OOO!! Orson just released his Ender’s Game short story on the web.
http://www.hatrack.com/osc/stories/enders-game.shtml
Add my voice to those who thought Speaker for the Dead was interesting and valuable, but a major change from Ender’s Game. I read them immediately back-to-back; it probably would have been better to wait a while so the shift wasn’t so shocking. I didn’t care much for Xenocide and I wasn’t able to finish Children of the Mind.
Have you read The Conqueror’s Trilogy by Timothy Zahn? Pretty lightweight stuff, and Zahn ain’t no Delaney (hell, he ain’t even a Cherryh), but all three books are reasonably entertaining brainless fluff, if you can get past the dopey disembodied-spirit thing. Of course, it was always conceived as a trilogy, so it doesn’t suffer much from “sequelitis” where the writer is trying to come up with additional events to follow a book he originally wrote as a standalone.
That’s David Weber; he did collaborate on a series with Steve White, though. And I agree with your assessment of the Harrington books.
On the OP topic, I’ve never gotten into the Ender books (although I did read the original story) but I’m a big fan of the Alvin Maker series
Add my voice to the chorus of support for SFTD, with the same reservations regarding the difference in tone.
I didn’t personally enjoy the Shadow books as much as I did the Speaker sequels, although they were still fun. They focus on the political side of Ender’s Game far more than the philosophy of SFTD, and give detail to the future Earth hinted at in the Val/Peter passages of Ender’s Game. Card inserts a lot of his own personal politics into the Shadow books, something that irked me. Admittedly, this is partly due to my disagreement with his conservative stances, but it also sucked out some of the magic of the Enderverse simply because the characters began taking a back seat to the plot and political meanderings. I loved Ender’s Game because I empathized with Ender, and because the characters were so well-fleshed out in the context of the tale. I don’t feel a similar level of sympathy for any of the main characters in the Shadow books.
I really like Speaker For the Dead with the Piggies and Jane. Like others have said, it’s very different from Ender’s Game, and there are very few times when the books in the series refer back to Battle School except when they talk about the Buggers.
The Bean Series is going the same way as the Ender Series did, i.e. it lacks is quality as it goes on. Shadow of the Hedgemon is a good sequel to Ender’s Shadow, but Shadow Puppets is, in my opinion, awful. But one neat aspect is that while the Ender Series continues with Ender and Valentine and their hatred/fear of Peter Wiggin, the Bean Series shifts it’s point of view to Peter, and how he’s rising to world domination while going to school and living with his parents, but at the same time he’s a vulnerable character and different from the way Valentine and Ender remember him. I also liked that Card expanded on Peter, Valentine, and Ender’s parents more in the Bean Series (after Ender’s Shadow, that is).
I loved Speaker but the series just doesn’t go anywhere after that. (I did enjoy the OCD stuff in Xenocide, though–that was quite fascinating.) A lot of Card’s series seem to start off really well and then just kind of fizzle.
Oh I loved the mind game, the battle, the moral dilemma. What I felt was weak was the political stuff. The only good thing about the Warsaw Pact against the Hegemony was Peter. It doesn’t look like Card got into him later in the series. I’d love to read about how the terrible monster ended up ruling over a Pax Americana. I think that’s why Ender’s Shadow sounds like the book for me.
I loved EG, SFTD and ES. They’re my top 3 out of the whole “Ender” oeuvre.
When I read EG, I felt as though I’d had a spiritual experience. I will always be grateful to the boy who lent me his copy. When I read SFTD, I felt as though I’d had a spiritual experience again, but the payoff was a little slower. I had patience though, and it paid off. Oh boy did it ever.
Ender’s Shadow felt as though it had more “action” to me. Just MHO.
I recently reread the entire tetralogy and would definitely recommend reading Speaker for the Dead. Xenocide and Children of the Mind are interesting but you may (or may not) find the religious overtones annoying. Peter does return at the end of Xenocide, sorta, so you might find that interesting.
I can’t strongly recommend Ender’s Shadow. They’re ok, but not essential. I haven’t read Shadow Puppets yet.
I have this problem - if a book is part of a series, I have to read all of the books in the series, in order.
I would recommend reading the sequels, and the Shadow books. If you liked Ender’s Game, you will find something redeeming about all of them, even if you don’t really love them.
I would disagree with the “lack of hard science” comment re. Speaker, Xenocide, and Children. I think the trick is the shift in hard science from military application to genetics and social engineering.
For those who enjoyed Speaker, Xenocide and Children, may I recommend the Foundation series (Asimov I think). I was surprised (not an major Asimov fan), but I loved it - it’s based on the premise that psychology can be measured like any hard science.
YES YES YES YES YES
Read it!
I read 3 to 4 books a week and “Speaker for the Dead” is my all-time favorite novel
Strange, I’ve read the EG+SFTD+X+COTM 3 times and didn’t get the same impression. Especially since there was more than one character in X with OCD, and the different characters made different choices–one major OCD character made the “right” choice, and one made the “wrong” choice. So?
Easy answer: Did you like the last chapter of Ender’s Game? Did you think, “Oh, good. All that annoying action is over, and now we can get down to the business of deep, insightful analyses of xeno-culture.”?
Then you’d like Speaker for the Dead.
(And maybe you even were heard to sigh, “Gosh, if only there’d been more Catholics and pigs and people speaking Portugese…”)
I could never get into SFTD and the others that are directly in the Ender series, though I did like the Ender’s Shadow books - until Shadow Puppets. I definitely agree with bean_shadow that it was simply awful.
Oh yes. Shadow Puppets is a travesty alright. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It was as though OSC just became another hack. Please stay away. It’s a disappointment. It’s tripe.
Correct me if I’m wrong (and I likely am), but, isn’t that the whole point of science fiction?
All I can say now is that I read the book when it first came out in hardback, and the only memory I have is of a woman who traced lines on the floor in a home, and that I thought she was pretty villianous. That and some of the ansible stuff. It seemed to me, at the time, that he was making a connectiong between the woman’s OCD and villianous acts she committed or allowed to be committed. I’ve read hundreds of books since then, and for the life of me I can’t recall any more detail than that. At some point I’ll probably go and reread it and will have a completely different impression (this frequently happens with me).
JOhn.