and had him sign stuff, (ok, his new book :) well actually just about everybody did. The first time he told me he didn't intend for Ender to be an actual genetic cross between Peter and Valentine, he was just saying that Ender had that capacity for Good and Evil. The second time, I asked him if The Time Machine had an influence on his fourth book of Homecoming; he about smacked himself. He didn't do it intentionally, but now that I mentioned it, he definitely saw the obvious parallel.

    Unfortunately, my girlfriend had my copy of Ender's Game, so I couldn't get that signed. But I'm glad she read it, 'cause it's a great book...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Well, there's one shared character - Y.T. ends up as the old lady in the wheelchair, Mrs. Matheson.
    --
    Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
  • I'll join you.

    I first started reading OSC when Ender's Game was released. Oddly enough, I picked the book up from the bookstore, remembering his name from somewhere. I read the book; I loved it; I became a fan.

    Years later, I finally figured out that I knew his name from a column he used to write for RUN Magazine -- a C64 rag. I think it was a gaming or graphics column of some sort.

    --
  • In the Salon article about the original two books. Apparently some lesbian-in-codependency-recovery (aren't they all?--bad Teleny! bad, bad, Teleny!) decided to talk to Card about the book, and how much of a "healing experience" it was to read it. Bad mistake. Card is a Mormon and takes a very dim view of lesbians. The l-in-c-r took a dim view of war (being politically correct and all). The resulting deadlock was hilarious, as Card sounded incredibly sensible (albeit a bit conservative) and the l-in-c-r sounded increasingly hysterical. Don't miss this one. WWF RAW is WAR was never so vehement. Really!
  • Bullshit. If I had the computing resources he had, I would write a software that could defeat any enemy, human, alien, or machine, that had less computer power at hand, claw, or interface.

    Using what? Brute-force search? Neural networks? A heretofore undiscovered AI technique? The computing power isn't the problem, it's knowing what to do with it.

    So let's say I have a chess computer that can do a depth n search. Now double its speed. Congratulations, now it can search n+1 levels deep. Wait a whole thirty years, and it'll be able to search n+20 levels. Enough to beat Gary Kasparov, sure, but can it play go? Plan a battle strategy? Play a game whose rules change?

    I'm not going to defend the consistency of technological advance in Card's stories*, but it seems a reasonable premise that no one made any great advances in AI in the handful of decades that the book is supposed to take place after. Perhaps all the computer scientists were busy building a computer network that would allow a couple of kids to take over the world. Or maybe they figured it was faster to try and make people smarter until they could raise a super-general than it was to try to make machines smarter.

    *(Card's books are fantasy, not hard sci-fi. His computers are basically Apple IIs with magic powers.)

    --

  • I find it funny to read these comments about the Alvin Maker series, where the readers consider the books to only be American alternative history. In point of fact, they are something more.

    The Alvin Maker series is in fact Card's mythological retelling and extended riff on the life of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church--with a twist. The "Alvin" in Alvin Maker comes from an (unproven) historical assertion that Joseph Smith's older brother Alvin (who died just as Joseph Smith was getting caught up with gold plates, etc.) was actually supposed to be called as a prophet, and Joseph was a mere backup.

    If you read Card's oevure, you can see the Mormon influence shot all the way through. It's most obvious in the "Homecoming" series (which is a liberal borrowing of the Book of Mormon), but you can see it in other of Card's books.

    Mirele

  • > I have read Ender's Gamer at least six times

    Only six? I lost count somewhere arount twenty-three . . .

    >"Ender's Shadow" was terrible.

    I don't know if I'd go that far. I agree that it wasn't quite as good as Ender's Game, but it was an enjoyable book. Where it paled in comparison to Ender's Game was where it focused more on Bean's analyses of the situations that he's put into rather than Ender's analyses of the people he's around.

  • Ender's Game started as a short story, and he was pressured into turning it into a full-length novel by his publisher

    The way I heard OSC tell it (at a book signing) was that Ender's Game was just back story. It was originally supposed to be part of Speaker for the Dead but he split it off to a seperate novel to keep Speaker from being obscenely long...

    -Dorsey

  • once in some (I forget exactly which) bookstore in Raleigh when he was signing Ender's Shadow.

    Quail Ridge Books. You were directly behind my group of friends in line. Or maybe you were directly in front of us. Something like that...

    -Dorsey

  • You'll only be disappointed if you expect the rest to be the same (and that would be sequels-for-money). Speaker, Xenocide and Children of the Mind are, IMNSHO, excellent books but not adventure stories (which Ender's game is [if you want adventure I suggest Peter F Hamilton]).
    I think that one reason why a lot of people identify with Ender aged 6 is that he's relatively unformed (we all could have been Ender inside our heads) and we root for him so much more. The older Ender is a stranger to us, he's had thousands of (objective) years we don't know about and we come stright into his mid life crisis. I liked all of the books (even-shock- Ender's Shadow). Give them a chance (use a library if you need to). If your disappointed so what! At least you won't have wasted your time watching the TV.
  • Ah, that's right! Thanks, Dorsey.

    Incidentally, I've gotten to see my former arch-nemesis (or maybe she was second only to her sister at the time) more since she started hanging out with some of my friends; I consider her to be much cooler now.

    Strange how the world works, eh?
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Nana, you got it confused. First it was a short story. Then he was writing Speaker for the Dead and he decided it would be cool if Ender was the Speaker. That meant he had to rewrite Ender's Game to make it fit together. Like he says, theres a thousand right ways to tell a story and ten thousand wrong ones.
  • I had the *exact same feeling*. Ender's Game was a good, fast and compelling read. Speaker for the Dead was an amazing broadening and deepening of both the subject and the characters. Xenocide had great quotes, great characters (though both taoism and puritanism get caricatured rather badly), great situations, and a shitty deus-ex-machina ending that fit like a soccer ball in the soup. for that reason I haven't read Children of the Mind (or whatever the following sequel is called), although I'll probably pick it up if I see it cheap enough in a 2nd hand bookstore. As for the 'shadow' series, I really don't find the premise all that compelling, nor the characters of Bean or Peter. Give me Valerie's story anytime, and I'll buy it ... no wait, no need, it's already in Speaker for the Dead.
  • the premise of the book was basically that Ender was nothing special, and everything that he thought he did that was out of the ordinary was really done by Bean.

    Or at least, that was Bean's impression of the same events. Most people, I think, tend to make themselves the "Star" of their own story. Perceptions of facts tend to align themselves with our perception of ourself.

    Given that, is it surprising that Ender sees himself as an incredible leader and Bean sees something similar in himself?


    -The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
  • You must be a Foundation series fan. ;)

    I personally enjoyed the Foundation series and Ender's Game. I was not all that thrilled by the subsequent books following Ender's Game.

    On a side note, I first read Ender's Game in Fantasy and Science Fiction in novella form. I wonder if I still have my collection somewhere in my house or maybe my parents' house. I will have to check this Thanksgiving.
  • Beyond the five chapters, I can't let out more of the book before the official release on 2 January. However, for those who would like to give autographed copies of Shadow of the Hegemon as Christmas gifts or simply have a copy signed for themselves, at http://www.hatrack.com we will be giving away sticky-backed bookplates printed nicely with the title and color scheme of Shadow of the Hegemon. Those who send in a self-addressed stamped business envelope, along with the names of the persons to whom bookplates should be inscribed, can receive up to three autographed and personalized bookplates for free. That is, until we run out of the thousand that we printed up. The address to which you should send the SASE is: Hegemon PO Box 18184 Greensboro NC 27419-8184. - Orson Scott Card

  • This is not the first time OSC has used an electronic medium to allow his readers to get an advance look at a novel. IIRC, the Hatrack River area on (gasp) AOL [aol.com] was a popular hangout for Card fans some years back... I don't know whether it still exists, as I haven't subscribed to AOL in many years. However, when I was a subscriber, OSC released the entire text of Children of the Mind before the book hit the presses. I downloaded my copy, read it voraciously, and then bought a dead tree version in hardback.

    Recommended OSC books:

    • Ender's Game
    • Speaker for the Dead
    • Ender's Shadow
    • Stone Tables
    • Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
    • Lovelock (first in an unfinished trilogy)

    Check out Hatrack River [hatrack.com] for more official details about OSC's work, and the Philotic Web [philoticweb.net] for the unofficial details.

  • Card has simply slipped -- gone downhill. Reading his earliest works and comparing them to his latest makes me wish he'd quit writing so he doesn't spoil or taint those earlier pieces of good writing.

    He did the same thing with his "Alvin Maker" series -- as I've read the last 2 or 3 of the series I've actually come to be disgusted with Alvin himself -- and I have a sinking suspicion that Card had no intention of ever helping his readers lose any affinity towards the main characters of his stories.

    Maybe it's the fact that he puts out a new book every 4 months, at least, that has contributed to the almost complete attrition of his good writing.

    I know this is flamebait, but for the record, I've read almost every book that Card has put out, and only recently as I go back and read the earlier works have I realized why I am so disappointed with his newest -- they simply are not the same writing.
  • Here's the link to the salon article: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/03/card /index.html

    And to some letters to the editor about the article: http://www.salon.com/letters/2000/02/05/card/index .html

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