Bean There

I finally caught up with Shadow of the Giant, Orson Scott Card's latest in his Ender Shadow series.

Although Card has written plenty of books outside this trilogy, he's been writing Ender nearly as long as Lucas has been doing Star Wars. Card wrote a short story about Ender which appeared in Analog, a science fiction magazine, in August of 1977. Lucas had just released Star Wars in May of 77.

Card didn't make the short story into a novel until the mid-80s, and wrote four books in the series. The first one, Ender's Game is quite different from any of the four followups.

It chronicles the story of Ender (born Andrew, but called Ender, because his sister Valentine couldn't pronounce his name correctly, when she was young), the youngest of three children (sister Valentine, brother Peter). Earth has been fighting a war with aliens called "buggers". They won their last encounter when war hero Mazer Rackham destroyed their main ship. Now, they try to train children to be the finest strategic minds to do battle with the buggers.

Training is done in space on a space station, where the best of the best, fight in a battle room with kids divided up into teams playing what amounts to laser tag in zero-g.

The followup, Speaker for the Dead, takes place far away from Earth when Valentine and Ender leave to go to one of the colonies. Two more books serve as followups: Xenocide and Children of the Mind. After that, Card was done with the Ender series.

Or was he? A fellow author wanted to write in the Ender universe, and Card suggested writing about Bean from his perspective, set in the same universe as Ender's Game. Card became so intrigued with the idea that he decided to write it himself, and thus four books have come from this series.

As a science fiction writer, Card has never been too heavy on the science. His aliens are bug-like creatures. Light-speed travel causes time dilation. The ansible is the faster than light communication used. You're not going to find many intriguing science ideas in his books. Card's interest has always been politics and world history and there's evidence of both in his latest.

You can see Card is generally biased against Islam and China, though Islam takes the brunt of the abuse. He likes really old views of countries like India (where Virlomi proclaims she's a goddess) or the emperor of China ruling by the mandate of heaven, which are both consistent with the culture, though rather old.

What's exasperating about Card is how he doesn't mind ranking one person against another. Bean is clearly the best, even better than Ender. The loyalty to Ender is unswerving. Again and again, Card points out how Ender's jeesh (his slang for his "gang") are, by far, the top military strategists.

As a writer though, he favors the power of the word. In Ender's Game, columns written by Locke and Demosthenes (which are really Peter and Valentine Wiggin) are so influential, they convince many to fall on one side or the other. At the time, Usenet was still pretty young, so Card must have felt rather prescient thinking that writing could eventually carry weight (yet, it carries way too much, as some should simply not care).

He uses this again with essays by Lincoln and Martel (Peter and Petra, in this case). Card's been accused that his genius kids aren't very kidlike, and he's responded by saying that there have been bright kids who say that it's accurate.

Personally, I don't find it that accurate. Love and hate figure profoundly in his novels. Characters fall somewhere between ambiguously good to bad, bad, bad (Achilles mostly). Peter started off that way, as a bully of a kid, but in the Shadow series, he's rehabilitated and is shown as someone using power for the good of the world, even as it appears he's taking over the world.

Card has said one of his heroes of writing is Asimov. One thing he shares with Asimov is writing about people who have the most influence. Thus, the wars started by Ender's jeesh are mostly about them. The individuals who fight in the war are either incompetently trained, or highly trained, or highly loyal, or what-have-you. Their lives aren't particularly meaningful.

Despite Card's politics, like all Card novels, it's very readable and hard to put down. You may disagree with his characters that are supposed to be super smart, or his pronouncements on history, or even his belief that certain historical figures were that important (thus, the name Alexander being used throughout), you want to know what happens to this person or that.

Still, I did decide to wait a year until it came out in paperback before reading this. Enjoyable and exasperating at the same time.