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Title: Xenocide by Orson Scott Card, Stefan Rudnicki, David Birney, Scott Brick, Gabrielle De Cuir, Amanda Karr ISBN: 1-57453-543-9 Publisher: Fantastic Audio Pub. Date: June, 2003 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 12 List Price(USD): $53.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.87 (164 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Ender's story isn't over yet...
Comment: Well, the author did warn us in the preface of Speaker for the Dead that Xenocide was going to be more philosophical and slow than his first two books of the Ender series. (Perhaps that's why this book didn't win the Hugo award that year.) The book's ending is set up for the fourth and last book in the series - The Children of the Mind. (The reviews I've read on it are less than positive.) This book deals with a wide range of issues such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, faster-than-light travel, interspecies tolerance, martyrdom, separation, etc. It's no wonder this book seemed long preachy.
Here's what I really think about this book. I hated the ending. It's a ... ploy for the reader to buy the fourth book. The rest of the book was so-so, a LOT of dialogue and positing. And since all of the technology presented in this book is fiction, it's highly incredulous.
Plotwise, nothing really exciting happens in this book. It picks off from where Speaker for the Dead left off. (It's like that movie Contact with Jodie Foster. Did she really travel to space or was she just [imagining it]?) The sources of conflict in this book are the same: the descolada, Lusitania fleet, Novinha's family, Valentine. I'll keep you posted on the last book. But I'm not getting my hopes up.
LEAP rating (each out of 5):
============================
L (Language) - 3 (blah blah blah)
E (Erotica) - 0 (n/a - sigh)
A (Action) - 0 (n/a - can you believe this?)
P (Plot) - 2 ("we need to figure out what to do with the descolada" <- pretty much sums up the story)
Rating: 4
Summary: Part 2 of a trilogy
Comment: Most people who have read "Ender's Game" and "Speaker for the Dead" will like this novel, not for its content but because they love Ender. Card wrote Game as a stand alone novel and Speaker as the first of a trilogy, (he may not have meant to from the beginning, but that's how these books play out). Readers familiar to trilogies know that in most cases they follow a rigid pattern, 1) Setup, 2) bridge, 3) conflict and conclussion. Speaker set up the saga with more style than most trilogies, and is a great novel on its own. Xenocide is just a bridge which disappointed me, and from what I've seen from other reviews, quite a lot of people as well. I was expecting another great novel, but what I read had a "to be continued" feel.
The book is above average for a bridge or arc, which is usually a good thing. However, with our expectations so high from the first two books, this novel falls short of absolute brilliance, and is instead just a good read. We meet a supporting cast of new characters, some hateful and seemingly villianous, which is something new to the series. We are introduced to the dark side of Starways Congress who seem to act out of spite and anger for no real reason. This was the most troubling aspect of the book for me. The first books of the series gave us moral ambiguity and actions bourne of neccesity rather than evil. The story always gave us hope for the future, but the darkness introduced here dims that a bit.
The story still takes place on Ender's "home" world of Lusitania, where the three species are gearing up for the threat of destruction by Starways Congress. We still get the moral dillemas typical of the series, but they feel just a bit contrived at times. Ender's wife acts too standoffish to be true to life. One wonders how Ender ever fell in love with her, and stayed with her for so long. The Sci-fi/fantasy aspect of the book overtakes the human drama which made the series so great and feel so real to the readers. If you get through this book, the conclussion of the series waits on the other side in the novel "Children of the Mind", which gets a lot of the greatness back. If you've read the first two, stick with it. If you haven't read Ender before, please don't start here. If you start here, don't give up on it.
Rating: 4
Summary: Serious reading!
Comment: With every book in Ender series it's becoming more complex and sophisticated. This book is full of very interesting mostly phylosophical (especially interesting on role of religion) and metaphysical discussions. The drawback is that it's much more difficult to read. It takes some effort (at least this was the case for me) to get to the end. Although the series started as quite typical sci-fi I can't consider it to be this genre anymore (the presense of another planet and alien cultures notwithstanding). I am not saying that it's a shortcoming but it's something that future readers need to keep in mind not to be disappointed. I believe Orson Scott Card is a very smart person but not a great writer (if you judge his novels by such criterias as plot and character development). Still, it's a very interesting book assuming you know what to expect.
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Title: Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card ISBN: 0812522397 Publisher: Tor Science Fiction Pub. Date: 15 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Speaker for the Dead : Author's Definitive Edition by Orson Scott Card ISBN: 0812550757 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 15 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card ISBN: 0812565959 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 09 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card ISBN: 0812575717 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 15 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Shadow Puppets (Ender, Book 7) by Orson Scott Card ISBN: 0765340054 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 03 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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