Ender’s game is one of my favorite books of all time. This has a lot to do with the fact that I was 14 when I first read it and it had a huge impact on me personally. It is one of the few novels I have ever read in a single sitting and holds a special place in my literary heart.
But I have a real problem with Orson Scott Card. The Ender books are the only of his series that I have only read one of, and I have yet to find a series that I don’t love at the start and hate by the end. The Shadow series, loved Enders Shadow, couldn’t even finish Shadow Puppets and will probably not read shadow of the Giant. I thought Seventh Son was brilliant, but by about book 3 of that series I was done, I doubt I will finish the rest. I have heard many good things about Speaker for the Dead, but Xenocide and Children of the Mind are supposedly so horrible that I worry it will ruin the whole thing for me. So here I sit having re read Enders game for the umpteenth time wondering if this time I should take the plung and start in on Speaker for the Dead. Is Speaker for the Dead stand alone enough that I won’t have to read Xenocide etc? Or if I want to find out what happens with Ender and Val will I have to read the rest of the series? Is it worth it?
IMHO - Speaker for the Dead is worth it, but it is a completely different book than Ender’s Game. You don’t get much (if any) continuity satisfaction, so don’t expect it. That, again IMHO, is why Card ended up with the Shadow series - they are much more literally continuous. With SftD, he just headed off in a completely different direction.
I found Xenocide tedious and Children of the Mind simply bad.
Speaker for the Dead is so good I’ve often felt it should have started new traditions in funerals. No foolin’.
I’ve read Xenocide, which was OK, and Children of the Mind, which was still OK but began to work off out of the more thoughtful stuff Card does well.
Get me, I think Card is one of the better authors around right now. He’s a true craftsman at character and dialogue. But he gets unfocused and loses threads between books in a series so they read more like vignettes than series.
I really liked Speaker for the Dead. The next two I didn’t like much. But, I think it’s Children of the Mind that has the society that suffers from OCD, and I found that interesting.
NAF1138, definitely read Speaker for the Dead, but don’t expect it to be anything like Ender’s Game. Nothing like. Xenocide is fair (that’s the one with the OCD society, by the way); Children of the Mind is plodding - seems like he was just stuffing all the loose ends into a bag for that one. If you don’t read either of them, you’re not missing that much.
I think that’s Xenocide, and I found that construct a bit silly, personally. Just hard to believe that somewhere in the future OCD would have that result and not “gee, they have OCD”.