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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3226 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

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So, what are you reading?

My backlog isn't budging much. Adding Ender's Shadow to the pile.

Just finished book 1 of The Villianess is an SS+ Rank Avenurer, and while it's... adequate, I didn't find it compelling enough to want to continue the series.

On the subject of Ender's Shadow, I personally didn't appreciate the liberties it took with the original Ender's Game, and did not continue that the Shadow series either.

Edited for clarity.

I didn't care for the character of Bean as a protagonist. He just didn't work for me and I didn't connect to him at all. It was a shame because I actually liked the idea of exploring the geopolitical situation on Earth. But rewriting Bean like that, besides the deficiencies in his character, really ret-conned Ender's Game, and not in a good way.

But if you never continued on to Speaker of the Dead, etc., I do recommend giving it a shot. SotD and its followups go in a very different direction from Ender's Game but really introduce some fascinating ideas about contact between alien species, different modes of consciousness, that kind of thing. And they have one of my favorite Christian characters in fiction, FWIW.

I completely agree, for me that book diminished the characters of both Bean and especially Ender, gutted the emotional impact of Ender's journey, and twisted the entire narrative of Ender's Game into a lame-assed Xanatos-style manipulation by proxy. Weak.

When I said that I didn't continue the series, I meant the Shadow series, which I've edited my original post to clarify. I appreciated the different direction that the sequels took, even if I found the ending of Xenocide a little ham-handed and the portrayal of OCD a little stilted and one-dimensional. I have not read Ender in Exile, though I'd be open to checking it out if I had a decent reason to do so.

Ender in Exile is an entertaining read. If you’re just a fan of the setting, or if you really want to bridge Ender’s Game and the sequels, it’s worth reading. But that being said, you can definitely go without it, and it’s thematically more like a shadow series than like either the original novel or it’s sequels.

I liked it. If you didn’t like Shadow of the Hegemon, you might not. It suffers from treating Ender like, well, not a person- it’s not that he doesn’t have flaws, it’s that he’s a vehicle for philosophical exploration and social commentary rather than a believable character. The scenes on the colony world are good, the love story on the ship is… more of a series of monologues.

TLDR, read it if you want to frame the sequels the way Card wanted you to. If you didn’t like the shadow series I’d not expect you to like this for its own sake.

Thanks! I'll keep that in mind if I ever see a cheap copy of it, or if alternately the Kindle version goes on sale.

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