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Sequel To 'Ender's Shadow': ' Shadow Of The Hegemon'
enthalpyX writes: "According to The Philotic Web, Orson Scott Card's series, which began with 'Ender's Game' didn't end quite yet with Ender's Shadow. Due to be released January 2, 2001, 'Shadow of the Hegemon' will delve into Bean's life helping Peter rule the "old world" Ender left behind. You can read the first five chapters over at hatrack.com."
Its important to reward authors using the new mediums when so many are poo-pooing e-books and the web.
Orson Scott Card has to be one of the best writers of *anything* to come down the pike in a long time. He's as moral as Asimov and Heinlen, as original as Frank Herbert, and such an interesting writer. Right now I'm in the middle of the Alvin Maker series, which is a great fantasy Alt.History. Read it!
"Blow up your TV/Throw away your paper/
Move to the country/Build you a home"
io hymen hymnaee io
io hymen hymnaee
.. I still think Orson Scott Card's greatest work was The War of the Worlds.
Didn't Slashdot already have a story on this?m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/30/1018246.sht
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I must say, and I hope I don't incite a riot by saying this (it's just my opinion), but I personally consider the Ender's Game set (counting however many books there are now) to be my favorite large story in book form. It's right up there next to my favorite large story in audio-visual form, that being Babylon 5, of course.
(My friend loaned me her copy of Ender's Game one Friday night. I read it cover to cover the next day, and bought the whole set the day after. Had them all done in less than a week. I can't wait to read more.)
You are right while Card rocks in many ways and most of his books are great. Also I'm from Utah where he has a special place in all our geek hearts. I have to agree that Ender's Game should have been the first and last book with young Ender in it. I think that instead of this I will read Treason again. Although I have yet to click over to the preview and it might change my mind I'm not hopeful.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I find that a lot of people say that. Being a philosophy major, I found the post-Ender's Game books (except for Ender's Shadow) quite interesting. He certainly has some interesting philosophy that good to ponder, but wouldn't cut crap in the language and mind philosophical circles (even though some, such as Daniel Dennett, with whom I study under, would agree with him).
The conceptual and ethical ideas of a self-conscious computer make great SF corallary reading to all the dry texts that I read.
If you take the time to try to pick up these tidbits, I'm sure you'll enjoy the AI philosophical side (along with the other phil tangents that OSC takes).
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
However, "Ender's Shadow" was terrible. Admit it. Didn't you start really biting your lip when "the light on Bean's console began flashing, indicating that he should take over the attack on the bugger homeworld." Weren't you horrified by the reverse temporal lobotomy performed on Ender? Didn't you want to cry when all of the original Bean/Ender interaction was twisted beyond recognition?
I'm not reading the next book. It will be difficult for me, but in order to preserve what enjoyment I have left in the originals, I must stop now. Please, Mr. Card, consider doing the same.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
What is the general feeling to a continuation to the Alvin Maker series ? Does it feel "complete" after five books. - Slightly offtopic I guess but it IS Orson Scott Card. Maker is just as good as Ender, IMHO.
MRoeder
Ender's Game is without a doubt my favorite single book, followed closely by The Hobbit. The Ender Series is my second favorite series (following The Lord of the Rings and followed by The Wheel of Time. It is truly original, in my opinion; the idea of consciousness governing everything was new in Ender's Game, to be repeated in Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass and His Dark Materials (another of my favorites).
I must say that it has come to change my outlook on life. I've converted from agnostic to Wiccan since then. I want more than anything for the universe to be conscious--it would be incredible. Orgasmic.
Read this series if you haven't. I'm going to check out the last two books (Ender's Shadow and The Shadow of the Hegemon) as soon as Christmas comes around and I finish reading the ninth book of the Wheel of Time. Also make sure to check out Pullman's The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. Excellent books with a similar viewpoint.
Aciel
aciel@speakeasy.net
i just finished writing a paper on searle vs dennett, man those guys really dont seem to like each other very much at all... :p ... it seems that searle is on the right track moreso, at least for suggesting the irreducibility of consciousness. dennett probably wouldn't agree though. stupid functionalist.
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I own Ender's Shadow. I've read the 5 online chapters...
It seems to me that there is entirely too much self exposition by the character towards the readers. It makes it entirely too dry, to analytical, too heavy handed.
The first book had this way of grabbing you, of making you feel for Ender, of making you feel like you could be Ender.
I didn't have any such feelings for Bean (though he is admittedly difficult to relate to, given his nature), and no such feelings for Petra.
I don't feel any synergestic sympathy for the characters.
In fact, the person I felt the most for/with in the online chapters was Peter; if he becomes the main character in this book, perhaps we can recapture the same energies as the original Ender's Game.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
The series went downhill after Ender's Game. I read Speaker, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender's Shadow in that order. Don't get me wrong, they *were* good books. But Card just couldn't top Ender's Game. I read through Speaker and Xenocide hoping it would somehow take off and once again be the book that I originally loved. It didn't happen. Ender's Shadow is the better of the 'quels. Bean is *so* cool.
Hell yes. The books got progressively worse as the series went on.
On the other hand, I liked the subtle ways in which Neal Stephenson's books could be considered sequels/prequels to one another. Apart from avoiding any hint of trying to establish a franchise, it also made readers think more about the future possibilities of plotlines. Not to mention it being a great source of topics for arguments if the Diamond Age and the Snow Crash share any characters :-).
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"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Card explained why he started writing the sequels in the intro to Ender's Shadow. He was going to start farming out the Ender "universe" to other authors, and let them write from the point of views of other characters from the story. He'd even got someone who was interested in doing this. But, then, the more he thought about it, the more jealous he was of the guy who was going to get to do this. Eventually, he decided to swipe the project back.
Now, of course, you could say that's all a smoke screen. But it sounds to me like he did it for one reason: fun.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I feel the Ender's Game is five star science fiction (e.g. Dune, just the first one, and the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove). It is a well written fast paced story, appeals to both young and old. The second, Speaker for the Dead, was again five star science fiction and superbly written. It has a slower pace than the first and dealt with politics. And then we have the third book, Xenocide.
This book had some great ideas (I was particularly impressed with the people that where way out of control obsessive-compulsive (even by obsessive-compulsive standards)), the story was good for a while, but there was damning flaw. I feel that Card wrote himself into a corner and pulled the old deus ex machina to get out of it. I was so PISSED. The story in Xenocide was good (not as good as the first two) and then it was severly dicked up in the ending. After that I never even bothered to pick up any of the rest, Ender's Shadow, I was a Teenage Ender, etc...
The reason I am bringing this to your attention is that those 5 chapters maybe wonderful (I don't know as I have not read them yet) but unless he has improved you might find yourself pissed off, and out 20 bucks if you buy this book based off of those first 5 chapters.
I think that Card is a very talented author but he needs to move on to greener pastures and stop beating this dead cow even more.
With the abundance of books to read and constraints on time I find myself very picky in what I read, and once an author pisses me off, it is very unlikely that I will read anymore of their work. I know some of you will disagree with my criticisms of the series. I could be wrong, but I have not heard any arguments convincing enough on why I should pick up the series again. So if you have any please enlighten me.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
and a damned funny one, but way over the heads of this crowd apparently, seeing that it was even marked down to 0..
Slashdot picked up another Kuro5hin story. I just wish the book was closer to being released. So here are my comments, from there to here...
:) but realize that he's been talking about it for years. I, for one, hope it happens sometime soon, but even if it happened tomorrow, it'd probably be at least three years before we saw anything.
:) but they're slower, and they have different characters, and most importantly they aren't necessarily what his audience was expecting out of him...
:)
Yeah, I've seen Card talk about [his movie plans], too, (since I live in North Carolina
I'd love it if they could film the two at once, because then you'd get all the same cast at the same time. There aren't really any other decent sequel possibilities that wouldn't be completely different, and otherwise, they'd screw up Ender's Shadow.
I really like almost everything in that series, but everything after Ender's Game originally is pretty different. They're good books, and they aren't a rehash of Ender's Game, either, like Ender's Shadow is, (even though I love that, too
Card writes a lot of stuff, and some of it hits the mark; I liked the Harmony series, and I really enjoyed Songmaster and A Planet Called Treason. Most of his short stories are really good, which is funny since he claimed that he can't write short stories decently. I didn't like the Alvin Maker series as much, but maybe I just wasn't expecting American Historical Fantasy...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hegemon, I choose you!
Bullshit. If I had the computing resources he had, I would write a software that could defeat any enemy, human, alien, or machine, that had less computer power at hand, claw, or interface. Let's face it, "intuition" isn't about magic, it's just software that runs in a computer made of approximately 1e11 neurons, each with about 1e3 synapses and capable of doing some 1e2 computations per second. Yes, software can be made more efficient, but it cannot do magic, you need hardware power as well.
It's just plain stupid to assume that the human mind has some magic power. It just runs on hardware that hasn't (yet) been duplicated in the lab. The Wright brothers didn't achieve supersonic speeds in their first flight either.
Excellent book, took me 2 days to read it! Of course, now we've gotta wait another year or two to get volume 10 :(
While I'm anxiously awaiting any new Orson Scott Card issue, I've noticed several persons suggesting authors or titles they feel to be of parallel quality with Card's "Ender" series; I'll add my two cents worth! Do yourselves a favor and check out Christopher Hinz's AWESOME "Paratwa" series! EASILY on the same level as Card, Asimov or Herbert. The three Paratwa titles should occupy space on your sci-fi shelf: Liege Killer, Ash Ock, and The Paratwa, in order. I only wish Hinz, who has not been heard from in YEARS, would write again - If not something new, a continuation of the Paratwa series would be MOST welcome! : )
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Then, I looked for the release date - January 2001! Auggh!
I'm really looking forward to this new line of sequels - I thought Ender's Shadow was a very thoughtful and engaging retelling of Ender's Game.
The best part is that it's not just a repeat of Ender's Game - the part of the story where Bean and Ender coincide is a much smaller percentage of the book than I initially thought it would be.
They have something of a personal animosity to each other that leads them to seemingly deliberately misread each other. Searle doesn't believe that consciousness is indecipherable, only that it hasn't been deciphered, and most importantly isn't computational or informational - that it is a biological property of animal brains, and that no moving around of symbols or representations can generate it, anymore than a blackboard can understand the words that are written on it.
**Warning! Possible Spoilers!**
Got ahold of an "uncorrected advance copy" through ABEBooks.com, and I must say that this book at least lives up to the standard of Ender's Shadow, if not Ender's Game. Card goes into the battle between Peter and Bean vs. Achilles, you find out something...interesting about Ender's parents, and Peter Wiggin's character finally becomes a little more 3-dimensional. I won't say more than that, other than that I read this book in something like 3 or 4 hours flat...it's that good.
Orson Scott Card will be the Guest of Honor at LOSCON 27 , the Los Angeles Literary Science Fiction Convention, from November 24 through 26. The convention is at the Burbank Airport Hitlon in Burbank, CA. Other guest include Ray Bradbury, J. Michael Straczynski, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and many more...
yes i'd say that sums up searle's view well. the biggest issue for me vis a vis the nature of consciousness comes into play once we have actually unlocked the machinations of the brain itself, i.e., even with a highly detailed realtime MRI of every single neuron, synapse, neurotransmitters, etc. we still wouldn't be able to derive the subjective states of consciousness. we might be able to poke someone with a sharp stick, watch the neurons fly in response to the stimuli but we'll never ever be able to get a grip on the quale of the experience. when dennett goes and tries to say that we shouldn't count qualia as existing exactly because of their subjuctive nature is ridiculous. they may be subjective, yes, but that doesn't negate their property of being the appearance of reality to the thinker. this, it seems, is what searle was trying to prevent from happening when he argues for the irreducibility of counsciousness.... trying to cut dennett off at the pass, as it were. (btw, we need more philosophy on /.) hehehe.
canadaman
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In the Salon article about the original two books. Apparently some lesbian-in-codependency-recovery (aren't they all?--bad Teleny! bad, bad, Teleny!) decided to talk to Card about the book, and how much of a "healing experience" it was to read it. Bad mistake. Card is a Mormon and takes a very dim view of lesbians. The l-in-c-r took a dim view of war (being politically correct and all). The resulting deadlock was hilarious, as Card sounded incredibly sensible (albeit a bit conservative) and the l-in-c-r sounded increasingly hysterical. Don't miss this one. WWF RAW is WAR was never so vehement. Really!
teleny, friend of cats.
You'll only be disappointed if you expect the rest to be the same (and that would be sequels-for-money). Speaker, Xenocide and Children of the Mind are, IMNSHO, excellent books but not adventure stories (which Ender's game is [if you want adventure I suggest Peter F Hamilton]).
I think that one reason why a lot of people identify with Ender aged 6 is that he's relatively unformed (we all could have been Ender inside our heads) and we root for him so much more. The older Ender is a stranger to us, he's had thousands of (objective) years we don't know about and we come stright into his mid life crisis. I liked all of the books (even-shock- Ender's Shadow). Give them a chance (use a library if you need to). If your disappointed so what! At least you won't have wasted your time watching the TV.
-Are you sure it's a red alert, it will mean changing the bulb-
Nana, you got it confused. First it was a short story. Then he was writing Speaker for the Dead and he decided it would be cool if Ender was the Speaker. That meant he had to rewrite Ender's Game to make it fit together. Like he says, theres a thousand right ways to tell a story and ten thousand wrong ones.
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Open Source Sysadmin
This is not the first time OSC has used an electronic medium to allow his readers to get an advance look at a novel. IIRC, the Hatrack River area on (gasp) AOL was a popular hangout for Card fans some years back... I don't know whether it still exists, as I haven't subscribed to AOL in many years. However, when I was a subscriber, OSC released the entire text of Children of the Mind before the book hit the presses. I downloaded my copy, read it voraciously, and then bought a dead tree version in hardback.
Recommended OSC books:
Check out Hatrack River for more official details about OSC's work, and the Philotic Web for the unofficial details.
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies