So, I finally got around to reading Ender's Game and enjoyed it greatly. I was looking on amazon and its sequals seem to have a lot of mixed reviews. For those of you who have read them, are they worth reading? Are there some that should be avoided or seem to ruin the characters? I'd like to spend more time with this character and in this setting, but I don't really feal like ruining my experience with the first book.
So, I finally got around to reading Ender's Game and enjoyed it greatly. I was looking on amazon and its sequals seem to have a lot of mixed reviews. For those of you who have read them, are they worth reading? Are there some that should be avoided or seem to ruin the characters? I'd like to spend more time with this character and in this setting, but I don't really feal like ruining my experience with the first book.
I started Speaker for the Dead, but I couldn't finish it. I didn't want to wait through the whole book to finally figure out the mystery. I didn't even bother with the others.
I'd recommend the Homecoming Saga, though.
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So, I finally got around to reading Ender's Game and enjoyed it greatly. I was looking on amazon and its sequals seem to have a lot of mixed reviews. For those of you who have read them, are they worth reading? Are there some that should be avoided or seem to ruin the characters? I'd like to spend more time with this character and in this setting, but I don't really feal like ruining my experience with the first book.
I enjoyed them. Now I listened to them on audio book, so if there were parts I didn't like I just tuned them out, but I'm not recalling anything specific that I didn't like.
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32
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I loved Ender's Game as well and bought the sequals, but after my wife read them and told me they were only average and nowhere near as good as EG I gave them a miss.
So I can't help you on whether I thought they were any good, but you've got my wife's reccommendation (although she's not a sci-fi kinda person, I have convinced her to read a couple of my novels).
I liked Speaker for the Dead quite a lot. But after that I lost interest. They just didn't grab me as much. I felt like the story had been told and it was time to move on.
I have read them all. None of them come close to Ender's game, but they are all good, and worth reading.
Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide are very different than those books based around the battle school -- like the >last few<.
In the original three, my fav character after Ender is Jane the AI.
Edit: Have you seen >these< ?
I've absorbed every last book in the series. I've even read all the "parallel" novels about the Giant. I did it gradually over about a decade, so it was all well and good for me to digest and reflect on each one individually. What's interesting is that the two series of books are so vastly different in tone, pacing, structure, narrative voice, just every aspect really that they almost seem to be written by two different authors. It's wyrd.
By all means, read the rest of what follows Ender's Game. But be warned, it'll take you to a strange place. The rest of the series isn't anything at all like Ender's Game. Which is a shame really, almost, since Ender was such a brilliantly crafted story. It's beautiful as a stand-alone work. Almost doesn't need or work with sequels since they go off on such a bizarre tangent, instead of building on the original theme and direction as most sequels do. But if you like the kind of a book which is a real meal for your mind, a big thick subliminal sandwich that you have to chew on for a long time, then you will really enjoy Speaker, Xenocide, and (especially) Children of the Mind.
But only if you rally have a taste for some esoteric mindbending sci-fi physics. And if you're that kind of a person, well why don't you stand up and give yourself a hand.
Wayfinder, PaizoCon Founder
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We have them all. I will agree with the others than Ender's Game is quite different than its sequels. But not different=bad. I enjoyed them as a whole...because I love to read series.
Now, I did really enjoy the series following Bean: Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hedgemon, Shadow Puppets, and Shadow of the Giant. Puts a LOT of depth into the Enderverse.
Lastly, Ender in Exile was recently released (Nov 2008). It is a prequel to Speaker for the Dead. I bought it, but I haven't read it yet....I am gearing up to re-read the Ender's series again as a whole to maximize my enjoyment of the newer book.
FYI, here's a timeline for all these books that I just ran across.
Chief Technical Officer
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I've read just about every piece of fiction Orson Scott Card has published, and I actually think Speaker for the Dead is a better novel than Ender's Game. Xenocide is only ok. Children of the Mind is thoroughly skippable. The Shadow series and Ender in Exile are all pretty good, but none of them approach the greatness of the first two.
Thanks for all the responses. I think I'll wait a while and then try a few of the Shadow series. As for the other sequals, I'm not sure if I can put up with another Dune series. The first three were excellent but then it degraded into philoreligiousophical dreck (haven't read any of the ones by Herbert's son yet).
As an update, I just read Ender's Shadow because it turns out my uncle has a copy. Overall, I'd say it was pretty good. Card did an excellent job of weaving the new story into the pre-established framework of Ender's Game, but I didn't care for the Bean character that much. A huge thing Card seemed to miss was that there was no hint in Ender's Game that Bean was the genius that he was made into for Ender's Shadow. That fact escaping Ender seemed highly unlikely, and I didn't remember it coming up in the original book. If there was anything that really annoyed me, it was this:
Overall, it was worth reading.
FYI, here's a timeline for all these books that I just ran across.
That's nice to see. Definitely helps put all these books in order, especially for someone new to them.
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I really liked Ender's Game, and while Speaker and Xenocide had some interesting themes, it felt entirely too much like Ender Wiggins had become a security blanket of sorts that the author was afraid to leave behind. The themes of Speaker for the Dead, IMO, would have been easier to explore with a completely different character. It felt like a great story, being held back by Ender being dragged around like Linus' ratty old blanket.
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Wayfinder, PaizoCon Founder
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Finished "Ender in Exile" about a week ago...I quite liked it. Some of the stuff at the end felt quite rushed (like "Whoa! I'm nearly at the alloted page limit, and I haven't even written about THIS!"). But, all in all, I felt that it gave me a better idea about WHO Ender was. Neat.
Right now, I am re-reading "Ender's Shadow" and I must say...I really like Bean. I am enjoying this book just as much as I did "Ender's Game". Mostly because it is a companion to it. It's the whole story, and really adds a depth to it all, with the 2 different points of view.