Last time around, in "Ender's Peak", I looked at Orson Scott Card's famous book, Ender's Game, and the three direct sequels to that book. I ended up enthusing (rather embarrassingly) about Ender's Game itself and expressing some disappointment about the following books, Speaker for the Dead (which was formerly one of my favorites), Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. Please see that column for a more detailed explanation.

A few years after Children of the Mind came out in 1996, Card decided to reboot the series. But not with a sequel per se: Ender's Shadow, published in 1999, is a retelling of Ender's Game from the point of view of a character named Bean, who is the shadow of the title and becomes Ender's friend over the time period covered by the original book. Speaker for the Dead jumped ahead 3000 years, but that far future stuff is all gone; Ender's Shadow is set firmly in the same near future as Ender's Game. Over the next six years, Card wrote another three books in the series, all taking place right after the events of Ender's Shadow. So the two series form parallel tracks in the lives of their respective protagonists, Ender and Bean, with four books apiece. Of course, the eight book count is not a complete tally; by Card's own account, he has one more book planned for each series.

Ender's Shadow

Ender's Shadow begins in the mean streets of Rotterdam, a city flooded with refugees and orphans in the aftermath of catastrophe elsewhere in the world. Children of various ages are doing their best to survive without much in the way of adult help or supervision; gangs of older kids ruthlessly take away even the smallest crust from the littlest kids. In this world, Card introduces us to Bean, the tiniest of the tiny, a child so small no one can believe he can walk and talk. Bean is preternaturally smart and perceptive; he can understand gang warfare and he's probably only 3 years old when the story starts. Leaving aside for now his extreme youth . . . how does he survive on the streets? It's through his understanding of character, and even though he makes a few errors of judgment, he is essentially on the road to Battle School. The first quarter or so of Ender's Shadow takes place in Rotterdam; it feels like quite a hefty section of the book, and it serves about the same function as the section in Ender's Game where Ender is growing up and getting along/not getting along with his siblings. The characters are given a deeply rooted context that explains their subsequent actions rather neatly.

What is Battle School? As per Ender's Game, humans are fighting against the alien race known derisively as the buggers, and the best hope of humanity is the Battle School where the youngest, most promising military minds are trained. Bean, demonstrating skills crucial to this interstellar conflict by surviving an extreme situation like Rotterdam, is perfectly prepared for this kind of training. And as smart as he is, he realizes almost right away that the only "soldier" operating at anywhere near his level is Ender Wiggin. Bean enters into a competition that Ender is not aware of, since Ender is not even aware of Bean's existence at first. The rest of the story follows a path we already know from the first book, with a few wrinkles.

The main one is that Bean is a cold and analytical person, and while Ender had his inhumanly smart side, he functioned much more in the mode of emotion and compassion. Bean has a penetrating insight, and he is often forced to put it to the task of figuring out how to act like other humans. The retelling of the story in Ender's Shadow focuses on one key twist related to this that drives the emotional knife much deeper. Why didn't Ender know what his actions truly were, in the context of the game of the title? Well, Bean, even smarter, figures it out fairly quickly, as might be expected from someone who is constitutionally smarter than normal humans. But then he's also smart enough to realize that he has to keep it quiet. That's another turn of the screw on this particular emotional rack. He can see pretty clearly what the psychological devastation will be like for Ender (as happens at the end of Ender's Game, a kind of internalized Scouring of the Shire), but he goes through with it all anyway.

Ender's Shadow, to me, illustrates the peculiar power of Ender's Game—almost the same events, but told from a different point of view, still compelling and readable. There's just something about this particular tale: a young child growing up in difficult circumstances, taken away from family and sent into intense military training, and then facing ever more difficult obstacles in the pursuit of saving humanity. It's like the world's coolest boarding school novel, a science fiction version of Harry Potter.

That Harry Potter reference is apropos to a notion I had about Ender's Shadow only after reading two of the following books. There's something powerful about the story of Ender's Game, but there's also power in the storytelling style. Ender's Shadow, like Ender's Game before it, has a relentless and emotional focus on the internal life of one character. While Bean is not the most sympathetic (or even human) character, this kind of sustained submergence into his thoughts and life is bound to have results. It's like a template, and you can put anything from Dexter to Harry Potter in it—a serial killer becomes the hero, or a magical boy with a scarred forehead. Or a tiny genius, in the case of Bean. The next few books spread out the point of view until there's no clear protagonist, just a sprawling cast competing for screen time. In that basic structural sense, the sequels lost some of the same strength of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow.

I like Ender's Shadow, but it's still an odd artifact. It's also the last appearance by Ender himself, or at least the last major appearance by Ender. He shows up for a brief conversation at the end of the fourth book, but otherwise he becomes a mythical presence who is incommunicado on a colony ship heading to a faraway star.

Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets

I'm grouping these two books together, since they form a tightly paired set. The two blend into each other, as the second book, Shadow Puppets, has the logical ending for the duo. Unfortunately, the ending compares poorly to the one from Ender's Game/Shadow (but then again, what compares well to that one?).

Early on in Ender's Shadow, Bean, still stranded on the streets of Rotterdam, comes up with a scheme to fight off the bullies: their gang of little kids should get their own bully to protect them. In an example of a decision that has long-lasting consequences, he picks a bully with a limp named Achilles (pronounced Acheel), and the little gang knocks him to the ground and forces him to agree to protect them. Achilles is just what they were looking for, except that Bean gets a glimpse of his soul and sees a killer who will eventually destroy anyone who has seen him helpless. This dynamic works well in the context of one book, a personally intense narrative, but Achilles gets absurdly stretched out as the villain of the next two books, which are geopolitical thrillers.

Bizarre! He's just a kid, a Battle School washout, and he somehow has a global network. The Battle School grads, spread out across the world and feted as the heroes of the war against the buggers, exist in deathly fear 24/7 of Achilles' reach. Bean has the highest level of paranoia of any of them, but even his constant efforts can't protect those around him. This was interesting, at least for about the first half of Shadow of the Hegemon, but it got old fast after that. Bean and his friends and family have all of the resources of the world, never mind their own brains, and still they are safe nowhere. I don't know, maybe I've seen too many Bourne movies, but it's usually the one lone man who is in danger from the system, not the other way around. I simply wasn't convinced.

The three books that follow Ender's Shadow deal with geopolitical maneuvering in the aftermath of the bugger war. This geopolitical conflict feels strangely isolated, encapsulated and airless, existing away from all of the developments of the rest of the Ender series of which it is ostensibly a part. The fourth and final book remedies some of that, but it's a hard slog through these two. China attacks India, the new Muslim Caliphate attacks China's unprotected west, and so forth. Card makes the mistake of saying in one of the afterwords how he used to play a lot of Risk when he was a kid, and this is the metaphor that stuck in my mind whenever I was reading Card's future military history. He's certainly written other books with a more convincing historical feel to them.

Another odd and annoying storyline develops: Petra, one of the few female Battle Schoolers, becomes obsessed with having children; more specifically, Bean's children. Lots of folderol ensues, since Bean's children have strategic value. Unfortunately, Card never seems to use "kids" or "children" or any other synonym except one . . . I would really like to never hear the word "babies" again! In fact, I think if I ran these books through a wordcount analysis, "babies" would come up more often than "the" and "and." I'm a notoriously unobservant person for this kind of thing—I never see typos, and while I'm a fair speller, I hardly notice things like word frequency. But once you notice how much Card overuses "babies" in this series, it's like a giant knife stabbing your brain. Worse, it's not just that it's the specific word: every time I heard the word, it reminded me that the major female Battle School grad (one of only two in the story) has become a walking womb while her male compatriots are changing the world. Disturbing stuff.

Shadow of the Giant

The giant of the title refers to Bean: in the first book, he was the tiniest of the tiny, but that's no longer the case. We learn back then that Bean owes his superhuman intelligence to an experimental genetic change, one that gives him the smarts in exchange for a serious flaw. He will not stop growing, his body expanding to the point where his heart can't keep up. He's been living through each of the four books with the knowledge that his lifespan is limited to approximately twenty years, albeit twenty years with far more intelligence and capacity for achievement than other humans. As Shadow of the Giant starts, Bean can feel his heart struggling, and he has a very limited time left to live.

Achilles is thankfully out of the way, so the theme becomes the overall intransigence of the human race as it stubbornly refuses to let one man rule everyone. Peter Wiggin, older brother of Ender Wiggin, is fated to be that one man, the famous Hegemon who united Earth and brought peace to humanity just as it was expanding to other planets (the backdrop for the later Ender books). Bean is helping Peter in his quest, but other Battle School grads are loyal to their home nations, not to the abstract cause of world unity.

I was curious to see how this fabled world unity would come about. History has given us the European Union, a union of nations of relatively homogenous belief and background. What about religions at war with each other? Unfortunately, in Shadow of the Giant, the story feels like a somewhat accurate description of all of the difficulties inherent in the job of uniting humanity, then there's an authorial handwave, and we're on our way to world peace. That kind of magic might work on a personal level—I will never know anyone named Ender Wiggin, so I can't predict how he will act—but at a global/geopolitical level, it's a little more difficult to convince people in the context of the story, as well as the reader who is observing these changes.

Looking back on Ender's Shadow, I think that retelling the same story for a second time was probably the easier feat, oddly enough. For the three following books, we know that Peter Wiggin will become Hegemon so the ending is already set in stone but the events along the way are free to be molded. Ender's Shadow, set in stone all along the way, felt a little more liberated to me. Shadow of the Giant, in particular, seems like an obligatory volume. I often wonder why I have such a visceral reaction against any kind of prequel—most stories have a pretty obvious ending, and just like a prequel, the artistry is in taking the reader or viewer to that expected point with some flair. Perhaps I'm convinced that the earlier choice to skip over the part of the story that becomes the prequel material was the smart choice, e.g. the original Star Wars movie was better for skipping over all of the "who is Darth Vader and where does he come from" material. Going back feels like an admission that the earlier judgment call was a mistake.

So the series has filled in a major piece of the overall storyline of this universe, and wrapped up the story of Bean in a way that, not coincidentally, leaves it wide open for a sequel. I don't have much in the way of final words; I'm a little weary of the series, and while I admit I overdosed on the books in too short a time, I've inhaled plenty of other series without tiring of them. Let me leave it at that.