orrendo! davvero
tutta la parte sul pianeta Path mi ha fatto star male di stomaco
tutto il resto l'ho odiato

With this book in the Ender series, it feels like Ender has jumped the shark. The action of the first part revolves around some philosophical arguing over dealing with alien species, especially when to save one, or humanity itself, you may have to destroy another. Here, we see the various permutations of 4 sentient species working for or against each other. It gets to be quite involving. Trekkies know “the Prime Directive”, and episodes that dealt with this rule on dealing with alien civilizations involved the most philosophical pondering and actions based on this belief. This Ender story is of the same family. The story concludes with some truly odd occurrences that seem aimed to extend the story, and these events appear to the be basis of the next book in the series. While it seems a pretty weak step in the storytelling, akin to “magic happens”, the next book does seem to have an interesting basis built in this book.

Let me tell you the most beautiful story i know.
a man was given a dog, which he loved very much.
the dog went with him everywhere,
but the man could not teach it to do anything useful...
instead it regarded him with the same inscrutable expression.
"thats not a dog, its a wolf!" said the mans wife
"he alone is faithful to me" said the man
and his wife never discussed it with him again.
one day, the man took his dog with him onto his private airplane
and as they flew over the winter mountains
the engines failed
and the airplane was torn to shreds among the trees.
the man lay there, bleeding
his belly torn open by shards of sheared metal...
but all he could think of was his faithful dog
was he alive? was he hurt?
imagine his relief when the dog came padding up
and regarded him with that same steady gaze.
after an hour, the dog nosed the mans gaping abdomen
and began to pull out the intestine, spleen and liver,
gnawing on them,
all the while studying the mans face.
"thank god" the man said.
"at least one of us will not starve."

how can you NOT love that.
the book was AMAZING.
my second favorite in the series.

When you've learned more about philosophy and psychology from a sci-fi novel than you ever did anywhere else, you'd know you've read Orson Scott Card. Srsly dude, you can do ANYTHING.

El libro resulta interesante para reflexionar sobre la humanidad y cómo reaccionaríamos ante razas extraterrestres con las que podemos interactuar y ante aquellas con las que no, pero tengo que decir que aunque el trasfondo y las ideas son buenas, el libro, bajo mi punto de vista resulta pesado de leer, la calidad de la saga baja en comparación al primer libro.

Ender's Game was one of the best modern novels I've ever read, especially in this genre. It surprised, delighted, and asked ethical and epistemological questions I hadn't thought to ask up until having read it (not to mention some fascinating universe-wide questions of pneumatology, psychology, and hamartiology). Speaker for the Dead was better and did the same, though in an almost entirely different genre — that book changed how I offer eulogies forever, changed the nature of funerals in my mind.

Xenocide, it seems, fell flat. A la: https://xkcd.com/304/

Or at least the audiobook version did — perhaps I need to merely read it in print as I read the other two. Then again, of the making of books there is no end and much study wearies the body. But the words of the wise are like goads, and the anthologies of the masters are like firmly embedded nails driven by a single Shepherd. The first two novels in the series clearly seemed like mastery. This one... not so much. Please leave a comment if he improves or returns to mastery in another series or even this one – am I way off base here?

Card seems obsessed with the nature of humanity, specifically humanity as tethered to the idea of consciousness, and the seedbed of that question lies in both Speaker and Ender's. Can a machine be a conscious being? Can a tree? A larva? Can a hive? All good questions. In this book, it shows up over and over again in the quarantining of OCD humans who — prior to the revolution led by an A.I. — had been treated as less-than-human. It shows up in a conscious virus. In conscious clones of memories of Andrew. In the piggies and buggers and so on. But I feel the farther we get into the series, simultaneously the more interesting his questions of religion and faith get AND the less interesting his questions of consciousness and systematic theology / philosophy grow.

I feel like rather than reading this book, everyone would do well to read the consciousness section of The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss — in fact, all philosophers of the mind, folks who study A.I., people who have questions of consciousness, and the like should have read that chapter. It's heavy, but it's worth it.

As for Xenocide... the title sums up the question of species extermination and how far that implication goes.

It's also telling that these questions seem wholly absent from the author's personal politics. Or at least they seem lacking in any discernible sense.

He is, in the end, a tight storyteller and I'll be checking out his lessons on writing. He even says in the afterward that to make it this philosophical and talky, he needed to grow into a better writer — it might be a good idea for him to revise Xenocide into a new edition, but what do I know? I'm no better or worse than him. The last word of the book does help with the brightness, but it feels it ends in a similar way to The Waste Lands in the Dark Tower series, the only problem being Stephen King WARNED us he'd split his book at the start, Card did not so... yeah.

Cannot recommend Ender and Speaker enough.

If you've read it, what did you think? If you haven't, why do you want to?

Card is, in my opinion, one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time. While this work is not as narratively strong as Speaker for the Dead, it is certainly quite impactful in its messages.

I could see how this book would not be for everyone; It includes many long, philosophical discussions on religion, identity, intelligence, colonization, cosmopolitics, and transcorporeality. This just so happens to be exactly why I loved it.

It’s an intentional, entangled mess of humanity. And it’s great.

Friends, gather round and behold what happens when an author’s agent sells his trilogy when only two books have actually been written, putting huge pressure on the author to deliver something (anything).

So said author rehashes an old philosophical mishmash and squeezes it into the series, ensuring that no real character development or action is made available to the reader.

For instance, when it comes to disconnected behaviour:
- Father trees suddenly become murderous and anti-human (explained away by the virus or religion?)
- Ender’s wife suddenly wants to break up because she’s jealous of his sister and his AI assistant
- Ender goes from being virtually prescient in his management of people to being a henpecked old stepfather
- How did we get from initial alignment between races to torch bearing villagers burning down the forest of sentient beings??

Scott Card admits that he relied on an old treatment that was “complicated, philosophical and talky”. And, surprise surprise, he ended up with a book that is exactly that.

When it comes to religion, he really misses a beat here, and wastes way too much space on their philosophical deliberations (penance, anyone?). Also, given how much the practice of Christianity has changed in 2,000 years, are we really expected to believe nothing else significant has changed in the ensuing 3,000 years? It is jarring to have so much change in so many other areas of life and culture but somehow this has remained frozen in time with no real reason to back this up.

To add insult to injury he actually split his final book in two, and while I’m all for commercial success, this felt unnecessary. It reminded me of the feeling engendered by the last season of Game of Thrones where the showrunners, D&D, phoned it in because they had other projects to get to.

The fleet is coming to destroy planet Lusitania! The piggies may counter by releasing the Descolada virus to destroy all humanity! No matter what Ender decides, an intelligent life form may be annihilated! Holy ethical dilemma, Batman! Let's talk freshman philosophy.

Speaker for the Dead was about what it is to be human. This one raises the stakes, and it's mostly about what it is to be a god. And here, Card basically goes a bit heavy handed on the Mormon theology. A true god would want to make people just like he is. In the end, we are all gods. And there's even a hint at the end of the idea that people can make it possible for their ancestors to enter the kingdom of heaven. I don't really object to this morphing of Mormon theology into sci-fi, but I did roll my eyes a couple of times.

The philosophy that really bothered me in this book was an extensive discussion of free will/determinism. We are three thousand years into the future, and these are the smartest people who ever lived, and the discussion here basically falls into the simplest trap. Valentine says that the problem with determinism, if its true, is that it leads to a lack of responsibility. That totally misses the point. If it's true, determinism is useless. It only might lead to a lack of responsibility if its false and people believe in it and act on it. If it's true, people will simply do whatever has been determined.

Even that wasn't my big issue with the book. One of the strengths of the first two books was Card's ability to get you to care some for the characters. Here, I had the feeling at times that he was working to achieve the opposite. There were times when I thought the best way to end the book would be to have the fleet receive it's orders and wipe these insufferable people out. That would still leave the insufferable people on Path, but one can't have everything, can one?

Finally, Card thoroughly writes himself into a box in this book, and I had some curiosity as to how he was going to get himself out of the box. I didn't suspect that he was going to have a physicist "invent" a pair of ruby slippers for Ender, so that all Ender would have to do is wish very hard that "There's no place like home." With these slippers we get faster than light travel, the fountain of youth, and a Star Trek style replicator without the limitations. Pretty nifty device. It makes pretty much anything come true as long as the person using it wishes hard enough for it (holds its pattern in their mind). Too bad Card didn't actually have such a device, then he could have wished for something other than a deus ex machina machine.

Read this back a couple of years ago and forgot to rate it.

The short-version review for this book comes in the form of an image I’d like to plant in your head.

Imagine yourself standing in a large, densely populated area. Think Grand Central Terminal, Times Square or the floor at Comic Con on a Saturday. You’re standing there, head tilted back, eyes squeezed shut, hands clenched into fists at your side as you scream out every ounce of anger, frustration, confusion, and disappointment that you’ve ever experienced in your lifetime, from the depths of your very soul.

Now, imagine you’re releasing all those feelings through one epic scream as a reaction to this book.

There’s your short-version review. You are welcome.

For the longer version, let me just add that I’m pissed. I’m pissed at myself for reading this, pissed at Card for writing this, and pissed at the characters for being so frustratingly annoying.

I read this book because I was told - by Card himself, in the introduction - that this book would be, at long last, the final chapter in the story of Ender Wiggin. Even though I doubted his words (there are still a gazillion books after this one, after all), I put my doubts aside, because he promised that when the door closed, it’d be with a finality that would allow the reader to move on, knowing that every last question had been answered; that new, thought-provoking and open-ended questions had been delivered; and that you, as the reader, would be at peace with it all.

I call BS. This wasn’t an ending at all! It was an opening that led to another set of questions, another group of characters I could barely stand to read about, and another series of books that I just can’t bring myself to be interested in!

This book was far too long, but I can usually deal with books that ramble. This book, though. It didn’t just ramble. It rambled on the theological, metaphysical, scientific and theoretic fronts. My eyes glazed over more than once. My brain wanted to shut down at almost every page. And just when I thought I couldn’t hate certain characters more than I already had (I’m looking at you, Novinha!), I got to the next chapter and realized, nope…it is possible to hate a fictional character with every ounce of my being.

I realized pretty quickly that I just didn’t care. What I wanted was Ender. His story, his progression in life. What I got instead was a group of arrogant adults, each convinced they were right, each blissfully oblivious to the damage their small-mindedness was causing.

Were there problems? Of course. Were they solved? Absolutely. Did they spawn yet more problems? What good series could survive if that weren’t the case? Did any of it matter, in the long run? Did any of it move me, the reader, to care more about the people, their issues, their thoughts or fears? Not one. Damn. Bit.

So yes, I’m pissed. Shame on Card for writing that this could be read as the last book in Ender’s life. Shame on me for believing him, when all the evidence pointed at something else. And shame on these characters, for being too flawed to be believable, too smart to be humble and too near-sighted to care about anything other than their own worlds.

And don’t even get me started on that ending…

"So let me tell you what I think about gods. I think a real god is not going to be so scared or angry that he tries to keep other people down . . . A real god doesn’t care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them."

The third part of the Ender Quartet, the sequel to Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, which takes place on the Brazilian colony of Lusitania -- the habitat of all three known species in the universe: humans, pequeninos, and the Hive Queen's buggers -- and a planet called Path, a descendant colony of China whose inhabitants believe themselves to be "godspoken." The plot is concerned with three main issues: the development of a cure and an understanding of the descolada virus, which is threatening to wipe out all life it comes into contact with, but which is necessary for pequenino survival, and the existence of which has led Starways Congress to condemn the planet to destruction; the growing conflicts between species on all planets and the ethical, spiritual, and philosophical dilemmas that result; and finally, the quest of three individuals on Path to find out what happened to the Lusitania fleet which was sent by Starways Congress to destroy Lusitania -- a "godspoken," his daughter, and her servant -- all who will be instrumental in the shape of things to come.

I enjoyed this book. As always, Card manages to make you care about his characters at the same time as making you think in ways you never have before about religion, philosophy, and the nature of life. Reading one of his books is like a religious experience; I always walk away after finishing one feeling as if I've really accomplished something, like I'm a better person for having done it. For this reason alone all of his stories are 'A' quality, but this one misses the mark (as does it's sequel, Children of the Mind) in terms of narrative structure and control. More on this below. Overall, though, this book is well worth your time, if only for the education of your soul (and the tying up of a few plotlines from Speaker for the Dead).

I love Jane -- so much. I also really enjoy all the ethical dilemmas that Card so brilliantly orchestrates. His creation of a planet full of people who believe themselves to have the ability to speak with the gods, but who have really been genetically manipulated into having a specific form of obsessive compulsive disorder, is frankly genius. But I think my favorite part about this book (and the rest of the Ender Quartet) is the way that they force you to examine the way that you see the world through the use of the pequeninos and the buggers. Everything looks different and a hell of a lot scarier when you don't understand it.

The thing that makes Speaker for the Dead such an A+(++++++) book, a masterpiece really, is the way that Card interweaves character, plotting, pacing, and action. Speaker for the Dead is the perfect length, with things being revealed at just the right pace, and tension perfectly distributed. The result of this is a feeling of perfect completion upon finishing. The narrative is also almost all self-contained. With the exception of several unresolved problems (how they're going to stop the Lusitania fleet, what will happen to Miro, etc.) the conflict of the story is perfectly resolved. This is where Xenocide suffers. Xenocide and Children of the Mind were originally supposed to have been one book, but the narrative became too long and Card was forced to separate the two. Unfortunately this hurts both stories. Xenocide feels incomplete in terms of theme, and Children of the Mind feels almost trite in comparison to its behemoth of a brother. Ultimately, it would have been a much more successful story with a good paring down, and combining the two into one, as Card originally intended. And, to end on a whine, Ender's fate was pretty upsetting and I'm not sure what exactly about it bothers me, other than I felt cheated. Intellectually, the decision to give his soul to the Peter-body was a good one. He can now live out his life without the immense burden of guilt of having committed xenocide, which has haunted him since Ender's Game. While I know this is good, I still can't help but feel cheated in some way. But I digress. Oh, and also, I really hate Qing-Jao.