This post will NOT include major spoilers but if you wish to do so, feel free.
It’s been out for a month. I thought we could discuss it. Of course, you all look at my screen name and say “well, he’s a hard core Ender fanatic. We all know what he thought of this book.” And you would not be far off the mark. I am a hardcore Ender fanatic.
And the book…um…cough…yeah…
Shadow Puppets was terribly disappointing. I’ve read almost 25 of his novels and short story collections and even on the worst of them I could say “the writing was still wonderful and the psychological interplay between characters was brilliant.”
I couldn’t do that here.
Bit characters such as Virlomi weren’t really fleshed out. Peter seemed downright dimwitted. Bean and Petra’s romance didn’t ring true. And Card was basically shoving the whole “parents know best” theme down our throats like he got a gallon jar of Gerber baby food on wholesale.
Dialogue was stilted, which is a shame because Card is usually excellent at this. There were WAY too many characters laughing at their own jokes, which took me out of the book as if Card was saying “look at me, see how funny I am?”
But the main travesty is this: Achilles, the antagonist, gets almost no face time in this book. For the life of me, I can’t understand why Card made this choice. We keep hearing about how Evil Achilles is, but we never see it. We never get his viewpoint. Rarely do we get a viewpoint of someone near him because there is no one near him. He’s just an object. An idea. “Evil.”
But in each of the other books he does something to prove how vile he is. This time, there is nothing. No reason to hate him other than past deeds from the preceding novels. Bean needs someone to play off of and Lord knows Petra ain’t doin’ the trick.
The book seemed on autopilot. And while there were a few good ideas, so many character choices seemed to pale in comparison to what we knew those characters were capable of accomplishing.
I’d like to know what others thought. Dissents would be welcome.
I made the choice not to read this one, having been disappointed with Shadow of the Hegemon. But I’ll keep an eye on this thread, and see if it jumps as something I might want to read. If so, I’ll find it at the library.
I’ll still read only because I’m engrossed in the characters, not the storyline, at least not anymore. Ender’s Shadow was excellent. I’ll read it over and over and never tire of it. Shadow of the Hegemon was good, but the cat and mouse game got tiring, and at least we were kept on our toes with Bean’s life-or-death situation. I’m antsy to see what happens to Bean now, no matter how disappointing the book could be. The final book had better be darn good to vindicate the middle two.
I’ll let you know how I like it when I read it, if I can find it anywhere.
I read the copy writers edition (the copy sent out months in advance for people to read and edit) when I found it at the bookstore last June. I was disapointed then, so I was curious to see what others thought because the finished project would probably be a bit different than what I had; and I see that I was justified in my disapointment. I thought Bean was out of character. It really didn’t seem like the same Bean we knew from the other books.
(There be spoilers here - for Ender’s Game and the whole Shadow series.)
Throughout the Shadow series my level of emotional investment in the characters has been dropping, and this one lost it entirely. So what does OSC do in this one? He drops all the military strategy, all the political maneuvering, basically all the plot and gives us a lame, unconvincing emotional drama about Bean and Petra wanting to have babies. I absolutely do not give a damn about Bean and Petra trying to get pregnant. If I want to read about that, I’d go to other authors who do it better.
All the characters have suddenly become good Mormons who believe the whole purpose of life is to have lots of babies. Even the atheist characters like Bean. Even a GAY character, for Pete’s sake. We get preached at about this for pages. The worst part is the rewriting of Petra’s character - she suddenly has no interest in anything but marrying Bean and getting pregnant. And when did she suddenly become so emotionally open? I don’t object to her being a soldier and a mother, but the soldier part seems to have been completely dropped here. Somebody tell me she gets to kick ass at some point in this book.
Then there’s the part about Peter being redeemed. It’s nice to see the Wiggin parents being developed as characters, but “Spoiled Child is Reformed by Tough Love” is a cliche - it works in The Secret Garden or The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but not here. Besides, Peter’s character seems to have been rewritten from the beginning - he’s just ambitious here, he’s not the kid from Ender’s Game who tortured small animals to death for fun.
There’s been a few good bits - I’ve been enjoying the India/China plotline, and there’s a few really funny bits like Hot Soup’s sarcastic letter - but overall, it’s a huge letdown so far. Maybe it’ll get better, but I don’t have much hope.
king of spain, I agree with your analysis of many parts of the book. Bean seems way too centered on Christianity. Yes, sister Carlotta had a huge influence on his life but the Bean I know just isn’t Christian. He isn’t religious! He takes care of himself and to believe in God is to give up part of his own responsibility and transfer it to another. This doesn’t fit into his lifestyle at all.
I will disagree with you on Peter though. Yes, Peter has changed drastically from earlier books and a lot of it I don’t buy. But I was specifically considering the animal torturer side of him and it is possible for Peter to change. He mutilated squirrels when he was, what? 10? 12? He’s 20 now and while it seems strange that ALL his cruelty seems to be gone, it’s not that hard to believe he’s matured over the last decade.
What I’ve read on the subject (not that I’m an expert, or anything) indicates that extreme cruelty to animals in a child is often a warning sign of a future serial killer. In Ender’s Game Peter always read to me as a seriously messed up kid, not the kind of thing that would just go away by itself as he matured.
But basically, I’m not mad that Peter got over his cruelty - I’m mad that we didn’t get to see it. Peter always seems like such a wonderfully complex character at the end of Ender’s Game, when we get to the part about Ender writing his biography. I would’ve really looked forward to a story about how over the course of his career, he gradually matured from the cruel child we saw at the beginning. But in Shadow Puppets, OSC cheats and gets rid of the cruelty - the interesting part - offstage. If he’d left it in, Peter’s “redemption” might have been a lot more interesting.
The gay guy is Anton, the scientist whose theories made Bean’s genetic alterations possible. Come to think of it, the book might not explicitly say that he’s gay, just that he was “not of an inclination to desire women” or something like that, and that he used to have lots of, um, special friends. I thought it was pretty clear what he was implying. Remember, he’s the one who makes a whole big speech about how despite his scientific accomplishments, he realizes now that his life is empty because he hasn’t married a woman and raised children, and that’s what Bean really wants too?
(For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t read it yet, Anton’s backstory does make it vaguely plausible that he’d feel that way, so I can ignore the implicit homophobia. What I mind is OSC’s making all the characters mouthpieces for his own beliefs.)
I hate this board. I have just lost about 200 posts. RAAAAAAAAAAGHGHHHHHH!!!
Anyway: I hate the entire idea of Achilles. It worked when Bean was living in Amsterdam. It does not work anytime thereafter. It is, to put it midly, the single worst and most ludicrous idea in the entire history of OSC. WHy anyone would do anything with this psycho tyke except put a bullet twist his eybrows is beyond me
I agree. For super-geniuses, the collective population of Earth are idiots.
And from my very limited experience with gay people, I got the impression that it’s not just about the sex, any more than either of my heterosexual relationships were about sex.
While I don’t really find the whole subplot about Bean’s babies (Beanie babies?) all that fascinating, it does some sense in the big picture. I’m going to take a leap of logic here but I’m putting a big SPOILER! in here because I have a reasonable belief that my assumptions will prove to be correct.
Card has spoken about trying to tie the Ender and Bean books together. After book 4 in the Bean series he will have one last book, book 9, that also takes place 3000+ years in the future at a time just subsequent to Children of the Mind.
Card claims to have no idea how he’s going to do that, but I think he’s been formulating a bit anyway. Bean and Petra are in Brazil. They’re planning to learn Portuguese with one child on the way and others out there, waiting to be collected by Bean.
I think he finds them all, or most of them, and they all end up alive and in Bean and Petra’s care.
Super-smart people that speak Portuguese and Card needs a way to tie it into the Ender series. It’s obvious. Many, most, or all of the inhabitants of the Piggy world are descendants of Bean and Petra. They have within them Anton’s key, even if it’s completely recessive. Someone new is born on that world whose Anton’s Key is dominant and he helps Val and Peter change the face of history.
I really hjave trouble understanding why some characters get to be rewritten like that, and while I find it lame, can see why it has to be done too. Happy endings and all that.
[sub]i think i might be overanalyzing just a little bit.[/sub]
Certainly book nine will be very intriguing, to see how it alll goes down.
Petra keeps bashing herself for a mistake she made on Eros (the bugger made asteroid where the final battles took place). Through four books now we’ve seen how badly she’s taken it that she fell asleep. No one can blame her for it; she was young, pushed way past her limit, and completely exhausted. But she’s a control freak and desperate to prove she’s as smart as the boys, yet was the only one to let them down in a time of need. It’s natural for her to be upset, but not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.
But in this book, what happens? The world is at war and she takes herself and one of the greatest military minds ever out of action to go make babies. Worse, she puts herself in the hands of someone she knows she can’t trust. She KNOWS the test for Anton’s Key is a fake but she is so intent on having this baby she’d put the entire rest of the world at risk just to have one.
So what happens? The test does turn out to be a fake and we have five potential Bean-like minds ready to come into the world and take it over. Just like Petra knew would happen. Just like she could have prevented. But destroying the world is a risk Petra is apparently willing to take just to have a single child to call her own because she doesn’t seem to feel the least bit of guilt over this absurd mistake.
Yet she keeps lamenting the fact that she feel asleep that one time in Ender’s Jeesh. Either Petra’s lost complete perspective or Card has. I don’t know which.
What i didn’t like was the entire style of this book. It’s similar to the “Homecoming” series. It takes so long for anything to actually happen and he flits us all over the place, trying to give us the big picture, I guess. But, it’s annoying. Especially when nothing happens page after page after page until you get to the climax and then… MORE NOTHING! “Children of the Mind” worked, tho. Same basic style, just done right!