Orson Scott Card Enderverse Humble Bundle
Nov. 17th, 2024 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroDid you know that Humble has sliders for your donation, so you can decide how much money goes to the charity vs. the publisher vs. Humble? And that the publisher share is allowed to be zero, allowing you to re-read things without supporting anti-gay Mormon causes?
(I read most of Card’s then-published work twenty-someodd years ago; I was already getting tired of a bunch of his standard tropes by the time his homophobic stuff was hitting the internet. I generally thought he had some cool sci-fi ideas but his politics are troublesome and his characters—especially women—are extremely inconsistent.)
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (re-read) - Having last read this as a teenager, it’s interesting re-reading it with a more critical eye. Card’s near-future technological predictions are shockingly accurate; his take on human nature is…myopic. (And boy oh boy does he love the Great Man theory of history. Most of humanity are sheep except for a handful of super geniuses driving everything.) Card very clearly remembered being a little boy on the school playground and doing the “we’ve had a fight and now we can be friends” thing, but interpreted it as establishing hierarchy rather than a consequence of the way we teach boys to handle their emotions. No matter how sad Ender is at the end and how much he regrets the violence, he never doubts the necessity of the violence to achieving peace.
Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card – This is not a novel; this is a collection of novellas in a trenchcoat that fills in a bunch of gaps between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead that weren’t already covered by the Shadow books. (The Enderverse is the gift that keeps on giving.) Ender’s Game was, in retrospect, kind of homoerotic in that sort of military-worshiping way that we didn’t really register until dudes started getting really scared of being perceived as gay in the 90s. This, like most later Enderverse works, leans really hard into the “all women want the best babies” and “monogamous heteronormativity is the only way” messages. This includes an entire subplot on the colony where the monogamous marriages have been selected by lottery (because there aren’t enough women) and the remaining men must take drugs to reduce their libidos. (And my mind goes back to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode from 1989 where a colony lacking in genetic diversity was recommended that each woman have children with at least three men—an eminently more sensible solution.) Oh, and multiple cases where brilliant children are held back from their destiny by their insane, manipulative mothers. When combined with how much of a strained duty having children seems to be to most of the male characters, I’m not saying that Uncle Orson is a closeted queer man severely repressed by his religion...but he sure does write like one.
Shadows In Flight by Orson Scott Card – I read the Shadow novels years ago, and had vague memories that they ended (at that point) with Bean and the children who had Anton’s Key turned going into lightspeed spaceflight to prolong their lives. This book is actually a novella, a set of stories about The Giant and his three children during their lightspeed flight at the end of his life. And honestly it feels like a “greatest hits” reel, especially since one of the three genius children is named Ender. There’s a beating to show dominance, there’s a LOT of pontificating on human nature, there’s a lot of obsessing by the only female character over having lots of babies, there’s a terrible mother who dominates her children (though in this case, that’s a secret revelation of Formic biology). There are some clever sci-fi bits in later into the book and it leaves off on a lot of potential for what comes next. Unfortunately…
The Last Shadow by Orson Scott Card – The final sequel to both the Ender books and the Shadow books, taking place over 3,000 years after Ender’s Game and revolving around the leguminids (Bean’s children and grandchildren) and the people of Lusitania trying to find the origins of the Descolada virus. It is extremely over-written; heavily repetitive and just stuffed with unnecessary conversations and planning scenes that usually come to nothing. There’s an ongoing problem where repeatedly there’s a heavy setup for the plot to go in one direction...but then it doesn’t. Also it’s moderately racist (particularly regarding Chinese characters) and sexist in the weird obsessively heteronormative way. But mostly it’s disappointing, because it doesn’t actually wrap up anything of note: They never find the origin of the Descolada, the entire revelation from Shadows in Flight is dropped, instantaneous travel becomes a cheap magic trick, etc etc. An entire chapter is devoted to a nine-year-old getting pooped on by birds. (Card admits in the afterword that he didn’t have any ideas but then read a book about intelligent birds and ran with that idea.) If I’d been one of the fans waiting obsessively for a decade hoping he would write this, I would have been profoundly disappointed.
A fan theory I read—which, honestly, is better than anything Card put here—was that in the ~2,500 years between Shadows in Flight and Speaker For the Dead, Bean’s children use the terraforming equipment and their knowledge of genetic engineering to settle the planet later called Descoladora, and they created the Descolada virus. Perhaps it’s out of paranoia against humanity, perhaps it’s specifically to free Formics from the tyranny of the Hive Queen, perhaps it’s for a noble purpose but has unforeseen consequences. But that would lead to a proper wrap-up story: Ender’s reincarnation comes to Descoladora; Bean’s descendants are on the planet below. The leguminids must reconcile with humanity; the offshoot Formics must confront the Hive Queen. We’re brought back to themes of fear of the unknown, miscommunication, collateral damage, and reconciliation; and don’t need to introduce new elements to do it. (Hell, if he desperately wanted the birds, the leguminids could have made them with genetic material they brought from Earth!) Ah, well.
I might at some point re-read other parts of this series, but mostly I wanted to re-read the first book (which is by far the best) and find out what happened in the series after I stopped reading it. And honestly, I was mostly unimpressed.
(I read most of Card’s then-published work twenty-someodd years ago; I was already getting tired of a bunch of his standard tropes by the time his homophobic stuff was hitting the internet. I generally thought he had some cool sci-fi ideas but his politics are troublesome and his characters—especially women—are extremely inconsistent.)
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (re-read) - Having last read this as a teenager, it’s interesting re-reading it with a more critical eye. Card’s near-future technological predictions are shockingly accurate; his take on human nature is…myopic. (And boy oh boy does he love the Great Man theory of history. Most of humanity are sheep except for a handful of super geniuses driving everything.) Card very clearly remembered being a little boy on the school playground and doing the “we’ve had a fight and now we can be friends” thing, but interpreted it as establishing hierarchy rather than a consequence of the way we teach boys to handle their emotions. No matter how sad Ender is at the end and how much he regrets the violence, he never doubts the necessity of the violence to achieving peace.
Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card – This is not a novel; this is a collection of novellas in a trenchcoat that fills in a bunch of gaps between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead that weren’t already covered by the Shadow books. (The Enderverse is the gift that keeps on giving.) Ender’s Game was, in retrospect, kind of homoerotic in that sort of military-worshiping way that we didn’t really register until dudes started getting really scared of being perceived as gay in the 90s. This, like most later Enderverse works, leans really hard into the “all women want the best babies” and “monogamous heteronormativity is the only way” messages. This includes an entire subplot on the colony where the monogamous marriages have been selected by lottery (because there aren’t enough women) and the remaining men must take drugs to reduce their libidos. (And my mind goes back to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode from 1989 where a colony lacking in genetic diversity was recommended that each woman have children with at least three men—an eminently more sensible solution.) Oh, and multiple cases where brilliant children are held back from their destiny by their insane, manipulative mothers. When combined with how much of a strained duty having children seems to be to most of the male characters, I’m not saying that Uncle Orson is a closeted queer man severely repressed by his religion...but he sure does write like one.
Shadows In Flight by Orson Scott Card – I read the Shadow novels years ago, and had vague memories that they ended (at that point) with Bean and the children who had Anton’s Key turned going into lightspeed spaceflight to prolong their lives. This book is actually a novella, a set of stories about The Giant and his three children during their lightspeed flight at the end of his life. And honestly it feels like a “greatest hits” reel, especially since one of the three genius children is named Ender. There’s a beating to show dominance, there’s a LOT of pontificating on human nature, there’s a lot of obsessing by the only female character over having lots of babies, there’s a terrible mother who dominates her children (though in this case, that’s a secret revelation of Formic biology). There are some clever sci-fi bits in later into the book and it leaves off on a lot of potential for what comes next. Unfortunately…
The Last Shadow by Orson Scott Card – The final sequel to both the Ender books and the Shadow books, taking place over 3,000 years after Ender’s Game and revolving around the leguminids (Bean’s children and grandchildren) and the people of Lusitania trying to find the origins of the Descolada virus. It is extremely over-written; heavily repetitive and just stuffed with unnecessary conversations and planning scenes that usually come to nothing. There’s an ongoing problem where repeatedly there’s a heavy setup for the plot to go in one direction...but then it doesn’t. Also it’s moderately racist (particularly regarding Chinese characters) and sexist in the weird obsessively heteronormative way. But mostly it’s disappointing, because it doesn’t actually wrap up anything of note: They never find the origin of the Descolada, the entire revelation from Shadows in Flight is dropped, instantaneous travel becomes a cheap magic trick, etc etc. An entire chapter is devoted to a nine-year-old getting pooped on by birds. (Card admits in the afterword that he didn’t have any ideas but then read a book about intelligent birds and ran with that idea.) If I’d been one of the fans waiting obsessively for a decade hoping he would write this, I would have been profoundly disappointed.
A fan theory I read—which, honestly, is better than anything Card put here—was that in the ~2,500 years between Shadows in Flight and Speaker For the Dead, Bean’s children use the terraforming equipment and their knowledge of genetic engineering to settle the planet later called Descoladora, and they created the Descolada virus. Perhaps it’s out of paranoia against humanity, perhaps it’s specifically to free Formics from the tyranny of the Hive Queen, perhaps it’s for a noble purpose but has unforeseen consequences. But that would lead to a proper wrap-up story: Ender’s reincarnation comes to Descoladora; Bean’s descendants are on the planet below. The leguminids must reconcile with humanity; the offshoot Formics must confront the Hive Queen. We’re brought back to themes of fear of the unknown, miscommunication, collateral damage, and reconciliation; and don’t need to introduce new elements to do it. (Hell, if he desperately wanted the birds, the leguminids could have made them with genetic material they brought from Earth!) Ah, well.
I might at some point re-read other parts of this series, but mostly I wanted to re-read the first book (which is by far the best) and find out what happened in the series after I stopped reading it. And honestly, I was mostly unimpressed.
