New Ender Sequel

CMU_Nort writes "Orson Scott Card is at it again. Hot on the tail of Ender's Shadow, he's writing another sequel to the Ender's Game story. This one seems to cover the story of the immediate history following the original story when all of the children return home. Called Shadow of the Hegemon, it should give us some of the story of what happened to Peter. The first five chapters are already available online." The rest of his website looks interesting too.

Comments

Yep...

[pb]

He's planning out a series for this trilogy, from the perspectives of Ender's friends in battle school. This one's from Petra's perspective, I think, and the last one was from Bean's p.o.v.

Ender's Shadow was pretty good, it was weird having a lot of the dialogue from Ender's Game but with completely different stuff going on, but interesting as well. Of course, I'm a fan, so expect some bias... :)

I just did a paper about (among other things) Orson Scott Card, so here's some stuff on the site: the partial movie script for Ender's Game, (they had better not call them "Wooly Ants"! Why not Buggers, would the British be offended?), the complete bibliography, and his essays (in the library).

The essay about Fantasy and the reader is cool, since at one point he talks about how people overinterpret books and then act like their interpretation is the "correct" one. (that's what my paper was about...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Re:I'm Not a Fan of Sequels, Trilogys and That Sor

[Junks Jerzey]

SF has gotten very bad about this. You sit down and read a 600 page book--like Dan Simmons' Hyperion--and then find it's just a set-up for another book. It takes three more books to conclude anything, and after all that reading the conclusion is almost always a great let down.

This is one of the primary reasons I stopped reading SF. I enjoy reading novels, but I hate getting sucked into huge series' of books unwillingly. Heck, Card himself warned authors against doing this sort of thing in his "How to Write Science Fiction And Fantasy" book which came out over ten years ago. That was before he turned the two volumes of Ender's Game into five, going on six. And the Alvin Maker series looks like a never ending bunch of nonsense too. Sigh.

Re:Ender's Shadow not bad

[volsung]

I really enjoyed reading about the same scenes from a different perspective. I was impressed by how well OSC pulled it off.

It reminds you every great drama in real life also has dozens of plots and subplots that cross over each other. For every big story you hear about in history there were certainly many others that went on in the background. Fiction doesn't usually capture that, however.

I think I would like to see a few more parallel books attempted by various authors.

As for the other books in the series, they were not as intense as the first one. They ventured further into strangely philisophical land, but I enjoyed them just the same. That sort of thing appeals to me. But yes, those looking for more of the same kind of literary power in Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind that OSC put into Ender's Game will be disappointed. They take a different approach.

Re:Sequels worth reading?

[legoboy]

I've only read Ender's Game. I figured that after a book this good, no sequel could ever live up to it, so I didn't take the risk. Are any of the sequels as good as the first?

It depends on what you're looking for.

The later books, _Speaker (of/for) the Dead_, _Xenocide_, and _Children of the Mind_ (is there another one? It's been a while) are more about relationships than action. This seems to turn some people off, somehow. If you can get over the fact that Ender is not attempting to exterminate a species any longer, they're enjoyable reading. There are books I would prefer that I had never read. These are not among them.

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