I just finished reading Ender’s Game. I’m not sure how I made it this long without reading it. It came out back when I was an avid SF reader, but somehow I never got around to picking it up.
I enjoyed the book, and I’m wondering whether the sequels are worth getting into. I find sequels can be hit or miss, particularly when they start extending into a series, so I’m interested to see what other people think.
If you liked Ender’s Game, then you ought to pick up Speaker for the Dead. It’s quite good and very, very different from the first novel.
However, some time after that I lost interest in Card’s work and have never picked up the other sequels, so you’ll have to wait for others to respond.
I didn’t like the sequels neither as much. If you want to read them, I suggest getting them from the library. Though I’m sure some people here must like them. 
The sequels are very different, although interesting in their own right.
I think that the ‘companion’ book Ender’s Shadow is a better bet. No need to have read the true sequels.
I’ve read all of the Ender books and I enjoyed most of them.
I truly enjoyed Speaker for the Dead, but the next two books Children of the Mind and Xenocide are rather disappointing.
I suggest you wait a while before reading Ender’s Shadow. It is a great book, but it is a mirror/parrallel version of Ender’s Game focusing on the character Bean.
I think it works best if your imagination has had some time to mythologize Ender a bit.
The remaining books of the “Shadow” series are pretty good, but they deal with the events of Earth after Ender leaves and not the Formic Wars.
I enjoyed them, but they are more geopolitical/military thrillers than SciFi.
I love 'em all, even the ones everybody hates.
Speaking strictly IMHO, I thought Speaker for the Dead was the book Card wanted to write all along, and Ender’s Game was the elaborate set-up. Il liked EG, but was blown away by SFTD.
Sailboat
In my opinion, the most important thing to keep in mind, is that Speaker for the Dead while an interesting book in its own right is NOT a sequel in the traditional “pick up where the first book leaves off and see what happens next” format. If you read that one and enjoy it, you might keep reading, although from my point of view, the degree of logic and consistancy in the science fiction part goes downhill. I don’t know that I disliked any of them, but they seemed to keep getting more and more bizarre.
I really liked Ender’s Shadow, though the suggestion that you not read it imediately is not a bad one. It is a parallel story to Ender’s Game, featuring Bean.
The first sequel to Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon? (maybe?) is, in my mind the book that people had been wanting when they wanted a sequel to Ender’s Game all along. It finally answers the question of what happens NEXT. It’s a pretty good book, mostly logical(to me).
The next book, Shadow Puppets, was a tremendous dissapointment to me. I didn’t like what happened to a couple of major characters. They made decisions that didn’t seem logical to me. It was the most disappointing of the Shadow books.
The final book, Shadow of the Giant, is better. Not as good as the first sequel in the Shadow series, but not as frustrating as the Shadow Puppets book. I did have one major complaint-- Orson Scott Card has an entirely different idea than I do about the legnth of time over which it makes sense for events to happen. (He even admits that this is a weakness of his in his Author’s Note). If the book took place over 6 years, rather than 6 months (or whatever time frame it takes place over), I would like it a lot more, it would seem a lot more reasonable. Heck, maybe some of my complaints with Shadow Puppets would be fixed if the length of time over which it took place was longer.
The best part of this book was the ending, because in the end he brings it around to where Ender’s Game ended.
On preview:
middleman’s comment “I enjoyed them, but they are more geopolitical/military thrillers than SciFi.” probably says a lot about why I enjoyed the Shadow sequels more than I did the Sequels to Speaker for the Dead.
Your milage may vary.
(Yea! I coded this correctly! All my italic tags matched the first time!)
I second the Speaker for the Dead and Ender’s Shadow. I read most of the sequels, and hated them. They were miles away from the original feel of Ender, I thought.
There is another book in the works that ties Ender as a young planet-hopping refugee to a loose thread from the final Shadow novel.
I’m not sure I like the idea.
Specifically (spoiler through all Shadow sequels)"
I don’t like the idea of seeing Ender as a character anymore. His story is over. He lived a long life and died. Popping a story into the middle of his lifetime is just a commercial venture that doesn’t do much to advance the Enderverse.
It felt the weird when the final Shadow novel detailed Peter and Ender’s conversation from Peter’s point of view. I felt the same when I read the short story about how Ender met Jane. Ender is “gone” now. We know his story.
Oh. One more thing. After the next book, Card has hinted he may finally get around to writing a prequel to Ender’s Game.
A book about one Mazer Rackham.
Having read pretty much all of them, I have to say in retrospect I’m a bit disaapointed. Fact is, the series as a whole is nothing special. WHat made the original story really great tends to get lost in even in the book Ender’s Game, and more or less gone by the rest of the series.
Speaker for the Dead was god in its own distinct way, however. I thought the Shadow books were really over-the-top and quite silly.
I’ve only read Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide.
Oh, and I originally read the novella version of Game before it came out as a novel. I really felt that the novel took away from the starkness of the original novella. So, I was very disappointed with the novel.
Speaker, on the other hand, really got to me. I found it a much more cohesive, and powerful book than I found Game to have been.
I didn’t finish Xenocide. But part of that was because I saw where Card was going with one of his characters, and I really didn’t care to follow along. I liked the character too much to want to continue the story. And the rest of the story didn’t grip me enough to make me continue. In some ways it reminded me of Michael P. Kube-McDowell’s The Quiet Pools. After that book put me into a black mood for a month or two, I promised myself not to follow along again, if shown a similar trail.
Thanks for the input. I think I’ll check out Speaker for the Dead since it seems interesting, then see from there.
That just sounds like a bad idea.