[Books] Xenocide

As I continued to make my way through the original Ender books written by Orson Scott Card, I finally reached a point where my interests and those of the author started to diverge. While he won me over with the brilliance of Ender's Game and the complexity of Speaker for the Dead, this book left me feeling a little weird, among other things. Perhaps his being a Morman had truly begun to creep into his writing or at least presented itself in a way that rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe his focus on Brazil was weirding me out. Maybe the story was just going into a place I didn't entirely like. It's hard to say really.

It might have more to do with how Bean was perhaps one of the more interesting characters, at least in terms of how he was originally presented in Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. And while Ender was interesting to begin with, over the course of these books in particular, he's become less and less appealing a character to me given how lofty a lot of the subject matter has become. Or at least has tried to become.

To be fair, this story arc has included some pretty interesting themes and concepts. We've had to deal with the question of sentience, the value of one species over another and even a little religious argumentation to boot. But then it has meandered around a lot as well and I suppose that's really begun to eat away at my personal interest in this story. But still, I already started the series and I remain determined to finish it no matter what.

[Books] Speaker for the Dead

In popular culture, our collective history is littered with various child stars who failed to make it big in their adult years. It's become a bit of a meme at times - it being poking fun at failed child actors. But then what can we really expect, right? The way we select children as actors for roles isn't necessarily the same as what we need for more adult roles. Thus a lot of folks crash and burn in the transition effort and we're left with a weird result.

However, this is a book review and not a movie / TV show review.

But I use this concept as a springboard for this review since I feel like we had to go through a similar transition. But instead of some adorable kid who grew up really badly, instead we end up with a character who we grew to love and / or respect as a child but has left mixed feelings now that he's an adult. I suppose the transition from Ender being Andrew Wiggin felt like this to me - a bit awkward and definitely needing time to get used to.

Or maybe it's because the setting / tone of the book changed drastically from the first title. Before we were dealing with the rigors of military training as the Battle School prepared for interstellar conflict. But this time we were brought to some colony world all by its lonesome without a battle in sight. Thus the shift from a more action-packed adventure to one that came off a lot more philosophical certainly resulted in rather mixed feelings about the whole thing.

[Books] Ender's Shadow

I think this is the first time that I've ever encountered a "parallel novel" - a book that aims to tell the same story as another one but from a different perspective. Sure, I've encountered individual tales that like to shift the POV mid-story as it backtracks over a previous scene as viewed in a different light. But for an entire book to do this? To re-tell and entire story and make the reader go through everyone once more?

It was definitely a risky move - one that not many authors would probably venture right away. But thankfully, this one did and we're all the better for it. Admittedly it probably helped that the protagonist of this book was already a fairly popular character from the original Ender's Game, thus he was a good peg for people to affix to and want to follow this the adventure. Thus being able to follow-along with him and find out more about how he came to be was a pretty crucial piece to things.

And yes, I'm needlessly avoiding mentioning his name just yet since I like to save stuff like that for the synopsis. It's a thing I do.

Admittedly I was a bit surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. It's hard to determine if this was solely because I really liked the central character or it was just that much fun to revisit the book from a different part of the story. While it may feel like a bit of a gimmick, it certainly made for a more interesting adventure in an already established universe.

[Books] Ender's Game

The problem with science fiction and fantasy books in this country is that bookstores typically don't put that much importance in their value. It's easier to decide to invest in stocking up on faster-moving bestsellers that appeal to a wider audience than to a science fiction piece that may or may not work with the already limited audience that caters to these kinds of stories. Thus you stick to the bestsellers of the genre - the big books that have already proved to do well in international book markets and thus should be a reasonable risk. So other authors get marginalized and forgotten except within smaller reading circles where such treasured books are shared among like-minded individuals as brought in from other countries or more generous bookstores.

Admittedly, this is not some marginalized book. This is in fact a rather popular series that I only found the time to read just recently. But my initial thoughts on the science fiction challenges within the context the local book market was just something that I thought about when I was reading this book. It's sort of related, although maybe mostly not.

It's probably ironic that what helped me get around to reading this book is the fact that I now have a Kindle. As much as there's a sense of fulfillment in finding the actual paper books in stores, bargain bins and wherever as you assemble a particular series. But then having access to all of them at once with an ebook reader does save you a lot of legwork. And if anything, reading this book convinced me that it'll be worth the adventure to try and collect physical copies of the various books in this series.