Ender's Shadow

When I first heard Orson Scott Card had written a parallel story to Ender's Game, dealing with virtually the same events as the original book but told from another character's perspective, I thought it was a cheap way to cash in on the success of his first bestseller. Like many people, though, I had to eat my words after reading Ender's Shadow. For not only is it as gripping a read as Ender's Game, but in some regards it is actually a better book.

Ender's Shadow centres on one of Ender's lieutenants, Bean, an even younger and more intelligent child prodigy than Ender himself. After some thrilling adventures on the streets of Rotterdam, Bean is sent to Battle School, where he keeps hearing about this genius called Ender. Bean gets obsessed with Ender, or rather with proving to himself and others that he is a better strategist than Ender. But when he finally meets Ender, he realises that there is a reason why Ender is revered the way he is, and learns to accept his place in the universe. Nope, he doesn't get to command Earth's army, but he plays a major part in the background -- in many ways a more interesting part than the one Ender plays in the foreground.

Ender's Shadow does have a few problems. As a Dutchwoman, I dearly wish Card had gone over the Dutch names and references in the Rotterdam segment with a Dutch person, as many of them are riddled with mistakes (Sinterklaas lights? WTF?). Furthermore, there were a few times (especially halfway through the book) when I found Bean's superiority complex a bit grating. Apart from these minor flaws, though, Ender's Shadow is a solid novel by an author who had clearly matured immensely since writing Ender's Game. The prose in Ender's Shadow is much richer, the psychology has more depth, the back story is more fully realised, and thanks to Bean's amazing tactical and analytical insights, he is able to offer an interesting perspective on events known from the first book. Bean himself, too, is a much better drawn protagonist than Ender -- not always entirely likeable, but always fascinating. His story may lack some of the surprise and impact of Ender's, but in its own way it's thoroughly engaging and thought-provoking. It easily holds up as a stand-alone book, and as a companion piece to Ender's Game, filling in gaps and providing new perspectives on known events, it is simply superb. I never thought I'd say this about a young-adult-meets-sci-fi novel, but there you are. Good stuff.

2 ½ stars. Not as good as the first book. Too much pondering. Not enough action. Too much telling not showing.

STORY BRIEF FOR THE SERIES:

There are two Ender series by this author.

Ender Wiggin series:
Ender’s Game (Book 1 about Ender) 5 stars

Shadow Saga series:
Ender’s Shadow (Book 1 about Bean) 2 ½ stars

This is young adult science fiction. Eighty years ago the buggers attacked earth. Humans fear the buggers will attack again so they establish a Battle School and search for brilliant children in hopes of finding their next commander. Ender is selected to go to Battle School when he is six. “Ender’s Game” tells his story. Bean is also selected to go to Battle School at age six. He arrives at Battle School about two months after Ender arrives. “Ender’s Shadow” is Bean’s story before and at the school.

STORY BRIEF FOR ENDER’S SHADOW:
Bean is eight months old in a medical facility. It may be an organ parts farm. He senses a threat and crawls/walks to a hiding place for safety. A janitor finds him and cares for him for a while. Then Bean is on the streets begging for food. He survives and joins a gang of children at about age four. He recommends a strategy to the leader for getting food. The strategy involves getting a bully (Achilles) to be their new leader. It works and they start having more food. Sister Carlotta is on the lookout for brilliant children to send to Battle School. She learns about Bean and recommends him. He goes. He has more brain power than other children. He eventually ends up as Ender’s sub commander in mock battles. For about half the book, the story goes back and forth between Bean’s time at the school and Sister Carlotta researching Bean’s history, his parents, and why he was in the medical facility.

REVIEWER’S OPINION:
This wasn’t as exciting as “Ender’s Game” (EG). There was too much pondering and analysis in the mind by Bean. He would be thinking about things and then all of a sudden conclude “so that’s what’s really going on.” There wasn’t enough action or specific conversation. One of the things I loved about EG was showing specific actions by Ender which caused him to win in bullying situations and in battles. I was disappointed that there was less “showing” in this book. Following are three examples of telling, not showing.

(1) When Bean commanded his own army the author “told” that Bean’s direction and actions caused his soldiers to learn to work together. There were no examples of how this happened.

The following quotes were during computer simulation battles.

(2) “Some of the others talked to Bean when Ender’s attention was elsewhere. Crazy Tom and Hot Soup came up with their own plans but they routinely ran them past Bean. And since in each battle he was spending half his attention observing and analyzing Ender’s plan, Bean was able to tell them with pretty good accuracy what they should do to help make the overall plan work out. Now and then Ender praised Tom or Soup for decisions that came from Bean’s advice.” I wanted to hear what Bean was telling Tom and Soup.

(3) “And Bean became more and more aware of Ender’s decreasing alertness. His orders came after longer and longer pauses now. And a couple of times his orders weren’t clearly stated. Bean immediately translated them into a more comprehensible form. And Ender never knew there had been confusion. But the others were finally becoming aware that Bean was following the whole battle, not just his part of it.” Again, no examples of what Ender and Bean said.

During the last two hours of the book, a few times I felt like I was listening to a sermon. It was preachy thinking within Bean’s mind – about humans and politics.

I would recommend this book only for readers who love “Ender’s Game” and want to be in that world a little longer. The best part is the early story about Bean on the streets, which is not the sci-fi part.

There were a number of conversations between Sister Carlotta and others, in which she frequently refers to God knowing and controlling everything. A little of this is ok, but there was too much of it. It felt repetitive without going anywhere.

I listened to the audiobook which was wonderfully well done with a variety of actors reading the parts.

DATA:
Unabridged audiobook length: 15 hours 42 minutes. Narrators: Scott Brick, Gabrielle de Cuir, and others. Swearing language: none. Sexual content: none. Setting: future time on earth, space, and another planet. Copyright: 1999. Genre: young adult science fiction.

Read my full review on The Illiterate Reader book blog.

Cień Endera przedstawia historię Groszka, chłopca z Rotterdamu, który trafia do Szkoły Bojowej i wykazuje się ponadprzeciętną inteligencją. Ze względu na swoje umiejętności, często porównywany jest do Endera Wiggina, głównego bohatera Sagi Endera, który jest jednym z klasyków sci-fi (i który swoją drogą bardzo polecam!).

Te dwie historie można czytać niezależnie, jednak mimo wszystko polecam zacząć od Gry Endera. Historia Groszka wiele wnosi do całości obrazu, jednak pewnych etapów życia chłopców nie przedstawia aż tak dobrze.

Mimo że sam początek w Rotterdamie nie był dla mnie bardzo wciągający, tak dalsza część książki bardzo mnie zaangażowała i wiem, że wstęp w pewien sposób buduje fundamenty do postaci bohatera. Jestem w szoku jak wiele informacji przekazał autor, co powoduje, że zupełnie inaczej patrzę na pewne wydarzenia z Gry Endera.

Groszek jest fascynującą postacią. Wykazując się wysoką inteligencją, często wpada przez nią w kłopoty. W trakcie książki można obserwować jego przemianę podczas której chłopiec poznaje wcześniej nieznane sobie emocje.

Świetnie się bawiłem podczas lektury i nie mogę doczekać się kontynuacji tej historii - Cienia Hegemona, który przedstawia dalsze losy, po emocjonującym finale wydarzeń.

This book was definitely not as good as Ender's Game. The best parts of Ender's Game were the action parts, and also the parts where Ender would be faced with a problem and he had to come up with a clever way to fix it. But in Ender's Shadow, Bean is the main character and he tends to be much less subtle than Ender. He also spends an absurd amount of time thinking, just thinking and thinking. It's like... dude. STFU! Maybe if he thought about interesting stuff, but he spends most of his time thinking about military tactics and politics and his own relations with people when he was a baby. Also, one of Bean's character traits is that he's very small, so there's no hand-to-hand combat with him in the way that there was with Ender. All the parts that might have been hand-to-hand combat in Ender's Game were instead replaced with pages and pages of--you guessed it!--thinking.

Card seems to enjoy going off on this boring tangents wherein his characters have cryptic discussions about religion and the military--two subjects I really couldn't care less about. Which brings me to the religion parts of this book. Bean's caretaker for a while is a nun and often the narration will return to her story. Those are by far the worst parts of the book and I often found myself skipping them. I don't care about the adults of the Ender books. I care about the kids and the Battle School. And I especially don't care about the theological beliefs of every single minor character in the series.

Anyway, I would go so far as to say that this book ruined Ender's Game for me. It was so horrible in so many ways that it's eclipsed the coolness that was Ender's Game. And one thing's for sure: I'm not reading any more books in this series.

This was really awesome, and I wish I had read it closer to Ender’s Game, which only means I have to reread that classic soon! I loved diving into Bean as a protagonist. He is a fascinating character study of cold intelligence and the need for love and validation. It was great to be back at Battle School and it made me think that Rowling's Potterverse had to have been somewhat influenced by Card's Enderverse.

In this story, Bean goes from a horrific childhood on the violent streets to become the second-greatest military mind of his generation, helping Ender save the human race from the Buggers. The way we learn piece-by-piece about his origins is well-done and the book is not as laced with Mormonism as some of the later Ender books.

I want to move on to Shadow of the Hegemon now to see how he gets aligned with Peter Wiggins and how he gets along with Valentine.

Fino's Enderverse Reviews in internal chronological order (I think):
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This book made me wish I could forget that I had ever read Ender’s Game.

Not because it was necessarily a better book – though it is longer – but because the two books offer different views of the same events from two distinctly different perspectives.

Ender Wiggin is brilliant and empathetic, a boy torn apart by his own doubts and fears and driven to greatness by a government that sees him simply as a means to an end. It is only his ability to understand and come to love those around him that gets him through his trials, endure his isolation, and which ultimately allows him to put together the team that defeats the Buggers. Ender seems to be more human than human, and not in that ironic Blade Runner sort of way, but in a way which makes us want to see him succeed and do well.

Bean, on the other hand, is about as different from Ender as it’s possible to get. He’s introduced in Ender’s Game as a foil, a character designed to show us how far Ender had come in the short time that he had been in Battle School. When we meet Bean, Ender is using the same techniques of isolation and constructive abuse that were used on him, making us wonder if Ender will turn out to be just a copy of the adults who were tormenting him. We learn that Bean, like Ender, is brilliant, but he is also strong-willed and ambitious and takes well to the atmosphere of Battle School. In the end, Bean shows himself to be a vital part of the team that Ender assembles to save the Buggers and cement humanity’s place in the cosmos.

Ender’s story is all about empathy and self-understanding and his desire to be the person he wants to be, rather than the person humanity needs him to be. He has to give up some of his essential humanity in order to save the world.

Bean’s story comes from the opposite direction. More brilliant than Ender, Bean learns to find his humanity. He has to learn to see people as people, rather than a means to an end or a puzzle to solve. The hard lessons that he learned on the streets of Rotterdam as a small child were vital in preparing him to become a commander, but they have to be put aside if he’s to become a human.

Bean’s story is much bigger in scope than Ender’s, which gives the book as a whole more depth than Ender’s Game. We start out in Rotterdam, which has become a center of poverty and violence among rival gangs of street children. Bean, tiny and starving, manages to prove his worth to one of these gangs by suggesting strategies by which they can get more food and more respect. He gains the attention of Sister Carlotta, a nun who is working for both God and the International Fleet, and she is the first to see his full potential as a student in Battle School. But in the course of trying to understand Bean, she learns that his origin is one of horror, and that his future is even worse.

As a character, I liked Bean more than I liked Ender, possibly because on a scale of Complete Misanthrope to Bodhisattva, Bean and I are pretty close to the complete misanthrope end of the spectrum. To be fair, though, Bean has a lot more reasons to feel that way, and he’s a lot worse than I am. As we meet him, Bean views people as means to an end or as problems to be solved. He doesn’t reform the street gang culture of Rotterdam because it’s the right thing to do – he does it because he needs to eat. When he does experience attachment or fondness for others, he doesn’t know how to deal with it, and turns it into just another problem to be solved.

That hyper-analytical way of looking at the world makes Bean a much more aware character than Ender as well. While Ender spends most of his book wrapped inside his own head, Bean is constantly testing the world, analyzing it and trying to figure out what’s really going on. So while Ender was exploring the computer fantasy game, Bean was crawling through air ducts in the Battle School. While Ender was researching the battles of the past, Bean was learning how to spy on his teachers.

In the end, just as Ender is learning to put aside his humanity for the common good, Bean discovers a deep well of compassion that he never knew he had. Ender becomes more isolated, and Bean becomes more connected to others. The two characters come at each other from different directions and view the world in vastly different ways, giving us a kind of parallax view of the same events, to use Card’s preferred terminology.

Most interestingly, many of the revelations that were revealed to Ender in his book were discovered by Bean in this one, which creates a whole different reading experience.

And that’s why I wish I could delete my memory of having read Ender’s Game,, or at least put it away for a while. Reading this book, I constantly compare what’s happening to Bean with what happened to Ender, looking for those scenes that are shared between the books and others that we only get to see once. Whether it’s the early days of Battle School or Ender’s fight with Bonzo Madrid or the climactic end, there are enough similarities and differences to make each book worth reading.

But at the same time, I want to read each one for the first time, without knowing what’s going to happen next. I want to share Bean’s ability to see plans unspool before him without already knowing what those plans are. And then I want to read Ender’s Game the way I read Ender’s Shadow and have those wonderful moments of revelation as new light is shed on topics that were only briefly mentioned before – like Locke and Demosthenes, or the true fate of Mazer Rackham.

Card has done a difficult job very well in this book, and I can’t imagine it was easy at all. As he noted in his forward, a dozen years passed between the first book and this one, and a person changes in that much time. He learned new things and gained new perspectives, and that naturally had a great influence on how he chose to write this story.

And then there’s the enormous popularity of his other Ender books. Between Game and Shadow, he wrote Speaker for the Dead in 1986, Xenocide in 1991, and Children of the Mind in 1996. That means he had a much more solid understanding of his world by the time he got around to Ender’s Shadow in 1999, and a much larger fan base as well. Writers will always say that they write for the story, not for the fans, but every writer wants in their heart of hearts to have people love what they write. Revisiting your most famous work and exploring a popular character brings great risks with it.

Fortunately, I think Card succeeded with this book. It both compliments and contrasts with Ender’s Game, offering enough new information and new viewpoints to merit a second novel, while being faithful to the story that fans had come to love over a decade and a half. What’s more, it feels like the work of a more experienced writer. The scale is larger, the characters have more depth, and he takes more chances with the story than he did with Ender’s Game.

All in all, if you were a fan of the first, you’ll like this one. If you haven’t read either, you really should. And if you start with this one, let me know how it goes.

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“Ender was what Bean only wished to be — the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you. I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.”

4.5 Stars

I have enjoyed the Ender quartet this past year. Ender remains one of my favorite sci-fi characters. I really enjoyed Ender’s Shadow because it was still Ender’s story but through the eyes of Bean, one of Ender’s friends at battle school. It was interesting to see the world through the eyes of another character. At first, I thought Bean was a know it all who was jealous of Ender, but Bean eventually grew on me. Bean thought he was smarter than Ender, but by the end Bean had to admit that Ender was the smartest of them all. Bean was smart, don't get me wrong, but I was glad when Bean finally gave Ender the honor he deserved. This was a fun book and I can’t wait to read the others!!