Es bastante extenso, interesante pero también es lento aunque el final me mantuvo muy despierta y emocionada creo que se pudo haber realizado en menos páginas

I'm not sure where my review for this book went, which is unfortunate.

I loved this book. It's filled with philosophy and questions many things about life and love and is just so wonderfully written. The characters pop off the page and fill your world with wondrous ideas and you care deeply for everyone.

I wish my initial review didn't get erased. But just know this. I think this book is incredibly special. It's supplanted onto my favorites lost and I adore it. It's also my favorite book in the Ender series.

This was on it way to being a middle of the road - didnt love it or hate sci-fi novel, when a sermon broke out. I spent a number of hours getting preached at, and I didnt care for it.
It didnt even feel like the well-intentioned if ham fisted style of RAH trying to dole out advice / his world view - it was literally a sermon.

Jesus save the aliens, and in the end, just wishing (and a self-aware super-computer) can make miracles. It was a pretty bad excuse for fiction. And the ending resolved very little but tying down a superfluous oxbow in the story line.

I cant help but wonder if the success of Ender's Game & Speaker for the Dead - which were both very good - gave this author so much clout that his editors no longer reigned him in. 80% of the characters in this novel are extras - some were interesting, but they really did not have much to do with the story moving along. It seems like this was missing some red ink at the editorial phase.
But I bought it, and the next, and several dozen others by the same author, so here is to hoping that it picks up!

Por lo general, las terceras partes de las sagas de los libros que he leído no me han dado suficiente satisfacción, y en Ender el Xenocida no fue la excepción. Tampoco significa que el libro haya sido malo o que no me haya gustado; de hecho, hubo partes interesante que me hicieron leer sin parar hasta la madrugada. Pero siendo sincero, no me gusto el final. Ver a un Ender derrotado, débil y sintiéndose tan inútil no me parece que haya sido una buena sensación. Ender por lo general siempre fue inteligente, capaz, el mejor de todos y siempre nos sorprendía con sus calidades para conocer lo irreconocible, pero aquí nunca fue así. De hecho, los verdaderos protagonistas fueron Ela, Miro, Jane y los de Sendero, pero Ender no tuvo un protagonismo digno de libros anteriores. Él ya se había dedicado a su vida de esposo, se volvió católico y siento que se convirtió en un personaje común y corriente sin nada diferente. Sí, tenía algunas anotaciones, pensamientos y reflexiones interesantes como estábamos acostumbrados, pero no es lo mismo; y al contrario, verlo sufrir con Novinha (que tuvo 0% de protagonismo en este libro), afligido por re-crear a Peter y a Val y completamente desorientado sobre las soluciones que tenía que hacer para salvar a Luisitania de la destrucción me pareció algo triste. Es similar a cuando tenemos un héroe, un deportista favorito y nos enteramos que a esa persona le han pasado cosas terribles en el futuro y que ha sufrido demasiado y sentimos como esa pena y ese dolor… así me sentí en este libro como Ender.
Por lo cual, no entiendo porque el título del libro. No hubo nunca xenocidio, no hubo guerra y al contrario, los problemas casi que “mágicamente” se resolvieron casi todos a la vez. En cuanto a eso, sí que no me gusto. El 75% del libro había sido “lógico” y con un desarrollo de la historia normal, pero que de un momento a otro se fueran al exterior y todos los problemas se solucionaran así de repente, la verdad que me choca. Me choca, porque no me emociono, no sentí nunca acción y me pareció hasta aburrida la manera en que ese nudo de la historia se desarrollará.
Pero también, tengo que destacar lo que me gustó, y en ese sentido me encantaron los personajes. Puede que no haya habido batallas serias (excepto un incendio), pero cada personaje tenía tanta vida propia que se hacían sentir: Sus pensamientos, acciones, motivos de comportamiento y diálogos; me daban ganas de seguir leyendo para leer las nuevas aventuras de cada personaje, para conocer que le pasaría. ¿Se moriría? ¿Haría alguna rebelión? ¿Influiría en la decisión de alguien? ¿Cuál sería la siguiente rol que tomaría el personaje en la historia? Esa y muchas más preguntas me iba formulando mientras leía el libro. Quizás, por la misma enseñanza del personaje de Ender, cuando explicó que una vez que comprendíamos los verdaderos motivos de nuestro enemigo, no podíamos odiarlo, porque entonces ya lo conocíamos y en cambio lo amábamos porque lo comprendíamos. Asimismo, sin querer uno empieza a tratar los personajes de esa manera y a entender la forma en cómo se comporta cada uno, volviendo muy interesante las escenas al cruzarse los personajes en diversas situaciones.
También, me encanto la historia de Jane, su rol tan importante en el desarrollo de la salvación de Luisitiana y su relación con Ender y Miro, siendo cínica, pero a la vez honesta. Siempre que seguía leyendo, esperaba ansioso la participación “entrometida” de Jane para que la escena tuviera un poco más de humor interesante, como yo lo podría definir.
En cuanto al tema de racismo, filosofía, religión, ciencia y demás; me gusto porque es una visión diferente de estos temas. Por ejemplo, yo me imaginaba la evolución de una especie, como algo natural y no tan trascendente como lo vi en este libro. Aquí, era supremamente importante la evolución, porque si no evolucionaban y pronto todos se iban a morir, como en el caso de Plantador, y la verdad me toco el corazón la forma valiente en la que decidió desafiar a la misma naturaleza que se les había impuesto; y entonces, veo el tema de la evolución ahora un poco diferente, sin ser ahora tan molesto y tedioso el tema, sino en cambio un suceso más, que tiene muchas historias fundamentales tras de lo que ya ha sucedido. Me gusta la filosofía, el ser humano, el comportamiento y todo ese tipo de temas me parecieron geniales, incluso sirve para entender a mis semejantes o a mí mismo. En cuanto a la religión, me parece que el autor la hace quedar en ridículo. Todos oran y suplican, para que algo pasé, pero al ver la verdadera razón por la que se resolvieron las cosas entonces uno puede pensar que simplemente todo es una mentira y que usan la verdad no relacionada con la religión para controlar a las masas; pero a la vez, es contradictorio, porque los personajes implicados en el desarrollo hacen también parte de esa “religión” y se comportan como todos los demás, aunque sepan que lo que está pasando no es una obra divina sino científicamente está comprobado de ser algo distinto; por lo que no sé si tomarlo como burla, como mensaje subliminal para relacionar con la religión real o como simple casualidad y maldad mía en pensar de forma picara ante las situaciones.
En cuanto a lo de Sendero es una clara referencia a lo que se vivió en China en épocas pasadas, y quizás para muchos pueda parecer irracional y hasta tonto, que 3000 años después y hayan colonias o lugares comportándose “no evolucionada mente”, pero yo no le veo lo malo a ese detalle. En mi opinión, sin importar la cantidad de años que pasen en el mundo siempre va a existir una evolución, y así como en nuestro planeta se han pasado por tantas eras, en otros planetas también podría presentarse este factor. Asimismo, me parece interesante conocer con una historia tan sencilla como la de Han Qing Jao, a la China antigua y algunas de sus creencias y costumbres que fueron influenciadas para la historia de Sendero. Eso también fue grandioso.
En general, a mí me gustó aunque hay partes de la historia que no me convencieron demasiado; sin embargo, vale la pena leerlo y vale la pena continuar el siguiente libro de la saga para determinar si Ender seguirá con ese rol o tendrá un nuevo rol.

Cuando iba por la página 630 dije: ¿Cómo Orson va a resolver tantos problemas en menos de 30 páginas? y me preocupaba ¡mucho!. Debí imaginarlo: no los iba a resolver, al menos no todos y al menos no en éste libro.

Continuamos en el planeta que Orson ha creado, Lusitania, ahora las 3 especies que viven allí (Cerdis, Humanos e Insectores) estan potencialmente en peligro gracias a la orden del Congreso Estelar para destruir el planeta a causa de un virus que vive en cada especie de Lusitania, pero que es letal para los humanos. Ahora Ender trata de proteger a las especies y buscar alternativas para que el planeta no sea destruido.

El libro esta lleno de reflexiones acerca de la religión, creencias, espiritualidad, ideas de libertad, de existencialismo. No en vano Orson ha descrito a Ender como Humanista, corriente con la cual me identifico y vivo, pero este libro es un reto al contrastar estas ideas sobre todo con la religión y no en una búsqueda de atacarse uno al otro, sino de justificar cada una de las posturas.
La primera mitad del libro se me hizo sumamente reflexiva y llena de debates; en la segunda mitad me pareció que se desarrolló más la historia en el plano de acciones acerca de la ciencia-ficción. Es un libro con hechos que sólo los amantes de la ciencia-ficción aceptarán.

Debo confesar que como fangirl me molestaron las acciones de Novinha, la esposa de Ender, ¿Se puede ser más torpe? Aunque sé que por su historia de vida sus acciones de ven "justificadas" pero se me hizo un claro ejemplo de que no cerrar ciclos y vivir atada al pasado trae consecuencias negativas en el presente.

La interacción entre los creyentes de los dioses y su práctica de la religión se me hizo interesante cuando se introdujo la variable de que una persona quien toda su vida educó a su hija para seguir la religión de pronto se encontrara en la posición de poder explicarse muchas de sus prácticas con la ciencia y romper con todo su estilo de vida. Me pareció bastante bueno que se describieran los dos polos: por un lado alguien que cambia completamente sus ideas y acepta una explicación científica como real, y otra parte donde aún con las explicaciones se decide quedar con lo que ha creído toda su vida a pesar de las burlas.
Fue grato imaginar, al menos en un grupo reducido, la cooperación, apoyo y respeto entre humanos, con diferentes creencias y educación, unidos por la motivación de lograr un objetivo.

Citas favoritas:
• Ahora lo que ansiaba era la muerte, no porque no amara la vida, sino porque la muerte era inevitable, y lo que nadie puede impedir debe aceptarse.
• ¿Nadie se ha dado cuenta todavía de que los dioses siempre dicen lo que la gente está queriendo oír?
• ¿Cómo se la arreglan estos humanos para empezar con tanta inocencia y acabar siendo el final los que más sangre tienen en las manos?
• «Nunca saben nada, no gozan de suficientes años en sus cortas vidas para llegar a comprender nada en absoluto, sin embargo 'creen' que comprenden. Desde la más tierna infancia, se engañan para pensar que comprenden el mundo, mientras que lo que en realidad sucede es que tienen algunos primitivos prejuicios y suposiciones. A medida que se hacen mayores, aprenden un vocabulario más elevado con el que expresar su pseudoconocimiento y engañar a otras personas para que acepten sis prejuicios como si fueran la verdad, pero todo se reduce a lo mismo. individualmente, los seres humanos son todos idiotas»
«Mientras que, colectivamente...»
«Colectivamente, son un conjunto de idiotas. Pero con tanto correr de un lado a otro pretendiendo ser sabios, lanzando teorías idiotas a medio comprender sobre esto y aquello, un par de ellos se topan con con alguna idea que se acerca un poco más a la verdad de lo que ya se sabía. Y en una especie de vacilante prueba de tanteo y error, aproximadamente la mitad de las veces la verdad se abre paso y es aceptada por personas que todavía no la comprenden, que simplemente la adoptan como un nuevo prejuicio en el que confiar a ciegas hasta que el siguiente idiota se encuentre por casualidad con una mejora.»
«Entonces estás diciendo que ninguno de ellos es inteligente individualmente, y que los grupos son aún más estúpidos que los individuos. Sin embargo al mantener a tantos idiotas entretenidos en fingir ser inteligentes, se encuentran con algunos de los mismos resultados con los que se encontraría una especie inteligente.»
«En efecto»
«Si ellos son tan estúpidos y nosotros tan inteligentes ¿Por qué tenemos sólo una colmena, que sobrevive aquí porque nos trajo un humano? ¿Y por qué habéis dependido vosotros de ellos de una forma tan completa para todos los avances técnicos y científicos que habéis realizado?»
«Tal vez la inteligencia no lo es todo.»
«Tal vez nosotros somos los estúpidos, al pensar que sabemos. Tal vez los humanos son los únicos que entienden el hecho de que nada puede ser conocido.»
• No sabes como amar a la gente. Sólo sabes cómo poseerla. Y como la gente nunca actuará como tú quieres, madre, siempre te sentirás traicionada. Y como tarde o temprano todo el mundo muere, siempre te sentirás engañada. Pero eres tú quien te engaña, madre.
• Creo que un dios real no va a ser tan asustadizo o intransigente que intente rebajar a otras personas.
• Querer que otras personas crecieran. Querer que otras personas tuvieran todas las cosas buenas de que uno disfruta. Y evitarles los pesares si era posible. Eso era bondad.


¡Ender y Jane siguen teniendo mi corazón entero!

Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead are lucid, well-plotted novels with memorable characters, undergirded by their author's regressive politics. Xenocide, however, starts out lucid and well-plotted before its author loses control of the ship and goes belly-up into the briny deep. Sorry, did I mention I'm also reading Moby-Dick right now? You may want to get out of the splash zone if you don't want to get soaked by any further nautical metaphors.

Card sets up a doomsday scenario for his characters that's so total that the only way he can write himself out of it is with an enormously silly deus ex machina—or is it a deus extra machina, a god from outside the machine? No matter. The point is, two dudes trading positively cannabinoid theories in a drunk tank come up with a way to 'wish' (Card's word, not mine) FTL travel into existence, which then leads to a cascade of miracles that MacGyver the compelling ecological fable of the prior novel into one of the most handwavey versions of 'Science as God' I have ever read in my life. Quick spoiler alert and pro-tip: 'philote' is Orson Scott Card for 'midichlorian'.

I'm not opposed to 'divine science' in storytelling; I am heavily opposed to novels that forsake forward momentum and character- and plot-driven events in favor of huge expository infodumps that serve no purpose but to papier-mâché over a narrative conundrum.

And that's before we start the onerous job of tackling just how regressive this author really is. Stubborn and implacable women of color (Quara, Novinha, Ela, Qing-jao) must be browbeaten into cooperating with more 'level' minds. There is racist Orientalism baked into many aspects of the World of Path, a human colony of Chinese settlers, just as Speaker for the Dead introduced Card's utterly colonial depiction of the post-Earth colony of Lusitania, with its expat Brazilian inhabitants and native aliens, the pequeninos.

If Card's antisemitism wasn't clear from the character of 'Rose de Nose' in Ender's Game, along with the accompanying rant about how Jewish people control the world, he's back again to remind you that historically oppressed peoples like Gypsies and Jews must invent fables of specialness as a panacea to their oppression. Yes, he really says this. Yes, he is replicating that conservative tactic of declaring that the group he is targeting is both vastly, conspiratorially powerful as well as frail snowflakes.

Would you like paragraphs and paragraphs of ranting about how human civilization occurs because women need to turn barbarian alpha males into passive betas? Then boy, do I have some science-fiction for you.

No, really! Have a quote: "Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count on stability; our legal and moral codes that try to abolish violence and promote permanence of ownership and enforce contracts—those represent the primary female strategy, the taming of the male."

I have neither the energy nor the inclination to get into the way Card writes skin tone and disability and mental health—let's just say it's of a piece with all of the above.

And surely there is something to say about Card constantly maneuvering underaged girls into chaste but suggestive proximity with older men, or doing the same with brothers and sisters. But my stomach is, at present, not up to the job.

Wait, I'm actually not done complaining about the plot. By the end, Card goes and resurrects, for no reason, his most annoying character, who has been dead for 3000 years. Just thought that deserved a shout-out, too.

This sucks, and it doesn't even have whales. I'm going back to Moby-Dick.

This is one of the most profoundly philosophical science fiction books ever written.

Humans have colonized the planet they call Lusitania, home to the "piggies," intelligent mammal-like animals with no technology. Then Ender Wiggin arrives, with the Hive Queen, the last remaining member of her high-tech species. Now three intelligent species must cohabit one world -- for if they leave it, they will take with them the ultimate biological weapon, the descolada virus.

Human contact with not one but two intelligent alien species sets the scene for a thorough and balanced discussion of some of the most important questions about being human:
What does it mean to be intelligent?
What does it mean to be alive?
Does free will exist?
Where did the universe come from?
How can we pursue our own interests while remaining respectful of others'?

My only reservation about this book is that it really only makes sense having read the other two first, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. I tried reading it immediately after Ender's Game, and put it down in frustration after a few pages.

But if you have time to read a great sci-fi trilogy, with interesting characters, a suspenseful plot, and some surprisingly unique ideas, you will be richly rewarded.

Addendum: In light of Card's homophobic statements, I feel obligated to add a few words. It is incredibly disappointing to me that such an imaginative, creative writer as Card sees homosexuality as wrong. He is able to imagine species that reproduce in incredibly innovative and foreign ways, yet is not able to tolerate something as banal as one human loving another human who happens to be of the same sex. I admire Card's creativity, but I am saddened by his narrow-mindedness regarding his own species.

This is the best science fiction novel I have ever read. Very unexpected too as it's the 3rd book in a series and the only 3.8/5 avg. Goodreads rating. Verryyyyyyyyy original! Verrrrrryyyyyy creative, philosophical, and debatable. This book really makes you think about things, ideas, humanity, right/wrong, religion, faith, love, connection...

My Quick Synopsis:
It's difficult explaining the story without giving a lot away because this book constantly mophs and changes and evolves but I will begin with questions from the beginning:
There are a new set of characters from the God Path and they are Chinese descendants that are very intelligent but rely heavily on the gods, and what the gods lead them to do. But what if they're not listening to the gods, what is affecting how they are so strange from humans and that they need rituals to purify themselves to make them clean again?
How was Jane made, where did she come from, how can they save her?
How is Jane connected to everything, is she like a god?
More in depth look at the piggies and how they make sense now.
Who is the hive queen and how is she connected to everything?
What is the descolada virus and what does it do to sentitent beings on Luisitana?
How do they prevent another xenocide?
How do they stop the Descolada virus? Where did it come from?

I feel like normally even the best of books has it's faults, however small they are but this book is an exception, I'm almost sure it actually has no faults. I can usually be quick to complain about multiple parts of stories, characters, things that don't line up, plot holes, etc. but I am speechless with Xenocide, it's just about perfect! lol It's very rare I find a book like this. I feel like by this third book Orson Scott Card has improved his writing ten fold and that's even with the first couple books being pretty great.

I admit this book is very philosophical and "talky" as Orson Scott Card says. Some may not like that but I loved it. This book isn't about "what happened", it's more about "what was discussed and decided upon." Orson Scott Card was going to write a whole book about philotes but instead he combined the ideas into the Ender series and made this Xenocide book like a whole series in itself.

Parts I enjoyed:
""Don't be embarrassed, Qing-jao. The wise are wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them."

(Piggy speaking with Hive Queen)
n  
n  n   
n    n      
n      n        
n        n        
......

......


Miro talking to his mother Novinha:
"But you don't love him. You don't know how to love people. You only know how to own them. And because people will never act just like you want them to, Mother, you'll always feel betrayed. And because eventually everybody dies you'll always feel cheated. But you're the cheat, Mother. You're the one who uses our love for you to try to control us."

Miro speaking with Valentine:
"Are you a believer?
Let's say I'm a suspecter. I suspect there may be someone who cares what happens to us. That's one step better than merely wishing. And one step below hoping."

Valentine thinking about Miro and Ouanda:
"Inner strength and outward respect. These are the people who hold a community together, who lead. Unlike the sheep and the wolves, they perform a better role than the script given them by their inner fears and desires. They act out the script of decency, of self-sacrifice, of public horror-of civilization. And in he pretense, it becomes reality. There really is civilization in human history, thought Valentine, but only because of people like these. The shepherds.

Miro lashing out and Ender explaining to him:
"I think that we are free, and I don't think it's just an illusion that we believe in because it has survival value. And I think we're free because we aren't just this body, acting out a genetic script. And we aren't some soul that God created out of nothing. We're free because we always ex isted. Right back from the beginning of time, only there was no beginning of time so we existed all along. Nothing ever caused us. Nothing ever made us. We simply are, and we always were.
Philotes? asked Miro
Maybe, said Ender"

Ender explaining Gods to Wang-Mu:
"No matter how smart or strong you are, there's always somebody smarter or stronger, and when you run into somebody stronger and smarter than and you think, This is a god. This is perfection. But I can promise you that there's somebody else somewhere else who'll make your god look like a maggot by comparison. And somebody smarter or stronger or better is some way. 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. For Congress to genetically alter people to make them smarter and more creative, that would have been a godlike, generous gift. But they were scared, so they hobbled the people of Path. They wanted to stay in control. 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.

Ender talking with Jane:
"You can't have it both ways, said Wiggin. Either somebody had a purpose for you or you were an accident. That's what an accident is-somethig that happened without anyone purposing it. So are you going to be resentful either way? The people of the Path are going to resent Congress like crazy, once they all find out what's been done to them. Are you going to be resentful because nobody did anything to you?
I can if I want, said Jane, bit it was a mockery of childish spite.
I'll tell you what I think, said Wiggin. I think you don't grow up until you stop worrying about other people's purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself."

Hive Queen speaking to the piggy
"Earthborn animals do this thing inside their brains-a sort of mad firing-off of synapses, controlled insanity. While they're asleep. The part of their brain that records sight or sound, it's firing off every hour or two while they sleep; even when all the sights and sounds are complete random nonsense, their brains just keep on trying to assemble it into something sensible. They try to make stories out of it, it's complete random nonsense with no possible correlation to the real world, and yet they turn it into these crazy stories. And then they forget them. All that work, coming up with these stories, and when they wake up they forget almost all of them. But when they do remember, then they try to make stories of those crazy stories, trying to fit them into their real lives.n      n    n  n

Originally published at Fantasy Literature.

Xenocide is the third book in Orson Scott Card’s award-winning ENDER WIGGEN saga. In the first book, Ender’s Game, the child Ender Wiggen was trained to wipe out the alien “buggers” who were planning to destroy the earth. The second novel, Speaker for the Dead, takes place years later when Ender visits the planet Lusitania where Xenologists are studying two non-human species: the pequininos, who have an unusual life cycle, and the descolada virus, which is fatal for humans but necessary to the pequininos. In addition, Ender has brought the buggers’ hive queen to Lusitania so she can rebuild her species. When the human Starways Congress finds out what’s happening on Lustinania, it sends its fleets to blow up the planet. Speaker for the Dead ends with Ender’s sister Valentine, who writes propaganda under the name Demosthenes, traveling to Lusitania to support her brother. Both Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Ender’s Game is being made into a movie for release in spring 2013.

As Xenocide opens, Valentine is arriving on Lusitania after traveling for many years to get there. So far, her propaganda hasn’t worked and the fleet is still on its way to destroy the planet. So Jane, a Neuromanceresque artificial intelligence who lives in the connected computers all over the universe, cuts off the fleet’s communications so they can’t get the final “destroy” command from Congress. When Congress can’t figure out what happened to its fleet, a young Chinese girl on the planet Path is asked to use her superior intellect to solve the mystery.

Meanwhile, on Lusitania, Ender’s family is desperately trying to find a way to recode the descolada virus’s DNA so it will do what it needs to do for the pequininos without killing humans. If they can prove that it’s no longer harmful to humans — and get in contact with the fleet before it acts — they can stop the destruction of the planet. If they can’t, not only will the humans on Lusitania be killed, but two species, the pequininos and the buggers, will be completely wiped out. And make that three if you want to count the descolada as a species — the more they study it, the more they think it may be sentient. There’s a lot to get done before the fleet arrives…

Like its predecessors, Xenocide is an intense, emotional, and thought-provoking novel. Most of the text doesn’t actually deal with the action that the plot implies (e.g., the nearing of the fleet, the tests on the virus’s DNA, etc.) but it mostly revolves around all of the ethical and psychological issues that arise, and there are a lot of them. I can’t tell you about some of the most interesting ones because it would give away plot twists, but in generalities I can say that Xenocide had me thinking about the genetics of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), the relationship between compulsive behavior and religiosity, the nature of fatherhood, God, the big bang, the possibility of traveling faster than the speed of light, time-travel paradoxes, guilt and forgiveness, sentience, language, artificial intelligence, loyalty, and death.

The subject matter in Xenocide is pretty heavy, but Card accompanies this with lots of psychological drama, too. Almost every conversation is emotionally intense. The characters are constantly challenging each other’s beliefs, psychoanalyzing each other, and attributing motives to each other. They often go back and forth — analyzing, interpreting, questioning, denying. I found this to be emotionally draining and it increased the page count beyond what I thought was necessary. In fact, Card explains in his author’s note that eventually Xenocide got too long and the story had to be continued in the next novel, Children of the Mind. From what I’ve heard (not having read it yet), Children of the Mind rehashes much of the plot of Xenocide. I would have preferred for most of the overwrought dialogue to be written out of Xenocide so the story could be told in one volume as originally planned.

But that’s my only real complaint about Xenocide. I think some readers will find the ending too bizarre, but I’m feeling mostly generous toward the novel. Other than the overdose of drama, Xenocide is a well-crafted and thought-provoking story. It works beautifully with its award-winning predecessors and, though it’s more than 20 years old, its science and technology feel surprisingly current.

Me sorprende cómo Orson Scott Card cambia de registro con cada libro de esta saga.
El primero, El juego de Ender, es una novela más juvenil llena de acción; la segunda, La voz de los muertos, es una novela de primer contacto con una nueva especie alienígena, mucho más madura. Y esta tercera parte es una novela filosófica, donde se plantea el dilema de exterminar una especie entera por salvar a otra.

Es bastante más lenta y tarda algo en arrancar. No hay apenas acción, solo debates entre los distintos puntos de vista. También la parte técnica tiene un peso importante ya que Scott Card no ahorra páginas para explicar las partes más científicas de la novela como el viaje más rápido que la velocidad de la luz, o la solución a un virus indestructible. De hecho, estos capítulos finales me han dado la sensación de ser un poco "deus ex machina" para poder salir adelante. Es un final que no me esperaba y que vuelve a abrir la saga. Todavía estoy pensando si me ha gustado o no. Dependerá de la calidad de los siguientes libros y si le ha compensado estirar el chicle.

De todas formas, si te gustan los dilemas éticos este es tu libro. Sin embargo, si sigues buscando algo parecido al primer libro creo que el autor no va a continuar por ahí por lo que no te recomendaría seguir.

Definitely more of Card’s own philosophy/theology in this one than the others. If you are thinking in the same ontological groove that he is (which I wasn’t) I think it would be more interesting. Still good though!

This one was great until the deus ex machina ending, with a useless kind of cliffhanger to entice you to read Children of the Mind. I liked how this one started out and wanted more about the co-habitation of humans, piggies, and buggers. I got lots of exposition on philosophy, but it was less satisfying than Speaker for the Dead because of the "jumping the shark" ending, really. I liked Andrew Wiggins less in this sequel, but I did like the Chinese folks on Path and found that was a nice addition. I'll avoid spoilers, but the various twists and turns are sometimes surprising, and sometimes come off as kind of dumb. I am on the fence as to whether I'll read book 4 or not. Would anyone reading this review like to chime in?

Fino's Enderverse Reviews in internal chronological order (I think):
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