This post will discuss my impressions on Children of the mind, by Orson Scott Card. There will be spoilers, so if you intend to read that book, or any other book in the Ender series, consider yourself warned.

Children of the mind is the last opus in the Ender thread started in Ender game, that was followed by Speaker for the dead, and Xenocide.

As you can recall (see previous post),I had some trouble with Xenocide. Not that it was bad, but it felt long (way too long), and I didn’t care too much for the characters anymore. After hearing the afterword by the author, I discovered that the story had been cut in two, and that I would have another installment in a series I was finding was not going to a good place. So, I was more than a little apprehensive at starting the last book.

And guess what?

I was completely wrong! Children of the mind (despite the dreadful title) is perhaps the best book in the series, after Ender’s game (I don’t think even OSC himself can best that book). All the things that I felt were dragging in Xenocide were put in the background here, and old characters that were a little in the back before are brought to light. I felt something to these characters : Jane, Si Wang-mu, Peter, even Quara (though she is strong-headed through the end). Sure, some plot elements, felt strange : I still cannot understand why nobody even thought to use one of the starships as a target for the bomb that has been launched at the planet, but despite those (which had me almost shouting “idiots, why don’t you just…”), I cared to much about the characters to… well, care.

Sure, I asked myself what was all the fuss about with Jane, since it was obvious stopping every computer access to the network was not going to kill her, especially when she had so many friends storing her memories away, ready to reinject them into the network once it was restarted. But still, when she says “I’m dying”, I felt something for her. To me, at this point in the series, she’s the character I feel the most about.

Then you have the surprise, and it’s there that you see how OSC is good at what it does : Peter. You know peter, basically as an evil guy. When he was brought back in Xenocide, I thought that since that copy was coming from Ender’s memories, this one would be super-evil (since Ender never saw the good side of Peter, as did Valentine). In fact, to push that supposition in Xenocide, OSC puts in some very witty and cutting remarks from Peter to show you that he’s as bad as you think he is, but he did bring enough foreshadowing that when in Children you start seeing him change, you entirely buy it. This gives you a character with a steep growth arc, a character that ends up being the hero of the story. How’s that for an irony?

And then, there’s ender. I had stopped caring for him in Xenocide, perhaps even at the end of Speaker, so when the inevitable (not surprising, but I don’t think it was meant to be) comes, I felt nothing. Almost “good riddance, now I can have more of the interesting characters”. That’s sad in a way, that for a character I cared so much for in Ender’s game, a character that I could admire greatly in Speaker, I cannot even care when he’s killed off. In the afterword, OSC tells that his editor was not happy with him that he killed his character, but to me, that character died books ago, so I don’t see what the fuss is about.

Now, I’ll go the the second series : the one about Bean. Back to battle-school! Yeah!