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Shadow of the Hegemon
from the boom-boom-booooom dept.
| Shadow of the Hegemon | |
| author | Orson Scott Card |
| pages | 365 |
| publisher | TOR |
| rating | 8 |
| reviewer | Aaron Gifford |
| ISBN | 0-312-87651 |
| summary | Betrayal and murder litter the path to power as the child geniuses who helped Ender defend Earth return home to be kidnapped as a new struggle begins. |
It's out, the new Orson Scott Card book, Shadow of the Hegemon. I don't want to give away any more of the plot than is already apparent in the summary above, so let me tell you about the book indirectly, about my own reactions, what I liked about it.
First of all, I must admit it. I'm a Card fan. I was introduced to his work like many other Slashdot readers as a teenager when I read Ender's Game. The intensity of that story and the believable brilliance of the main characters hooked me from the start. The sequels, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind continue Ender's story, but are substantially different in style and tone from the first. Card's more recent bold experiment, Ender's Shadow returns to the events in Ender's Game and retells them in parallel through the eyes of a different character, Bean. That book recaptures some of the essence and style of Ender's Game while making the story into something completely new and original.
Shadow of the Hegemon charts new territory as a sequel to Ender's Shadow telling the stories of the aftermath of the Formics War. This is not a parallel book like its predecessor. It takes place during those years mentioned only briefly in Ender's Game as Ender travels through space on the colony ship. Ender plays no part in this book.
The book definitely has action, and I love it! While Card often writes so much about the inner thought processes of his characters that sometimes his stories can slow down, there's enough action and adventure and a fast enough pace to make this book a really fun read. I might characterize it as a cross between the slower moving intellectual style in the later Ender series books and the fast paced intensity in Ender's Game. It's a blend that works.
Among the many things I enjoyed in this book is Card's excellent development of Bean's human emotional self. While Bean is intellectually brilliant, as the book opens, he seems to go through the motions of human emotional interaction without truly having felt the emotion. Card seems to have captured the shortcoming that children who suffer deprivation of human contact early in life sometimes exhibit, and included it in the character of Bean. As the story progresses, Bean slowly develops genuine emotional ties with other human beings and the emotional side of his character matures considerably.
Like any work of fiction, there must be a suspension of disbelief. The character Achilles, Bean's enemy from his earlier years growing up in Rotterdam and again at Battle School, returns as a highly connected villain worthy of any James Bond movie. In Ender's Shadow Bean exposes him as the psychopathic murderer he is. Achilles, also a genius, has escaped from an institute for the criminally insane to wreak havoc on the world in general, and on Bean and his personal enemies in particular, as he ensconces himself in positions of power. In several places, Achilles seems to have a nearly omniscient ability to monitor the actions and whereabouts of his personal enemies, stretching my suspension of disbelief a bit thin as I read.
I truly enjoyed Card's character work in this book. I appreciate his willingness to create characters with backgrounds from many different cultures and locations. Card conscientiously takes the time to study and learn enough about other cultures and peoples. As a result, his characters have a depth and background beyond those in many novels.
Card creates characters with religious beliefs that are real to those characters who hold them. Even those characters who are atheist or agnostic in their own beliefs hold tightly to those beliefs every bit as tenaciously and religiously as do those characters who espouse a particular recognizable. Card always seems to treat religion with the respect others often neglect. His characters in this book, in particular Sister Carlotta, Ender's mother, and several characters from India and Pakistan, through their words and interactions, show how their own profound religious beliefs make up their core and affect their choices.
Another Card talent exhibited in this book, if not as strongly as it did in Ender's Game, is Card's ability to make smart characters actually act and behave intelligently. So many authors resort to devices that seem to say, "This character is smart because I'm telling you so," without any supporting evidence other than the author's word, or perhaps on the word of the author's supporting characters who may say in agreement, "Yes, that character is smart."
Card does sometimes tell the reader that his characters are smart, but he always backs it up with intelligent decisions, thought processes, and actions that make it believable. He's not perfect, but he is definitely among the top talents.
I was delighted and amused whenever I noticed one of the characters speaking or thinking and idea that I recognized as one of Card's own opinions or ideas. If you have read much of Card's work and are familiar with his own opinions as often expressed his non fiction and on his various Web sites (you can see some examples Card's political commentary at www.ornery.com) you too will catch his characters presenting some of those same ideas.
With so many intellectually gifted characters playing on the stage, sometimes they begin to sound a bit like each other. It's almost unavoidable for any author who writes as prolifically as Card to keep each character unique, fresh, and new. Card is one of the best at avoiding this problem, but it does crop up here and there.
When you finish the story, read the Afterword. Card's inclusion of a few words of commentary about the story writing process, how the book came to be, and about the decisions he had to make as he wrote it is fascinating. If you like Card, you will like this book. If you like action and international power plays, you will like this book. If you appreciate good writing and character development, you will like this book.
If you haven't yet read Ender's Shadow, I suggest you read it before you read this book. Like most of Card's work, this book can stand on its own, but it works better as a sequel since the book expects you to be familiar with the several main characters and their backgrounds.
You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
Book review... sample chapters of the book (Score:4)
The sky isn't really falling you know (Score:4)
He churns out the same book over and over. Does this sound familar. The protagonist is a kid, more often than not with trouble in his life, but sometimes raised by a fine family who doesn't quite understand him. This kids runs into trouble, ranging from aliens to ghosts to the government, but always he is a pawn and doesn't understand what is going on around him. On page 275 he discovers the Matrix, er, I mean the omnipresent controlling influence in his life. By the end of the book he has defeated evil, or is dead but has still been victorious over the evil that he had to give his life to defeat.
That should sound familiar to everyone who has read his books not only because they are almost all like that (though Redemption was a little bit of a break and a nice historical piece) and is probably pretty close to the life story of the average
Lot's of the denizens of
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Re:The sky isn't really falling you know (Score:5)
The merit of an author is should not be based on the overall themes that may connect his/her books, but on how they tell the story. Who are the characters? Can you relate to them? What happens to them? How are they affected/changed by their experiences? Is their world realistic and believable?
By your reasoning, Ender's Game and Memory of Earth should be exactly the same book, while in reality they are very very different. The characters are different, the setting is different, and the events are different.
The themes you describe apply to a majority of the stories written as well. Take the script for Armageddon for instance. Characters with trouble in their lives? Check. Run into trouble (asteroid, planetary death)? Check. Omnipresent controlling influence? Check. Defeated evil by the end of the book, or is dead but has still been victorious? Double Check.
Card may not author great literay works like Dickens or Flaubert, but he is a great storyteller. And in my book that's the better of the two.
Card consistently manages to write good novels, something that eludes way to many popular authors now adays.
Sig:
Re:Disturbing subtext (Score:3)
Re:Disturbing subtext (Score:3)
First, Grow up.
Second, generalizations make people look like assholes and idiots. And we all know what assuming does, right?
_NOT_ all LDS are homophobic, and I'd wager that it's a far smaller number than either of us could gestimate. Yes, the LDS Church teachs that homosexuality is a sin. So do the Baptists. So do the Catholics.
If you're ready to call about a Billion people homophobes, feel free. Feel free to be wrong, and looked at as an intellectual lightweight by those who matter.
Learn something about a group before you start bashing it, and -not- just from biased sources that are against a given group. Only through the dissemination of pro, anti and neutral opinions can one can any sort of an understanding about something as truly subjective as religion.
Re:Poor review (Score:3)
But, in any case, to criticize your criticism of a critique (okay, properly a review- more on this later):
"Characters with religious views that are real to those who hold them" is not a tautology - it is not self evident that an author would present characters with consistent, believable religious views - it is completely common in novels for a person to appear to have a certain opinion one moment, and then a completely different one the next.
The 'suspension of disbelief' statement was unneeded, but it seems to be a buzzword when denoting a weak point in a novel that isn't that important. He's right on this case - this portion of the novel was weak, but it was not devastating to the novel. Card has never portrayed Achilles as a believable villain - the section in Ender's Shadow from Achilles's point of view is weak at best. Therefore, it's understandable that he avoided going into the specifics of how Achilles rose to power - the only real way to do that would be to tell it from Achilles's point of view. Instead, he came up with a rather creative solution, which was to use a secondary character critical of the villain. This way he didn't have to write from a point of view supportin Achilles, which he has trouble doing, and could still explain most of Achilles's actions. It was weak - it did require a bit of acceptance, rather than justification, but it at least was internally consistent.
Finally, the crack about Card being a 'trashy novel' author is not only unnecessary - it's flat out wrong. "Ender's Game" is commonly viewed as the best example of the 'unlikely hero/child hero' scenario in science fiction.
As to the other comment about being critical of the book, that is for a critique, not a review. A review is a reader's impression of the novel - if the reader enjoys the novel, the review is likely to be positive. If the reader dislikes the novel, the review is likely to be negative. Go fig. Don't criticize a review for not being a critique - it never pretended to be one.