Children of the Mind

Orson Scott Card completes this complex saga by taking it from the tactical and emotional logic of its roots, to an all out orgasm of philosophical and metaphysical speculation. This does make things fun, but unlike the previous books where it was easy to follow where things where going due to Card's habit of hashing each tiny bit of logic out, here you have to swallow a lot of far-out concepts. I couldn't do that with all of this, so I felt a little less invested than I had in the past.

There's also the problem that after said orgasm, things dissolve into a whole lot of fluffy pillow talk. I know Card has never been exactly a gritty writer, I don't read his books for that, but the fact that things finish so damn prettily and the two major pairings wed with only sharing a single kiss respectively, just makes me want to roll my eyes. I think there is a reason why Card's most famous - and probably his best, though I haven't read anything else outside of the Ender series - book was about children.

So I'm pretty conflicted about this book. Parts I really enjoyed, others I really didn't. And as a whole it left me feeling kind of awkward.

Ok, this one was the last nail in the coffin. The basic idea is that Ender was sort of cloned twice, and now there is an evil and a good copy of his. The problem is that all characters act the same. I know these clones are a part of Ender, but it felt pointless to have such an elaborate story just for that.

The story was very boring. Even form the previous book, the whole thing with Novinha acting all religiously, and Ender himself converting to religion was a slap in the face for me.

While this isn't the official ending of the Ender saga, I think it serves as a pretty reasonable practical ending.

A couple of years ago, I re-read Ender's Game followed by Speaker for the Dead and then right on to Xenocide, all of which were pretty fantastic. I originally started CotM at that time, but just couldn't get into it, making it about 20% of the way in before setting it aside. This time I got the audiobook (first Ender book I've listened in audio format) and I think that really helped. TBH, I also “cheated” and read the summary on wikipedia. In the previous novels, Peter was always a very hated character for me, so him being featured prominently (though not really!) is what I think kept me from getting into it previously. That's where the summary helped me conceptually, because I was better oriented to what was going on.

That said, this is a pretty good story that resolves the main story line that occurs starting in SftD and continues in Xenocide, ending that book in something of a cliff-hanger

-At the end of Xenocide, the Starways Congress has decided the Descolada virus is such a threat to all of humanity that even quarantine isn't sufficient to mitigate the risk, so they order the star fleet to destroy the planet with the Mini-Doctor device. Simultaneously, they have discovered the existence of Jane and see her not as another sentient species, but as a malicious virus/threat infecting their systems, so they secretly enact a plan to shut down the ansible network upon which she exists as her neural network.This book covers:a. How the xenobiologists on Lusitania create an antidote to the descolada virus, which involves extreme manipulation of space/timeb. That has a side effect of allowing instantaneous interstellar travelc. It has another side effect that ends up in Ender being split into 3 bodies and a few other side effects as well.d. There are several missions relating to 2 major objectives: getting Starways Congress to rescind their order; finding habitable planets to evacuate the species and residents of Lusitaniae. Finally, there's a little side-shoot discussing how Jane might be saved.Personally, I felt it was a satisfying conclusion to this series. I don't feel a great desire to get into the 5th book and reviews on that one aren't stellar (pun-intended). However, I enjoy the series well enough to look into Bean's "Shadow" series, so that will likely be tackled before too long. I understand the 2 series "come together" in the 5th book, so maybe I'll tackle it then.