What comes around, goes around. I introduced Vin to the Orson Scott Card bolt of lightning known as Ender’s Game, and I shared my copies of Speaker for the Dead and Ender’s Shadow with him. But I didn’t know there are even more Ender novels, so I was pleasantly surprised to borrow Xenocide, which I recently finished. Even better news is that there are a total of eight books in this setting, and I’ve only read half of them.
Xenocide, like the others, booms ahead with a story that stretches the mind a bit, without making you work hard on the language. It’s been a while since I read Speaker for the Dead, so it took me a bit to get back into the vagaries of the planet Lusitania. But once there, I was happily turning pages. I found the plot twist that salvages our heros a bit much (faster than light travel), but set in a universe where instantaneous communication (via the ansible) is possible, I suppose you can’t be too picky. And, as with the other Ender books I’ve read, it’s the people that matter. I heard Michael Chabon on the radio this morning, talking about how he hates pigeonholes. The best authors don’t get trapped in one… although I’ve been plenty happy mindlessly turning pages in novels where the author delivers on the same formula time and again. As long I keep mixing it up, I’m happy.