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New Ender Sequel 130

Posted by jamie from the wiggin-out dept.
CMU_Nort writes "Orson Scott Card is at it again. Hot on the tail of Ender's Shadow, he's writing another sequel to the Ender's Game story. This one seems to cover the story of the immediate history following the original story when all of the children return home. Called Shadow of the Hegemon, it should give us some of the story of what happened to Peter. The first five chapters are already available online." The rest of his website looks interesting too.
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New Ender Sequel More

New Ender Sequel

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  • Why not Buggers, would the British be offended?

    I believe that Orson Scott Card said, either in the forward to _Ender's Shadow_ or elsewhere, that the homosexual connotations of the word "bugger" justified changing it for the movie. I disagree, but whatever. Any role his religious beliefs play in this is unknown.

    ------

  • Up there with Asimov's Foundation & Robot Novels as well as Herbert's Dune Novels.


    flatrabbit,
    peripheral visionary
  • Erm, Did you mean to say Ender's Game is a Matrix rip off? (I might've read it wrong) First of all, Enders Game is much older than the Matrix, and if any movie has every ripped off anything its the matrix (see: dark city, countless other films/books)
  • I must say, I rather liked the entire series. Enders game was great, it had action and I could relate to the main charecter. The rest of the Series was very differant. Mind you, ender is older. So you must expect things to be differant. I especially loved children of the mind and its weird plot twist. Enders shadow was also great. It was very awsome to see the world.. from a differant perspective. And in the newest book, we get to see what happened durring enders near light speed travel.
  • Why is it that otherwise excellent authors tend to start contemplating their navels as they get older?

    Robert Asprin wrote a great book called Another Fine Myth. He then wrote many sequels to that book. After the first few, they started going down hill quickly. Reading the last book, Sweet Mythtery of Life, was like watching an episode in the last season of Moonlighting.

    Robert Heinlein, considered by many to be one of the great authors of SF, had a habit of ending his books with about 70 pages where the heroes go through a time warp and party with all the characters of all his previous books.

    Even Isaac Asimov, one of my favorite authors, fell into that trap when he wrote a series of novels tying the robot stories to the foundation stories.

    For a demonstration of this phenomenon in miniature, read The Postman. There are three sections to the book. Each one was written independently as a novella so it is really a trilogy in miniature. The first story is excellent. The second story is ok. The third story was just annoying, and I gave up when he started in with the wierd zen cyborg stuff at the end. Buy the book, rip it apart, and burn all but the first third. Treasure the first third. Read it to your grandchildren.

    Incidentally, I think that as a prophylactic measure, Brin should avoid writing stories in his progenitors universe for a while.

    JRR Tolkein can be forgiven since the Middle Earth stuff that's been published for the past few years has been the work of his sons ransacking his office. This is why Harlan Ellison has given instructions that when he dies, everything in his office is to be destroyed immediately. I think he made a wise decision.

    The only author I can think of who has a long series of books which are still consistently good is Terry Pratchett. I see signs, however, that he may be slowly succumbing to the same illness. If he wants to avoid this fate, he should probably not write any more Rincewind novels.

    Orson Scott Card is an excellent author as well. I've stopped reading his books mostly because I got tired of watching a 10 year old boy save the universe in EVERY SINGLE BOOK. Also, while I believe in the value of family, I don't need to be hit over the head with it constantly. However, the Ender series has fallen into the same trap as the others. I gave up on the last Ender book I read when Ender's children appeared out of thin air when Ender merely thought about them while in hyperspace. Willing suspension of disbelief only goes so far. Now he is going back and filling in the blanks. There are probably a few die hard Ender fans who are looking forward to the book, but what they really want is more of the same, just reshuffled, and that is exactly what they will get.

    Readers: If a series is more than a trilogy, wait for the reviews.

    Authors: If a story has been completed, and a publisher comes to you and offers you lots of money to write another book in the same series, do so if you must, but remember, you are too close to make a good decision, your fans want more of the same, your publisher can get more money out of the same series, and your family likes you too much. Ask yourself: If someone who has never read your work before read this book, would they go out and buy another of your books?

    Please support your local chapter of the American Society for the Prevention of Sequelitis.
  • Apparently Shadow of the Hegemon develops Achilles' character a bit more... he appears in one of the first five chapters. Peter had style, but Achilles, well, didn't. Perhaps that's the point... all our characters have IQs that are four st.devs away from the mean, while Achilles is just a thug with a 130 or so. Pure speculation on my part, though.
  • Hey! That's great! Have you submitted it to Rinkworks' book-a-minute?
  • Sorry about that. It was careless, and I'm sorry if I spoiled the ending for anyone.
  • I agree. all agenda's aside. Just because he is against gay marriage doesn't mean he is afraid of homosexuality. The probablem with homophobe is that it is a loaded word that now means "Someone who is against homosexuality" so it is applied to people in that sense and then they can automatically conclude you are afraid of them.

    Vermifax
  • not true...the last book in the series, children of the mind was pretty damn good. Much better than the 2nd and 3rd books of the series although not quite as good as Ender's Game
    --
    ICQ#: 7012329 | AIM NICK: CW0LVES
  • This one is still from Bean's perspective...as you see if you read the first 5 chapters of it
    --
    ICQ#: 7012329 | AIM NICK: CW0LVES
  • No, if you read Ender's Shadow, it's pointed out several times that Bean isn't human...so Ender is still the smartest =)
    --
    ICQ#: 7012329 | AIM NICK: CW0LVES
  • After reading Ender's Game in highschool, I plodded through Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and one his short story anthologies, and I was completely unimpressed and bored out of my mind. I don't think the problem is that Ender's Game fans only like exterminating alien races, so much that Orson Scott Card can't write anything else well.

    All of his attempts at depicting serious relationships and social situations outside of childhood-angst-fighting-space-aliens are muted and bland, and illustrate how he is a socially backward jerk (has anyone ever read an interview with this nutbar?).

  • In chapter 3 there is a reference to "standard 2-byte format" as the standard character code. Unicode uses 2 bytes per letter doesn't it? Looks like Orson Scott Card has been doing quite a bit of research...

  • It is possible that my memory is failing me :), but as I recall, the Alvin Maker series does also have Mormon influences (the fact that Alvin goes off to build Crystal City)..

    But yeah, I've read of most of his stuff, too. His earlier works are better than the recent stuff - I liked Pastwatch, though.

  • Brin actually wrote about this, after he wrote six uplift-war novels (and maybe many more short stories). He said it was a bad sign when authors could not get out of one of the universes they'd created.

    I don't recall if he's written anything more recently in that universe, but at least he seems to be aware of the potential problem.
  • I've only read Ender's Game. I figured that after a book this good, no sequel could ever live up to it, so I didn't take the risk.

    Are any of the sequels as good as the first?

  • For those of you who may not have read any Card, here's my take on his books:

    • Ender's Game : An absolutely fantastic book. This is a "must own, so you can re-read often" book.
    • Speaker for the Dead : Incredibly, an even better and more powerful book than Ender's Game. The story is less Hollywood, so those with short attention spans need not apply, but for those with strong imaginations, this is Card's masterpiece.
    • Xenocide : Starts out with the potential to be even better than SFtD, but wanders off into some strange and bizzare sidetracks near the end. Still a very good book, but lesser than the first two Ender books.
    • Children of the Mind : This one was highly disappointing. It felt hurried and rushed, and suffered from a lack of any real direction.
    • Ender's Shadow : Hello, Sequalitis! With this book Card goes from a writer, to a milker of a cash cow. Totally predictable, sloppy - and skippable.
    • The Homecoming Series : Starts out very strongly - the first book is very good. It's not at the level of the first 3 Ender books, but it's solid stuff. Things start slipping from there, and the wrapup feels like Card would just rather finish and move on. Overall, a good read for the whole series, but nothing outstanding either.
    • Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus : A good, solid, SF yarn, and the best of Card's recent work. The premise is nothing groundbreaking, but the execution is first-rate. Worth reading.

    Overall, Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Pastwatch should be on one's "must buy" list. The others are worth reading if they fall into your lap, but don't go out of your way to buy them.

  • He talks [otherview.com] about Ender's Shadow mainly, but he mentions his plans (this was right after ES came out) for the series and other books as well.
  • Ender's Shadow is very good, but the three sequels in the Ender plotline get worse and worse as you go along.
  • I rather liked Ender's Shadow, it was mainly a rewrite of Ender's Game, but a damn sight better than the other sequels. The other books in the series just plain stunk.
  • Yes, I read the interview. I wasn't terribly impressed. She admits from the start that she is not an impartial interview, and it felt to me that the interviewer was projecting onto him to a very unprofessional extent ("You were an abused child, too! Therefor this is how you think! You're in denial about your abuse!"). And she seems to put a very negative spin on anything she even slightly disagreed with. So, I'm taking that interview with a grain of salt.

    I'm not saying that I agree with him. Yes, he's anti-gay-lifestyle. And I've read other things from him which show this. However, this does not mean he is a homophobe.

  • Ender's game was one of those rare books that makes you want to go out and find everything else the author's ever written.

    Too bad nothing else Orson Scott Card did compares favorably to Ender's Game. Hopefully the new sequel will be different...

  • The rest of the series is very different. Ender's Game is about the formation and manipulation of the boy, the power that adults have to mold children, and the ways that children both submit to that molding and overcome that molding. Ender is a confused, complex character.

    The later books are more story-driven. It's more about the plot than the internals of how the characters are being shaped. Although his conversations with Jane (isn't that the name of the computer-mind?) attempt to give the same sort of insight that the first book contains, it falls a little flat.

    The other OSC novel that I found as good as Ender's Game was Songbird - an early novel of his that might be out of print at the moment. It is also about the shaping of a young boy through an overwhelming force, the songhouse, and how that shaping affects his life and his rebellion. Unlike EG, it contains the idea of conflicting attempts to manipulate the boy. The songhouse shapes him one way, the gov't uses that shaping and manipulates it another way ... It's almost like the story of what might have happened to Ender if Peter had gotten his hands on him after the Bugger destruction. It's pretty complex.
  • He was smart, quick, and a great leader

    Very true. I've read a lot of books about effective living and leadership (written by people like Covey and Zig Zigler) and I learned more about leadership from Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow than from all of these books and seminars put together. Ender is smart, but it's his leadership that makes the people around him better. Read the books again, and see how.

    You know, /. type of people are the ones who will be looked to for leadership in this new "e-economy" (I know, I hate the e-buzzwords too, but it's easy) and the leadership qualities we can learn here will give us that edge. Besides, we can be the Brain without Pinky (having relegated Pinky to serving french fries), and take over the world!

  • Of course, real history always leaves loose ends...

  • Yep... (Score:3)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Sunday April 30, 2000 @06:08AM (#1100885)
    He's planning out a series for this trilogy, from the perspectives of Ender's friends in battle school. This one's from Petra's perspective, I think, and the last one was from Bean's p.o.v.

    Ender's Shadow was pretty good, it was weird having a lot of the dialogue from Ender's Game but with completely different stuff going on, but interesting as well. Of course, I'm a fan, so expect some bias... :)

    I just did a paper about (among other things) Orson Scott Card, so here's some stuff on the site: the partial movie script for Ender's Game, (they had better not call them "Wooly Ants"! Why not Buggers, would the British be offended?), the complete bibliography, and his essays (in the library).

    The essay about Fantasy and the reader is cool, since at one point he talks about how people overinterpret books and then act like their interpretation is the "correct" one. (that's what my paper was about...)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Look at Star Wars ep 3, as well.

    Obviously they both ripped of the Matrix!

    Ender's Game and Star Wars, however, did come out first, so they do get more originality points ^^

    -AS
  • Ender's Game was written years before The Matrix was even conceived. If one ripped off the other, then it was The Matrix ripping off Ender's Game.

    Or are you just one of the new non-anonymous trolls, trying to break Trollmastah's record?
  • It seems to me that these types of books are designed to milk us consumers out of our hard earned dollars. I always question novelists who commit to these types of literary deals. It would seem to me that a true novelist would be in the constant search for new life experiences to drive his writing. Rehashing the same story over and over would seem to as limiting as you could get.

    As a rule of thumb, I refuse to read these serialized stories. I may read the first in a series but that's all. If the novelist hasn't gotten his message across at the end of the first book, it means he is either a poor novelist or looking to get his new yacht. I won't be a part of that.

  • The thing that really bothered me about OSC's sequels is his obvious total lack of scientific understanding. It becomes apparent that Card has no understanding of basic biology, and invents plot devices as much as in Star Trek. Oh, let's invent teleportation so I can work myself out of this corner!

  • *sigh* (Score:2)

    by 8bit ( 127134 )
    Normally I don't complain, but I would like to see the story finish first, eh? At the end of Children of the Mind, you still have some unresolved issues. What happens with the descoladores? Will the new Peter regain Ender's full memory and possibly become Ender? What happens to Starways Congress? What does the world do with Jane? I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW!!!
    Roy Miller
    :wq! DOH!
  • Actually, the reason that Ender was the the right guy for the job was because he was empathetic. He had the ability to get to know someone, including his enemy, so well that he could see through there eyes and see why they did the things they did. At this point he could understand exactly why they were doing the things they did, but at the same time, he knew them so well he knew how to defeat him.

    That is also why he made a good leader, because he could use those under him to there fullest potential.

    These concepts came out more in Speaker for the Dead, but are still very visible from Ender's Game. He is smart. He is quick. But his biggest advantage is his ability to know and use people.

    Their are lots of references to the Buggers trying to use there communication with Ender, hence the bad dreams during the end of the book. And the manipulation of the fantasy game hinted at as well (and the creation of Jane).

    Makaer
  • Welcome to a society filled with capitalists! The almighty $ (or whatever it is in your country) is more important than substance. Like a dog who licks his gonads, they milk it because they can....
  • Oh, come now... the whole point of his argument is that the tribulations Ender endured far outweight any tangible or intangible benefits he recieved. I hardly think his statement ruins the ending for first time readers. Besides, what are the odds that someone who has never read the book would be following this discussion closely enough to spot that one comment and have their chance of enjoying the book to its fullest diminished?

    If you don't see the fnord it can't eat you...

  • Yep, yep. OSC is one of my favorite authors all the way around. I'd also recommend Song Master. Though, like others have said, Ender's Game really is a masterpiece. Saying his other works aren't worth reading just because they're not as good is like ignoring all of Leonardo DaVinci's other art because the Mona Lisa is so beautiful (well, I dunno... is it?)

    At any rate, I haven't read as many OSC books as some of the rest of you. I also enjoyed Treason. I've heard his Seventh Son series is not to be missed, and I plan on hitting it someday.

    One thing about OSC, is I hate the ending to almost all of his stuff. He's a story teller, and only a story teller. I'm always expecting some major profound punchline to the end of Sci-fi novels, and he just doesn't have those. He tends to put his punch-lines at the beginning (i.e. Speaker for the Dead we find out right off that Ender has "accidentally" committed xenocide. Boom. There's the profound surprise, and the rest of the book is merely telling the story of what happened. All of his books are like that.. Less of a point and more "This happened to someone, and it happened like this".

    And he does a great job of it.
  • I just finished Pastwatch as well.
    It was good, but I don't think you finished it if you're looking for more. Kind of tough to have more pastwatching going on.
    ---CONFLICT!!---
  • Whoa!!!!!!!

    They're making a movie!!!

    Yeah baby!! I only hope they do it right. Sadly they probably won't. Get ready for a replay of Phantom Menace with a kid at the joystick saving the universe. What I'd do if I could make it into a movie would be to tell the story the way Card did in his book. Not dumbing down for mindless ticket buyers, no trying to sell it as a kids movie for the merchandising profits. I'm not exactly sure how I'd make the movie, but it wouldn't be a mindless action flick, thats for sure.

  • Jake Lloyd?

    NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, anything but that! I'd rather see Kato Kaelin dressed up as a kid than see Jake play Ender. Or Mcauly Culkin (who's what, 19 now?)

    Get the kid from the Sixth sense. Jake Lloyd can't act any better than Mark Hammil. I'm sure Jake is a nice kid, but hey you've got to have some talent, just being nice won't cut it.

    The fact that he wants to play Ender scares me and puts serious doubts into my mind as to how good the movie could ever be. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Jake, I just don't think he can act. Maybe, just maybe he can learn, in which case if he can do the part let him have it. But if he can't learn then give the part to someone who can.

  • With this book Card goes from a writer, to a milker of a cash cow.

    Hell yeah he's milking that cash cow. Man's got to eat doesn't he? It's called supply and demand you fucking geek! He writes it, you buy it, he writes more. You don't like it, you don't buy it, and he stops writing it. Simple, no?

    Jesus people, what's your major malfuntion? He wrote Ender's Game and everyone wanted more. So he wrote Speaker for The Dead. Everyone wanted more. So he wrote Xenocide, and everyone bitched, but still you wanted more. The Children of the Mind, more bitching and still you wanted more.

    Fuck people, you weren't happy with the direction he was going so he goes back to square one and starts a new. What hell do you want?

    Ender's Shadow is one kick ass book. If you don't like it or it gets your panties in a wad because he has a hit here, fuck you. Besides ES and Hedmond are not about Ender. They are about the other characters.

    Get fucking over it.

    Twit

  • "A human does inhuman things and saves world"

    Hey, that's not a particularly new storyline, anyway. See also "Gilgamesh", the New Testament, Beowulf, etc.

    If copying that general plotline counts as being unoriginal, there hasn't been much original work in the past few thousand years.
  • Ender's game was an increadable book. Speaker for the dead was even better despite the fact that it didn't have little kids beating each other up, which seems to turn alot of people off. Xenocide and Children of the Mind were ok but nothing really special. Then Card comes out with Ender's Shadow and even though it was a good book I got the feeling Card was writing for money. This new book comfirms my suspicions.
  • I love Ender's game. I read it in one sitting when I was a freshman in high school. For a few years I read everything of his I could get my hands on.

    Sadly, in recent years I've learned things about Orson Scott Card that make him rather hard to enjoy. Specifically, he has advocated keeping sodomy laws on the books in order to allow the jailing of homosexual community leaders.

    The following interview [salon.com] has its flaws, namely the self-obsessed interviewer. However, it will give you a pretty good idea of why I have trouble stomaching Card these days.

    Dan
    (Note, I understand others may be able to look past his political views, or even agree with them. I just can't and don't.)
  • Too bad nothing else Orson Scott Card did compares favorably to Ender's Game. Hopefully the new sequel will be different...

    I guess it depend on what you liked about Ender's game, but personally, I think that Card has written lots of stuff easily in the same class as Enders game. To wit:

    Speaker for the Dead: The year after Ender's Game won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, so did this one. While it's very different from Ender's Game, it's no less a sci-fi classic in its own right. After Speaker, the series of books takes a bit of a downturn, but that detracts nothing from this often powerful work.

    The Worthing Chronicle: This is one of my favorite books ever. It's so many of Card's most clear and imaginitive stories thrown into one novel. I don't know how to do the story justice in just one paragraph, but suffice to say I have reread this book many times and found it thoroughly moving each time.

    Maps in a Mirror: This is a large volume that collects a major portion of all of Card's short fiction. He's written many, many gems over the years, and they're all in here. These stories are back from when Card was younger and starting out; his vicious imagination is plainly evident, and all of his ideas are fresh and new.

    Others: If you've read a few of Card's books and liked them, then by all means go back and read some of his fine earlier novels. Seventh Son is an intriguing alternate history of colonial America. Treason is an interesting, fast-moving adventure. Wyrms is an inventive and compelling fantasy. (It's where I took the nickname 'ruin' from)

    Ok, yes, Scott Card is my favorite science fiction author. However, I would say the new sequel is unlikely to be the best in the series. If you want to find the best work by any given author, go look for things they wrote before they were writing for a living, when the ideas they had were all untried and new, bubbling out, desperate to be written.

    --

  • I hate to say it but Ender's Game is somewhat juvenille. It's still a very enjoyable book though, just like the matrix was an entertaining movie.
  • Interestingly enough, he's a regular "columnist" on the Mormon section of the religious website www.belief.net [belief.net].

  • But would it make a good book? Most novels leave things untold once everything has been said and done. But I'll bet that if they didn't you would be essentially reading a historical account, interesting but not really that good.

  • The official page is at http://www.frescopictures.com /movies/ender/index.html [frescopictures.com]. They've got the first bit of the script up, as well as mention that Jake Lloyd is interested in playing Ender. They're also planning to film Ender's Shadow at the same time.

  • I can't say I agree. I've just finished reading Children of the Mind (again). It's so utterly forgettable that I couldn't remember reading it the first time. The first is the best in this series.

    Don't get me wrong though. I like Card. I think his best book is Ender's Game, but I enjoyed Homecoming more than any other series.

  • In the sequels the biology is that of a alien world. Why should it be anything like our biology?

  • My my, touchy, aren't we?

    The fact remains that, no matter _why_ he wrote them, the later Ender books simply are nowhere near the quality of the original three books.

    Which is a shame, as the first three books are fantastic.

    But when a writer dips back into the trough, and doesn't bother putting the effort in because he knows that the mere fact that it's an "Ender Book" means it'll sell - that's just milking the cow. Going through the motions.

    See "Star Wars, Episode I" for more examples.

    "Ender's Shadow" was a shoddy mess. It makes no difference to me if he sold one or a billion, the book still stinks. And after reading the first few chapters of the followup, I find to my dismay that it's getting WORSE, not better.

    What do I want? Quality. And lately, Card hasn't been delivering.

    Get over THAT, fanboy.

  • Well, if you want a dead tree version, but you don't want to print out a bunch of wasteful HTML, try these pdfs [dhs.org] or these files in postscript [dhs.org].

    Do you want to know how I made these files from HTML? Well, take a look at html2latex [sourceforge.net].

  • Oh yeah... It doesn't stop there. Many SCI-FI and fantasy books have been written that rip off the Matrix:

    Dune
    Lord of the Rings
    Stranger in a Strange Land
    The Stand

    etc...

  • Hmmm... A person using the name Orson Scott Card has posted a few messages on previous threads concerning the upcoming movie, Ender's Game.

  • I enjoyed Ender's Game but I never made it through Speaker For The Dead. I felt sort of insulted after the first couple of chapters, like Card was clubbing me over the head with the same point over and over. I found myself saying, "Okay, okay, everyone hates Ender now. I get it!".

    Judging from the positive reactions to this story, though, I think I'll give Speaker another try, after I get through Illuminatus!.

  • Enders Game is the best book I have ever read. I also have Enders Shadow and It is a good book but it doesn't even come close to being better than Enders game. If you havn't read Enders Game READ IT NOW.

  • As a rule of thumb, I refuse to read these serialized stories. I may read the first in a series but that's all.

    I generally agree but I like to check and see who broke up the book. If it's the publisher, as was the case with Lord of the Rings, then you're really missing out.

    I don't think that's the case much these days. Authors enter into some sort of multi-book contract and then just churn them out. There's no incentive to make just one epic book. Nowadays, I find myself browsing book stores for the largest books I can find. If the book is greater than 1200 pages, the odds of it becoming serialized are small.

  • Yeah, his earlier stuff is mush better. I also noticed that his first (and sometimes second) novels in a series have substance, but it starts to dissapate after two novels. I think that's why I like his short stories better. I like the rest though. Anything is better than nothing.


    flatrabbit,
    peripheral visionary
  • Back in the Fall when /. posted the story about the script, OSC was fielding a bunch of comments and he talked about this, too.

    Yes, there was the homosexual connotation, but there was also something else. The aliens in Starship Troopers the movie were called "buggers", too, so they didn't want to duplicate.

    Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin...
  • This is my biggest gripe with Card. He used to be my favorite author, but I got sick of him refusing to let a story conclude.

    The first one or two books in a series are always excellent, well written, with very good character development. These books get me hooked on the storyline and characters, but they never quite allow the story to finish.

    By the 4th or 5th book, I realize that Card is simply writing to sell more books. The story has become stale, and these books lack the excitement of the first few.

    I just wish Card would push himself to give a decent conclusion within a trilogy, and demonstrate more concern for the story than for selling more books.

    Of course I am making a huge assumption about Card's motives here, and to be fair, he could also just lack talent at giving closure.

    Doug
  • From this interview, I agree. However, he has made more incidiary comments in articles he has written for Mormon publications. If there is interesting, I'll dig up a source.

    Dan
  • Far be it from me to imply that he is. Hail Xenu.

    Dan
  • People often talk about Ender's Game and the related sequels. Ender's Game is my favorite Card book. In fact, it's probably the top book of all time, but if I were to pick a second favorite Orson Scott Card book, I would choose Lost Boys. Lost Boys is about a computer programmer in the 80's whose son is having all sorts of problems telling lies, misbehaving, and so forth. The book seems completely normal, but still fascinating, but it's not normal at all. It has an ending that grips you and slaps you across the face like the ending of Ender's Game. I recommend it.
  • How appropriate for this discussion. Your .sig is about Bender's Game.

    The bus came by and I got on
    That's when it all began
    There was cowboy Neal
    At the wheel
    Of a bus to never-ever land

  • Re:Sequels worth reading? No. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ahahhahahaha....you got mod'd down, you socially backward jerk.

  • I actually liked the sequels to Ender's Game better than the original novel. However, I'm a major minority there.


    -RickHunter
  • I always thought that the point of Ender's Game was to show the exploitation of Ender's talents by an uncaring government.

    How many of us would want to be the Supergenius Who Saves The World if we had to wipe out another race to do it? Or even worse, to be tricked into wiping out another race when you thought you were only playing a game.

  • I'm a major fan of Ender's game, and I'm glad to see that OSC is doing another book. However, I'm rather disappointed that its set in the Battle School. I believe I'm part of a minority of fans for this, but I actually liked the "Hundred Worlds" setting better. And the end of Children of the Mind seemed to imply that another novel was forthcoming.

    That said, both Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow were very well done. For any fans who don't already know, there's a semi-official (we have OSC's permission, with a few of restrictions) MOO operating at telnet://ansible.org:6000. I really recommend using a MU*-client program like GMud [together.net]. For those who don't know MOO's are text-based roleplaying games. Ansible is very RP-centered (RP=roleplay), even though some of our players may not be.


    -RickHunter
  • I mostly agree with you - this is why I've never gotten into most traditional sci-fi - but there are exceptions.

    For instance, I just finished with the third book in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive) and I found it very satisfying. Gibson had it figured out - make all the books able to stand on their own, but make it so that the trilogy together is bigger than the sum of it's parts. Not an easy thing to do, by any stretch, but worth noting when someone accomplishes it.

    "If I removed everything here that I thought was pointless, there would be like two messages here."

  • Okay... he's a homophobe.

    I don't like bigots but he has a long way to go before becoming the same sort of monster as L. Ron Hubbard.

  • I really do. You know what else? Once, when I was eight, my Dad built a veranda...

    ...without any tools! How about that?

  • What I thought was really funny about Ender's Shadow was the fact that Card completely manipulated events in the original book so that it turns out that the smartest kid ever in the history of the world was actually Bean, his new main character.

    I don't think that Ender is meant to be the smartest kid ever, or what not, even in the original book. Yeah, he was really fucking smart, but that wasn't what made him the pick for commander of the invasion. He was smart, quick, and a great leader. Bean was super-smart, super-quick, but was a relatively poor leader, compared to Ender.

    I think Ender's Shadow made all of this quite clear. Even in Ender's Game it is quite clear that is is not so much Ender's smarts as it is his leadership that make him the one...

  • I don't know. He comes across as pretty level headed in his views (for example, marriage has always been associated with procreation and raising a family, so it's understandable that he doesn't see the same term being applicable to gay couples). It's very politicially incorrect these days to say anything negative about homosexuality. Doing so doesn't mean someone is a gay basher or a homophobe, but not being out and out pro-gay certainly wasn't the in thing in the 1990s. I think the interviewee was pushing an irrelevant agenda.
  • I've been thinking for a while now why EG was good in the first place. My teacher at the time was a real nitpicker, and I ended up reading it about 5 times in most sections, with every little mistake burning a whole through the page. Anyone else catch the mistakes?

    I think the reason EG appeals to us is because we all want to be the supergenius who saves the world (at least on /. I'm sure) We'd like to think that our eccentricities and lack of sociability will be made up for ultimately; and that's where we're wrong.

    Ender's game is not teaching us a positive lesson for people who follow that belief. Ender was more a leader than he was brilliant. Don't think the smart quiet guy always wins in the end. He doesn't.

    Take every day as a new possibility to influence people so that one day you can be the manager. That is the real strategy to infer.
  • SF has gotten very bad about this. You sit down and read a 600 page book--like Dan Simmons' Hyperion--and then find it's just a set-up for another book. It takes three more books to conclude anything, and after all that reading the conclusion is almost always a great let down.

    This is one of the primary reasons I stopped reading SF. I enjoy reading novels, but I hate getting sucked into huge series' of books unwillingly. Heck, Card himself warned authors against doing this sort of thing in his "How to Write Science Fiction And Fantasy" book which came out over ten years ago. That was before he turned the two volumes of Ender's Game into five, going on six. And the Alvin Maker series looks like a never ending bunch of nonsense too. Sigh.
  • Note to idiot moderators: Flamebait != Post you disagree with.
  • De gustibus non disputandum est, of course, but in my opinion the best of Card's work is Enchantment [hatrack.com]. I found "Enders Game" to be an absorbing and wonderful story, but the above to be more philosophical and thought-provoking.

  • This is exactly what I think about Orson Scott Card, especially the Alvin Maker series, where he goes from one half-realization to another over 4 or 5 books, and you wonder, when is he going to get to the point, and not all these half finished allusions to concepts that somehow work into his as yet unrevealed world picture.

    If he just wanted to write interesting episodic fiction, like Piers Anthony does (or did), that would be okay; but everytime he writes something, he tries to take it to a new climax, or finale, and then he has yet another surprise\contination to pull on you...why? Because he gets bored, wants to write,but doesn't want to create new characters? Or because he has a "message" and wants to expliacate it to us, and figures he can just shove it into the mouth of his old characters?

    Well, I guess I shouldn't say that much about this; because for all of this, the new book might be the best thing ever written.

  • Actually, the last two books really were an extended epilogue. According to the author's notes, Card hadn't quite finished the story in Speaker for the Dead, so he continued it in Xenocide which didn't quite end and finished it in Children of the Mind. Sorta - there's still a lose thread out there about the new species they discover at the end, so I'm waiting for that sequel...

    Personally, I liked Speaker for the Dead the best of all of them, but that's just me...

    (Also, my user name on Slashdot is based on "xenocide" for the Ender series - in an online game, someone changed their nick to Ender for a while so I decided to use Xenocide, and I've kept on using it.)

  • The only thing sad about that is that no one has shown you the real reason for living.
  • when EG was written, the technology in the book was novel and unheard of, it came across as extremely futuristic and fantastical.

    having read the first five chapters of the new book, i am extremely disappointed. he seems to be shaping the fantasy world (of 200 years in the future) around the modern world: using email, having addresses with *@foo.gov, etc. i dont know about you, but i'll be extremely disappointed if our electronic communication is symantically identical in ten years, let alone 200.

    for god's sake, the books' earth history is screwed up enough as it is (the Warsaw Pact being a serious power?), why does he feel the need to make the stupid little techie details conform to reality? if he kept all the terms and ideas he laid down 20 years ago, i could respect that, i could understand that. but as is, the thing reads like an extremely uncreative look at a future history which might as well have happened in southern california five years ago.

  • I personally thought the sequels got better. At first I thought the same thing, I just couldn't get into Speaker for the Dead. It starts very slowly, but for me each book was more interesting than the previous.
  • Uh, did you actually *read* the first five chapters?

    Unless he's changed them since I read them a few weeks ago, the POV varies between characters - Some from Petra, some from Bean, some from Achilles, and probably another character or two thrown in there as well that I'm not remembering.

  • That interview annoyed me enough to provoke a letter to the editors of Salon. Ms. Minkowitz was completely biased, interjecting her personal agenda into everything that she wrote. Note: Not everything she SAID, everything she wrote. She distinctly mentions in the article that she saves her barbs and asides for after the interview, because she doesn't have the courage to say those things during the conversation. That technique is completely unprofessional, and her little asides detract from the conversation. I thought Card's responses without her comments were level headed, if a little conservative.
  • I would berate you for giving away the plot, but plot generally implies continuation, which the teleportation certainly didn't have.

    CloudWarrior .o. "I may be in the gutter but I look to the stars"
  • I'm just as fustrated as you with the Alvin Maker series, but both Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow are both very good *self contained* novels. They just happen to be set at the same time.

    Thats the trouble OSC suffers from - when he lacks a firm idea of what his plot is, he just lets the story draaaag on. With the current load of books, this doesn't seem to be the case. Yet ;)

    CloudWarrior .o. "I may be in the gutter but I look to the stars"
  • Why is everyone so down on the other Enders Game sequels? OK, so they don't have the same impact as Enders game from an originality and surprise ending (if you hadn't already had it spoilt by someone else, grrrrr) point of view, but certainly Speaker For The Dead compares well with the general run-of-the-mill sci-fi I've read.
    --
  • for a little while i was excited that there might be another star wars or matrix movie, until i actually read that it's about Ender's Game. 8)

    seriously though, what did people think of the five chapters on the website?


  • Re:Ender's Shadow not bad (Score:3)

    by volsung ( 378 ) <stan@mtrr.org> on Sunday April 30, 2000 @06:15AM (#1100947)
    I really enjoyed reading about the same scenes from a different perspective. I was impressed by how well OSC pulled it off.

    It reminds you every great drama in real life also has dozens of plots and subplots that cross over each other. For every big story you hear about in history there were certainly many others that went on in the background. Fiction doesn't usually capture that, however.

    I think I would like to see a few more parallel books attempted by various authors.

    As for the other books in the series, they were not as intense as the first one. They ventured further into strangely philisophical land, but I enjoyed them just the same. That sort of thing appeals to me. But yes, those looking for more of the same kind of literary power in Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind that OSC put into Ender's Game will be disappointed. They take a different approach.

  • I personally rate Ender's Game the highest, but there are people who consider its first sequel (Speaker for the Dead) better. That one definitely worth reading.

    As for the rest, you can safely skip them. The quality dropped as the Ender Saga got longer - the same phenomenon happened with his other longer series, too.

  • I would put Ender's Game up there with the Asimov's Foundation Trilogy and Robot Novels. They were some of the best books I've ever read.

    (However, my opinion doesn't count because I also liked _Siddhartha_ by Hermann Hesse. Or at least that's what they tell me.)

  • What I thought was really funny about Ender's Shadow was the fact that Card completely manipulated events in the original book so that it turns out that the smartest kid ever in the history of the world was actually Bean, his new main character. I guess that's just his style - he does a really good job of describing the "I'm too smart for everyone" perspective. I guess I lot of us feel that way, which is why we like the books so much ;)

    Anwyay, I'm curious to see if the new books will also demonstrate that, actually, Petra was pulling the strings the whole time.

    Want to work at Transmeta? MicronPC? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?

  • I read the first chapter and I am going to read the other four eventually. It starts out pretty well (concerning Petra returning).

    I read the series through _Children of the Mind_ and generally reccomend to friends that they read _Game_, _Shadow_, and probably _Speaker_ (probably in that order). _Speaker_ is not quite as good, but wraps stuff up enough.

    I also really liked _The Worthing Saga_, a collection of stories. If you like Card's work, I would pick it up. It is different from the Ender series, but is still a very good read.
  • The aliens in Starship Troopers the movie were called "buggers", too, so they didn't want to duplicate.

    If that was the case, maybe he should have thought of that before he even started writing Ender's Game! I read Ender's Game back when I was in high school, along with a lot of Heinlein's novels. After reading Starship Troopers recently, and reflecting with a more mature perspective, large parts of Ender's Game don't seem all that original to me. Card cribbed many of his ideas from Heinlein and Asimov. The "surprise twist" ending was a pale imitation of Asimov's novels; the only difference being that Asimov was the master of suspense and kept you guessing until the very end, whereas I was starting to suspect that the "games" might be real, by the time that they involved action with the Buggers.

    I just hope that Hollywood doesn't edit and dilute the plot of Ender's Game as much as they slashed apart Starship Troopers.

  • Bean was determined to lead an earth army, and determined to learn more about Peter Wiggin. Achilles had been seized by the russians, presumably put at the head of an army bent on raining fire and destruction down upon the earth. Valentine and Wiggin are in interstellar travel, meaning that they can have little effect on the story line (except that over the next 50 years, Val will publish several histories of the bugger wars).

    We know that Peter is the Hegemon when Ender and Val arrive at the planet 50 years later.

    We know that the first thing Bean will do when he gets back is study Peter to find out if he betrayed Ender. Since Bean never wastes anything, he'll probably then try to assert himself as Peter's general. If Bean is seven, he's got maybe 13 years before his genetically altered body dies of old age. And we assume that three's some gigantic battle to occur between Bean and Achilles.

    At least, for my money there had darn well BETTER be.

  • Re:Sequels worth reading? (Score:3)

    by legoboy ( 39651 ) on Sunday April 30, 2000 @06:32AM (#1100971)

    I've only read Ender's Game. I figured that after a book this good, no sequel could ever live up to it, so I didn't take the risk. Are any of the sequels as good as the first?

    It depends on what you're looking for.

    The later books, _Speaker (of/for) the Dead_, _Xenocide_, and _Children of the Mind_ (is there another one? It's been a while) are more about relationships than action. This seems to turn some people off, somehow. If you can get over the fact that Ender is not attempting to exterminate a species any longer, they're enjoyable reading. There are books I would prefer that I had never read. These are not among them.

    ------

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I like most of Card's work, I eagerly anticipated each volume in the Homecoming series. While I enjoy the Ender series a great deal, I'd MUCH rather see a sequel to Lovelock (The Mayflower Trilogy, Part I) [amazon.com] than YAEB (Yet Another Ender Book).

    Lovelock was a truly original Sci-Fi book that Card cowrote with Kathryn H. Kidd. I enjoyed it immensely, but it was published in 1995 and there is still no sequel out. Does anyone know when and if "Rasputin" will be available?

    That said, no one has toppled Heinlein as my favorite Sci-Fi author yet, but out of all of the current writers in the field, Card probably has the best chance.
    ---

  • That's a fairly random comment. What are you talking about?
  • It is rather interesting that you managed to brand Red Mars as "juveline" based on your own opinion, that is, the fact that you find it boring.

    It may be boring to some people, but it has nothing to do with it being "juveline". The fact that reading it requires a lot of attention and that it doesn't have a lot of dazzling displays of brutal action means that its target audience doesn't consist of your average adolescents who consume two books of mass-market scifi a day.

    Red Mars is an extremely entertaining description of the colonization of Mars, it has a lot of technical details that are easy to believe to be accurate - and the book doesn't forget the social aspects either. It's a very rich book, and I consider it one of the best scifi books I've ever read.

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