I’ll warn you : this is a discussion about Ender’s series ; this will contain spoilers.

A few months back, I started listening to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s game and was entirely taken by that book. I had heard Brandon Sanderson tell that this was probably the best SF book ever written, and I agreed wholeheartly.

Then, I took up “Speaker for the dead”. I found this book much less compelling than the first one, though still pretty good. I had expected this book to be about the guilt of a young boy after having killed billions innocent aliens, but instead, I was thrown in a new place : Lusitania. At first, I didn’t relate to what was happening there, and even grew to dislike some characters (enter Novinha). Then, Ender arrived at the place, and things started to get interesting, so the book was still good, but failed to grab me until the characters I already knew entered the scene. The end chapters were quite rivetting, bringing revelations about the native aliens of the planet, and the saga could have stopped there.

I believe that Orson Scott Card meant it to stop there.

Then, enters “Xenocide”, the third book in the series. I found that one even less interesting than the previous one. Not that it was bad, but compared to the first, this is a different species of books entirely. Once more, we’re introduced to a new world (Path) that, if nice to learn about, still isn’t where Ender lives. And for Ender, he seems like a shadow of himself in this book and I started more and more to become interested in Valentine, because Ender had basically ceased to be Ender. I’ll grant you that I never liked Novinha, and having Ender marrying her left me … well… unhappy to say the least : having him almost whine as she did her usual selfish things was almost too much for me. What interested me in this book, you could ask? Well, the physicist inside me got very interested at the depiction of the physics of Enderverse that are presented in this book : from instantaneous travel to evolution to the nature of a soul. This did indeed fascinate me more than the characters did. I felt that the ending was a little rushed, but after hearing the afterword by the author, I understand why : the book was too large and had to be cut in two, so the ending of the first part is not as good as it could have been.

Now, I have to listen to the last installment : “Children of the mind”. I’ll report there my conclusions when I’m done listening to this one.