Ender/Bean Series - Orson Scott Card

[GORDON]

I just went through all the audio books. Doing this out of memory, so pardon exclusions:

Chronological:
Ender's Game
A book with 4 novellas I can't remember the name of that happen before and after EG
Ender's Shadow
Ender in Exile
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadows in Flight
Shadow of the Giant
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
The Last Shadow

The last book came out recently, and feels like a conclusion to a series that has gone on for 40 years. "Shadow" books focus on Bean, others focus on Ender. Because Bean was always in Ender's shadow. Get it?

There were two distinct series in that list, one focusing on Ender, the other focusing on his primary general, Bean. The two storylines diverged after the first book but surprisingly came back together 20 years later in the last book.

OVERALL, good. The Shadow series focused on Bean, the young orphan military genius who fought with Ender in the last Formic (alien invasion) War, and then stayed behind to help conquer the Earth at the age of 12.

The Ender series was strange. The first book, Ender's Game, was on the USMC reading list when I went in in 1991. It is very focused on the nature of leadership. But the proper sequel to that book takes place 25 years later in Ender's life. He is now approaching middle age, is more mellow, and would rather speak eulogies at funerals than be the young military genius that I wanted more of at the age of 28 (I was young when I first read it and was disappointed). But reading it again at 40 and in my 50s, I get it. I can relate more.

The last lines of Xenocide bring tears to my eyes.

But the Bean series was what I had wanted more of in my 20s.... military genius prodigies (they had scoured the earth looking for napoleons while they were still 5 or 6, and groomed them for command) rampaging over the Earth. What strikes me as something of an author myself is that I learned "If you want to write a very clever character, the author has to be very clever himself, first." At the end of all of these audiobooks there is an "afterward from author" where Card spends 7 minutes talking about some back story of each book. In one of the strategy-heavy books Card talks about how as children he and his brothers loved to play Risk, and would even invent new maps/boards/battlefields to play against each other. He said he would stay up late at night thinking about strategies to defeat his brothers on some new Risk map they invented. And you can see that kind of strategic immersion in the "Shadow" books. These kids do genius things. I especially liked how the teenage girl only took 6 weeks to defeat Russia in a ground war in the winter.

A primary theme of these books seems to be we all take a lot of actions based on poor communication and understanding.

"Speaker of the Dead" (possibly "Xenocide, I'm mixing up settings) was a heavy criticism of religious dogma, which is surprising since OSCard is an elder in the Church of Mormon. There were a lot of heavy ideas explored in it.

The messages are generally positive. "Don't shoot first, ask questions later. Talk. Understand. And the benefits may return to us ten-fold."

Anyway, the audiobooks are..... generally, pretty good. There was one where it seemed like they had some production issues, probably the most egregious when two different readers pronounced "hegemony" differently, and they went back in post and inserted a revised pronunciation, but the audio was comically mismatched. But 99% of it is fine and really over like 200 hours of audiobook you can't complain.