Ender's Shadow - Orson Scott Card

Fourteen years after the publication of Ender's Game, and only three after the conclusion of the Speaker for the Dead trilogy, Orson Scott Card decided to return to the Enderverse in a very interesting way - by revisiting Ender's time in the Battle School through the eyes of another character - little Bean whose minor role in the original novel gave Card enough freedom to tell quite a different story.

Bean has grown up among the many gangs of homeless children on the streets of post-war Rotterdam. A child of unnaturally sharp intellect, he was self-aware mere days after his birth, and his life has been a lot more vicious than Ender's. Eventually he is found by Sister Carlota - a nun who works for the International Fleet, scouring the world in search for children to recruit in the war against the buggers. Bean is sent to the Battle School where he quickly realizes that he is a lot smarter than everybody else, including the school's tactic genius - Ender Wiggin himself. At first, he finds it difficult to like the boy that every eye in the station is focused on, but eventually Bean becomes one of his most trusted allies. Meanwhile he begins uncovering the many layers of deceit that the adults have built around the children in the school, refusing to play by their rules and opting instead to be their equal.

Ender's Shadow is not the same type of book that Ender's Game was. For one, it is much more smoothly written - decade and a half of experience will do that - but it is also a lot more... ordinary than the original story. Themes of child abuse, exploitation and morals are still noticeable, but this is a book about plot. And since we already have one Ender's Game, I'd call this a good thing, as Bean's story is a tremendous leap forward in the world-building of the Enderverse.

Bean himself is a drastically different character than Ender. He is twice as smart as him, but he also lacks his compassion and humanity - the very qualities that turn Ender into the potential savior of mankind. That is not to say that Bean is an emotionless robot. In fact, he makes quite the progress in the book, and by the end of the story - the climax being Ender's last "game" - he is not only an integral and passionate part of the team (as well as outside overseer, becoming the reluctant secret liaison between the children and the adults), but a key factor in the end result.

Unfortunately, coming back fourteen year later to revisit the same story from a different perspective, hides certain risks, and Card wasn't able to evade all of them. There is one particular problem with Ender's Shadow that rears its ugly head every time Bean and Ender interact. Originally, Bean was not intended to be the supernatural genius that he turned out to be. He was just another kid in the group, maybe smarter than some, a vulnerable mirror image of Ender himself when he first came into the Battle School, but nothing out of the ordinary. And while Card can tell it however he wants in Bean's own private time, whenever he and Ender meet, he must, for consistency's sake, act like he acted in Ender's Game. And that leads to him swallowing his tongue and being uncharacteristically speechless and slow-thinking in every scene he shares with Ender, just so his reactions could look the way they did in the original. This discrepancy is quite annoying, but luckily, said interactions are few and far between.

In the end, Ender's Shadow is not the revelation that Ender's Game is, but it is none the less a terrific book. Card's style is more mature and sure-footed, his story-telling skills are honed to perfection, and his world-building is way more complex, revealing many aspects of both Earth, the Battle School and the International Fleet that previous books haven't touched upon. Ender's Shadow is the beginning of the so-called "Shadow series" which - just like Ender's story - sharply changes direction after the first installment. In this case, it leads to the intrigues and war that break out on Earth after the end of the Game, and the ways that different countries try to use the genius children of the Battle School for their own ends. I am planning to reread those (as well as the Speaker trilogy) and will review them some time in the future. Meanwhile, I greatly recommend Ender's Shadow, especially if you've liked Ender's Game. But even if you haven't, it's quite a different type of story and might still win you over.

8/10

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

Ender's Game is not easy to review, and I expect to fail miserably in the task. Thing is, everybody knows this book. It is among the most important works of Science Fiction, and it's almost impossible to say anything new about it. So I won't even try. I will just go with the flow and see where it takes me.

Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is a child prodigy growing up in a near future Earth that has suffered horribly in the first wars with the alien Formics - usually called "buggers" - and is now preparing for an inevitable last conflict, united under the shaky alliance of the Hegemon, the Polemarch and the Strategos who compete for dominance while developing the International Fleet. In a world where strict birth-control laws are in place, Ender is a third child - an exception that earns him hatred and isolation from his peers. He is soon selected by the IF to train in the elite Battle School - a space station orbiting Earth, where genius children are prepared to lead Humanity's armies in the war against the buggers. But from the very beginning Ender is forced to use all his intellectual powers to win in a game more deadly than anything he has faced back on Earth. A game created by the grown-ups and as such - infinitely unfair.

It is easy not to like Orson Scott Card. In fact, he makes it exceedingly easy with all his bigotry, homophobia, religious zeal etc. etc. etc. To be perfectly honest, I stopped keeping track of his outbursts a long time ago. The reason? I don't want to know. I don't want this knowledge to cloud my perception of his earlier books. Because they - and especially Ender's Game - are among the greatest examples of SF ever written.

There are any number of ways to perceive this book. It has been banned from high schools for its themes (real and imagined both), and it has been used in teaching courses in military schools. It has been praised for the realistic way it depicts gifted children, and it has been ridiculed for the unrealistic way it depicts gifted children. It is accused of being an undercover justification of Adolf Hitler's actions, and it is a beloved symbol for intelligent children wishing to be treated as equals to adults.

But Ender's Game is - above all else - a novel that a lot of readers take personally, and that is the reason why people are so passionate about it. Like Card himself says in an introduction for the book, kids love it not because they love Ender or pity him (as most adult readers do), but because they are Ender. He rings true to them as he rang true to me when I first read the novel in my early teens. And - again as Card says in the introduction - this is possibly among the chief reasons for many cases of adults disliking Ender's Game. Because the recognition that a child could be that intelligent and perceptive, that aware, takes a lot of us to a scary place - one we may not wish to visit. Sure, Ender is an exaggeration - a 7-year old acting like a 40-year old - but at the same time he isn't. He is a lonely child doing the best he can under a pressure that no human being should endure. And he feels a child to the reader.

Another topic that often pops up when discussing Ender's Game, is that of child abuse. How far can we go in the destruction of an innocent and immensely vulnerable human being while still being able to justify our need to do so? Is it "right" to do it? Does any end justify those means? The book gives no easy answer to those questions. Or - the other side of the coin - how far can Ender take his actions and still be considered "innocent" by the reader? A lot of criticism for the book is focused upon this problem. Ender is depicted as a child, and one manipulated by adults into becoming a mass murderer. Does he have a choice? Yes - in the end he does. But to me, this is a ridiculous criticism. Because even if Card's own opinion of Ender's morals and those of the people controlling him might remain unclear, Ender's vision of himself is perfectly obvious. In fact, the entire Speaker For the Dead trilogy is a direct result of the way he feels about what he does.

Ender's Game is a simply written book. It is plain and direct - quite on purpose, as Card wanted to avoid all the "literary" games and details that draw attention away from the story and characters. In a way, it is almost surgical in its decision to not sugarcoat anything, and the atmosphere of the book is at times painfully intense. The writing might be simple, but that makes it no less masterful, and even though that was Card's first novel, it is still among the very best the genre has to offer due to the wonderful marriage of ideas, character and style.

So, is Ender's Game still relevant today, 25 years after its publication? Most definitely. It is an important book, extremely complex and multifaceted in its simplicity, and as controversial as it is brilliantly written. Anyone who considers himself a reader of SF has to read it. Whether you will like it or not depends on what you will see in it. Chances are that whatever it is, it won't leave you indifferent.

10/10