Calum

Sequel to Ender's Game, set three thousand years after its end. Ender is now a Speaker for the Dead, recounting the lives, motives, thoughts and actions of those he is called to speak.

Orson Scott Card wrote Ender's Game almost as an introduction to this book. Although it did not recieve as much recognition, it deals with many more complex issues - especially the treatment of strangers through Demosthenes' groupings of utlanning, framling, ramen and varelse. Much of the story focuses on recognising that the species known as piggies are ramen, the stranger that is human but not homo sapiens, rather than varelse, like the animals. Brings up ideas of how we judge others that we don't know. Neither the Xenocide nor minimal intervention is the right way.

Other characters include Novinha, a xenobiologist, and her children in the colony. They tell us something of fear and guilt, and the way that different people deal with different issues (Ender's speaking is masterful in its comprehension of the events, as well as the audience reaction.)

Enjoyable also due to the concepts of scifi technology introduced. The ansibles enable instantaneous communication, but the ideas behind starflight, protection, genetic engineering, and the unique biology of Lusitania are ideas worth revisiting.

Definitely looking forward to Xenocide, the next book.

This novel is masterful. Roy's prose is poetry, or near as. With coinages, imagery, and heartbreaking emotion, she transports you to rural Kerala and places you among the cast of the novel across the generations they span. I've just put the book down, and am attempting to extinguish the lingering feeling of oppressive, impending doom that has sat with me throughout the book. More incredibly to me, I enjoyed it, as someone who tends to avoid doom and its impending arrival at as many opportunities as possible. Roy boldly tells you what is going to happen in the very first pages, and unfolds the path to get there beautifully, keeping you entranced not by suspense but with the weight of inevitability. I didn't think it would work until I read it.

Inevitability is not just the feeling of the book, it's also a theme. There is history, and there is History. We might take the former as a set of facts, and the latter as facts personified, empowered to affect the ways in which we live. The titular God of Small Things is a the personal tragedies that fall victim to History, when the things we want and need are unreachable because of History's designs and strictures. How free are we, when we live amidst ideology, tradition, family, society? Are we free to live, to love? I won't say this novel gives me hope that we are. I don't even think it makes it clear that we will be; this is a tragedy and History can be ruthless with those that rebel against it. What it does do, is remind me that we should be, because the cost of living constrained thus is far too high a price to pay.

I was wondering what I'd get when I noticed what appeared to be fantasy from [a:Kazuo Ishiguro 4280 Kazuo Ishiguro https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1424906625p2/4280.jpg] on the library shelf. [b:The Buried Giant 22522805 The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451444392s/22522805.jpg 41115424] proves to be remarkably Kazuo. In this fictional Albion with ongoing Anglo-Saxon conflict, he threads an underlying question of what it means to be British, that to me feels like the kind of interrogation you can only really have when you grow up a non-native Brit. It's startling, at least to me, to see the landscapes of England shifted to fantasy and yet described so accurately (or what I imagine to be accurately). He gets the spirit of the place.Setting aside, the novel is an odd, timeskipping piece. We're kept in the dark about most of the plot, since the characters don't really know what's going on half the time anyway. It's interesting to meet characters who don't remember their own lives, but I wouldn't say the experience is particularly fun. The jumps in perspective and time, even mid paragraph, are disorienting. Again, that's sort of the point, I suppose, but it's not easy to read. Ishiguro gets an amazing sense of tone and atmosphere here; it's certainly “literary” or at least feels that way. Yet impressive prose doesn't make it entirely enjoyable, so come into this with appropriate expectations...

Continues on from Speaker for the Dead. Valentine and her family arrive on Lusitania, even as Starways Congress' Fleet bears down on the planet with the M.D Device. Ender is struggling under the impending doom from the Fleet, the adaptable and destructive descolada, the diplomacy between the three sentient species and the problems within his own family.

Introduces Han Qing-jao, Han Fei-tzu and Si Wang-mu, who live on the Taoist Chinese world of Path. They are given a mandate to discover the whereabouts of the Lusitania fleet after Jane hid it. Raises issues of servility, as well as the nature of religion and faith when it has been engineered into you.

Orson Scott Card expands on his idea of the philotes, indivisible particles that join and create everything real. They use this idea to permit instantaneous starflight by shifting to the Outside and back In. Possible relations to string theory? The concept of an auia, the spirit philote which represents an individual - controlling a network of smaller auias in cells etc. resembles a physical soul. Provides mechanism for Jane's emergence, and for the transfer of memories in the pequenino lifecycle.

Ender

Set immediately after the events of Ender's Game, this sequel narrates Ender's life following the end of the Bugger War. The story deals primarily with the guilt that Ender feels as a result of having killed two boys while at Battle School, and the unknowing xenocide of an entire species.

Ender sacrifices his reputation by revealing the deaths of Bonzo and Stilson to the court martial, even though he is unable to understand why the buggers “let him win.” He travels out into the colonies to find an answer, and eventually lets himself be beaten up, partly to punish himself.


Orson Scott Card provides some further great lore on the wars during Peter's ascent to the Hegemony. I enjoyed the following up of many characters from Ender's Game, as well as the power the jeesh had on the new Earth. Insight into the way the colonies were created was also welcome.

I think this book falls down on the necessity of sticking with the previous timeline at the end of Ender's Game. Card's afterword notes that he is prone to making errors in continuity. The book suffers from spending a lot of time dealing with how Ender sees his parents and sister on his way to Shakespeare, and much less with his own redemption until the very end. Various plotlines on the ship appeared gratuitous to me - enjoyable to read, but not apparently necessary and diminishing from the “point” of the book.

Looking forward to exploring more of Ender's universe.