I love Peter.

3.5/5 Ultimately fun to see these characters in a different setting outside of Battle School, but honestly all the stuff about earth politics kinda fell flat for me after the last 2 books were about, ya know, having to stop the aliens from invading FOR THE THIRD TIME. So yeah don’t blame me if “India starts war with Burma” isn’t as interesting to me. But the villain is great and the characters are well written, it just sucked that they weren’t all in the same place interacting with each other until the end. Sorta seemed like a big set up for the next book, but overall still enjoyed.

The characters are just so good and definitely made this book for me. Their motives are really unique and I loved getting inside their heads!

Bean’s wrestle to find meaning for his genius and struggle to discover his place in the world was stirring. I enjoyed seeing how he interacts with Peter. Their relationship contrasts nicely with Bean and Ender’s. I also liked just getting to know Peter and Petra more in general.

Achilles was a remarkable villain! He’s completely psychotic, yet you can’t help feeling his sickening sense of charm that is weirdly intoxicating. How quickly and easily Achilles gains power was just a step too far into the unbelievable for me, but that didn’t stop him from being a very interesting villain.

Shadow of the Hegemon didn’t have the same “awe” factor as Ender’s Game or Ender’s Shadow. It felt more like a giant game of Risk with a hostage scenario in the middle. Really enjoyable and intriguing, but not quite as stunning or impactful for me.

Oh and I finally had to look this up and can confirm that Orson Scott Card was a missionary in Brazil! Haha! I knew it! His Portuguese slang and familiarity with Brasil (which he usually even spells with the s instead of z) was just too uncanny! Lol

Great book! Definitely worth the read!

Fantastic!

This sequel to Ender’s Shadow (also fantastic!) is a very different book from Ender’s Shadow, but wonderful just the same.

In Ender’s Shadow, we get a new look at Ender’s Game from the eyes of another of the genius children who have been trained in Battle School to save the Earth from the alien invaders.

In this sequel to Ender’s Shadow, the alien invaders are vanquished and humankind has been saved by these children. The children are sent back to Earth to their families after many years’ absence. All should be well, right?

Of course not. Now that there is no outside invader threatening humanity, the fragile world peace that lasted for the decades of war with the aliens evaporates. Various nations are happy to resume hostilities… and who better to lead their armies and create winning strategies and tactics than these children who have been trained in war. But, one by one, Battle School graduates are being kidnapped as they return to Earth. Is this by someone who wants to utilize their talents or in order to remove a valuable asset from an “enemy” country?

Only one child evades capture – Bean, our hero from Ender’s Shadow. Can he find out who has the genius children and rescue them? Will the kidnapper simply kill the children rather than allow them to be rescued?

This is a wonderful book because again, as Orson Scott Card is so terrific at doing, the characters come alive on the page and in the mind of the reader. Whether reading about the psychopath Achilles (another genius child), Bean himself, Petra (a female Battle School graduate) or someone else, the reader understands and loves (or detests) these characters. I also loved meeting and getting to know Ender’s parents, especially as they are drastically underestimated by their genius children…

Highly recommended!

I read this in half a day. It felt pretty generic sci-fi, fitting in the plot turns that had to happen based on what we knew already (such as Peter coming out as Locke) and going into the expansionist wars (it's interesting to place the two separate series into the context of when they were written. Ender's Game / Speaker? The big scary guys on earth are clearly the Russians. Shadow series? The Chinese are the expansionist power). Also, the villain was a little too.. omnipotent? resourceful? unbelievable? in this one, which I guess is a common flaw in sci/fi fantasy adventures. Still, I really enjoy reading Orson Scott Card (and I have to admit I care about what happens to Bean. Does he save the world from a self destructive war and then make babies in the next one? I bet he does). Fun.

I just love these books.

Después de que Ender derrotara a los insectores, los niños de la Escuela de Batalla regresan a la Tierra y se sitúan en puestos clave de los distintos Gobiernos terrestres para idear estrategias sobre la inminente guerra mundial. Y aquí empieza la partida de Risk.

Me sorprende la versatilidad de Orson Scott Card para crear novelas ambientadas en el mismo universo pero tan diferente unas de otras. Las continuaciones de El juego de Ender, que tenían como protagonista al propio Ender, eran una Ciencia Ficción ambientada tres mil años en el futuro, mucho más filosófica, centrada en el primer contacto y lo que significa encontrarnos con otra especie inteligente.

En cambio, la saga que se centra en el personaje de Bean, es una Ciencia Ficción ambientada dos siglos en el futuro, centrada en política y en la guerra. Nos encontramos con que la Tierra es un gran tablero de Risk donde los personajes mueven ejércitos, hacen caer Gobiernos y dictan el futuro de la Humanidad.

Hasta aquí perfecto. ¿Cuál es la única pega que le veo? Pues que en el fondo son niños de 10-15 años los que hacen eso. Es verdad que Card hace un buen trabajo construyendo los personajes e intentando desentrañar la mente de esos chicos, y Bean me genera mucha más empatía que Ender. Pero cada frase que dicen es una sentencia de la verdad más absoluta, y la acción avanza simplemente porque nos tenemos que creer que si un niño ve una mariposa volar, ya sabe que está sucediendo un huracán en la otra parte del mundo. Que sí, que son genios y su capacidad de deducción dejaría a Sherlock Holmes sintiéndose como Watson. Pero en ocasiones me ha faltado algo más de desarrollo en lo que ocurre. Hay un momento que hasta recurre a la intuición y directamente el personaje dice que no sabe por qué pero va a ocurrir tal cosa. Y te lo comes con patatas.

Aún así, es un libro que se lee en un suspiro porque no cesa la acción, los juegos políticos y el suspense hasta el último momento. Pienso que no llega al nivel de la otra saga pero la estoy disfrutando también.

Originally posted on SpecFic Junkie.

Ender's Shadow was fine, if not great. This book is bad and should feel wrong. Orson Scott Card decides to get weirdly preachy and weird moments, he keeps emphasizing how nothing but children matter, he's incredibly offensive to people with genetic disorders (cough ME), and he seriously says at the end that Guns, Germs, and Steel laid the ground rules for him. And everyone should read it. Oh, and he can't write women. Spoilers everywhere.

Wow! That was a lot to pack into a summary. This book really was awful!

So yeah, Ender's Shadow was a lot preachier than the Ender series, but I was able to manage it. This time, I was having to get through pages of the Wiggins' mother whining about how hard it is to be religious and how they had to hide it from their children and their colleagues or no one would take them seriously. Mostly her diatribes make me feel like she was just a bad parent.

Now, here's the thing. I have no specific issue with any religion. But it's actually not that hard to be religious and not be oppressed. You probably can't try to shove it in everyone's faces, but you can't shove a kink relationship in non-consenting faces either. Besides, in my experience, religion is personal. It's not really something you should be bringing up with your colleagues anyway. But whatever. Maybe that's just me.

Maybe things are hella different in this future. But I'm given no real reason in the writing to believe so.

I can deal with a bit of preachiness, but once he starts going on (repeatedly) about how children are really the only path to true happiness, I'm just done. It's one of those things where yeah, I'm sure that it's true for some people, but probably not as many people as it comes up for and it's just a weird fixation.

I guess they feel like weird fixations because see, these are things Bean is supposed to come to appreciate. He's supposed to find God because the nun died and because Petra suddenly has the hots for him and he's going to die early, he should want to leave his mark.

Oh right, Petra having the hots for him.

So, apparently Petra wanted nothing more the entire time at Battle School to have babies with Ender because he needs to show her womanly side now that he's shown her tough and snarky side. But see, Ender's gone away to the colonies so instead she wants to have Bean's babies. None of this was in Petra's character in any of the other books.

So, speaking of Bean. Bean finds out that his genetics have been altered so that his brain will never stop growing (which somehow makes him super smart) but he'll never stop growing either. So they had to tweak both those parts of his genetics. And the nun says:

"There are those who have said that because of this small genetic difference, you are not human. That because Anton's key requires two changes in the genome, not one, it could never have happened randomly, and therefore you represent a new species, created in the laboratory."

There are, in fact, genetic disorders that require two genetic changes. Also, since when does something like that define a new species? Biologists have defined what makes a new species pretty clearly. Can Bean have Petra's babies? Well, you know what I mean.

Anyway, the only reason I can think of for Petra's sudden character reveal that was not hinted at in any of the other books is that she needs to further the theme of "babies are the only path to true happiness" but he didn't know where else to find a woman. In fact, he has to create one to sympathize with Petra because only another woman could possibly care about her plight.

Also, I just never found Petra so angsty as she is in this book. I don't even feel like she's the same character.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that he's trying to write smart characters, but everything seems like a stupid game of RISK because he's not smart enough to write smart characters manipulating and trying to outwit other smart characters. It's really, really hard to do. It was easier to do in Ender's Game because the adults held the upper hand. But now the super smart kids are the ones who are running the game (of the world's armies) and ... it just is yawn worthy. I like political intrigue. This is awful.

And then I just get all of this icky feeling about his adoration of Jared Diamond. He's not really anti-racist and his science is just bad. Which also sums up Shadow of the Hegemon.

This is the second book I've read in the series in the same universe as the Ender Quartet. I read it basically in 24 hours, which speaks to its fast pace and readability. I'm starting to like this series possibly even more than the quartet. There are a lot of really interesting characters - the complex Bean, the ambiguous Peter, etc. Plus I really like the theme of genius kids who aren't cutely precocious, etc. This book deals a lot with military strategy, which doesn't tend to be my thing, but I was never bored with it - it actually puts you inside the mindset of military thinkers in a way that you understand and admire how they puzzle things out. Card continues to be one of my favorite writers period and possibly my favorite sci-fi writer. I'm looking forward to moving onto the next book.

4.75

Really enjoyed this. Not quite the hit as Enders Shadow but it was cool to see what happened next. Might continue the series sometime.

I didn't enjoy this one as much as Ender's Game or Ender's Shadow. As in those two, the plot and action were just backdrop. The book was really about people deducing what other people were thinking. In the previous books, this was used for character development and I enjoyed it. In this one, it seemed like the author used it more as a gimmick. Rather than use it as a tool to accomplish something else, he just trotted it out to do tricks over and over. It accounted for most of the book and got old.

The whole book was one genius child or another making impossible guesses about what another genius child was doing and why. Knowing almost nothing about what another genius child was doing somewhere else in the world, one genius child would explain to some nearby genius child what this other child's options were, why he would choose Option C and not B as it appeared, what that would lead to, etc etc etc. And then they'd go pull off some impossible feat while the slackjawed adults would stand around and take orders.

It was too much and makes me want to give up on this particular strand of the Enderverse. I am interested in knowing what happens to Bean eventually given his physical condition, but am not sure I want to wade through the next two books to find out. And the fate of the nations of Earth in this series seems like unimportant subject matter now that the aliens have been beaten. Wars, politics, realignment, snooooze. Maybe I'll hop over to the Ender Quartet and try that line out.

Card spent a little time on Bean trying to come to grips with his genetically-modified origin, which could have been a nice idea to focus on and develop, but not a whole lot. I found I wasn't interested in his relationship with Petra. I was also sick of Achilles by this point. Omniscient sicko bad guy, we get it. Somebody kill him already!