The Ender Trilogy: Some Thoughts

I’ll be discussing quite a few plot points in this review, so expect spoilers. These books are classics, so you should be reading them anyways. My short advice is to read Ender's Game without hesitation, but pause before reaching Xenocide.

Ender’s Game:

Ender’s Game is a classic for a very good reason. I also think that its subject matter had a lot to do with its popularity in geek circles. The way that Card gets into the minds of super-gifted kids delights those of us who lived with the gifted label. Sure, they might talk like adults, but that’s the point he’s making. When you take a child away from normal life and drill him into a creepy child soldier, he’s going to be pretty haggard, whether or not you think it’s for a good cause. Card does an outstanding job making you think about the events from moral perspectives.  

Ender takes the classic alien invasion story, mixes it up with dual shots of philosophy and physics, and then turns it on its head. It’s not only a fantastic stand-alone novel, it also serves as a solid launch pad for a much larger story. Not too much to say about it besides you’re crazed if you don’t read it, nerd or not.

Speaker of the Dead:

When I first read Ender a year ago, I was a bit apprehensive to continue the series. I heard that the other books were very different, and I wondered how they could ever top this one. I figured they were just the author’s attempt to milk a popular series.  I was quite wrong, and I wish I had read them sooner.

While Ender’s Game was content to focus on one person’s development, Speaker throws the doors wide open. A dozen Ender’s Games are in Speaker, plot-wise, and each thread is just as taught. Speaker not only works so well with Ender, but it adds so much depth as well.

Speaker was the book Card originally had in mind when he wrote Ender. Instead of simply picking up from where Ender left off, it leaps three millennia into the future.  On one hand, I was hesitant to leave the familiar world of Ender behind, but the new wonders awaiting me in Speaker coaxed me out of my shell.

Card writes characters very well, so the increased cast size works. Andrew works his way into the family drama, telling them what they need, not what they want. This entire plot-thread echoed so very much of a personal Christ that I looked up the author to confirm whether or not he was a Christian. Like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, Speaker shows that it's possible to write Christian stories without devolving into the starchy pulp that gets sold in most religious bookstores. 

The mysteries do a good job of holding the plot together. Why did Novinha marry a brute of a man instead of the one she loved? Why did the Piggies murder two xenologers? Why does the ecology of Lusitania feature such a sparse biological landscape? They drive the plot forward and keep everything flowing at a good pace without seeming artificial or boring.

The mysteries resolve mostly satisfying. It was beautiful to watch Card slowly unravel some of his delicately-wound characters so we can see every stich and seam. The human mysteries are truly the best, while the scientific mysteries are more flat. Perhaps this is only so because the human stories are so rich by comparison. In retrospect, Speaker seems more about people then about any larger sci-fi motif. Then again, perhaps this was also true for Ender’s Game.

Besides personal drama, Speaker loves dealing with the philosophy of aliens and intelligence. The categorizing of beings into levels of familiarity and intelligence did a lot to facilitate the discussion of the destruction of other species for self-preservation. It’s these discussions that make it more then just family drama and sell the novel to the geek sci-fi crowd. They’re some of the finest parts of the book by far.

However, the thread about the descolada virus is not quite so good. The reveal at the end works I suppose, but it seems far too weird for my tastes. I swallowed it regardless and the rest of the story went down just as well.

At the end, many plot threads are left untied. I didn’t mind it because the story was truly about Novinha and her family. These parts resolve into satisfying conclusions, so I didn’t feel like I was taken for a ride. Xenocide on the other hand….

Xenocide:

I dived into Xenocide right away, excited to see the larger threats in Speaker resolve. So many juicy plot threads were left dangling to me to resist the pull of the sequel for long. I spent half as much more time slowly following their winding trails only to be left disappointed.

The progression seems to flow naturally from Speaker at first, but there’s a twist at the end that tangles everything into a nasty knot. Xenocide first introduces the idea of Philons. If the full revelation of the Descolada in Speaker was a bit off, Philons is full-on midichlorian weird. If it sounds like an idea that belongs in a different series of books, it’s because it was (but the publishers encouraged Card to merge them). 

The Philon idea then leads everything into a magical dreamscape that recreates old characters from Ender’s Game and leaves you on the promise that you get to watch them run free in the next book, Children of the Mind. It felt unnatural and I cannot conceive of any way for the narrative to resolve in a way that doesn’t feel fake.

I’m aware that it’s a bit awkward to end on Xenocide, when by the authors admission, it and Children of the Mind were conceived as a single book. I should likely finish the fourth book before making a judgment, but I don’t care that much any more.

What started as bubbling excitement in Speaker ended in disappointment in Xenocide. The big threats, such as the fleet destroying the colony and the fate of the piggies have been teasing me for two whole books without any satisfying conclusion. Someday I’ll finish what I’ve started and perhaps learn that I was wrong again, but in the mean time, I have Steven Erikson tickling every Post-Modern element of my brain right now. Another time, Card. Perhaps another time.