Rating: Summary: I loves these Review: I am an Ender adict, and have read all of these many times over. I found that while the Bean series were action packed and fast paced, Speaker for the Dead was by far the best of them all. The continuation of the Ender series expanded on the last chapter in the novel and gave it somewhat more of an ending.
Speaker for the dead I stayed up all night to finish and immediatly went out to buy the next. Xenocide was the hardest to get through. I found it was slow going, but still fast enough to keep one interested. Children of the Mind was an interesting concept and I liked it through and through. All in all I think this is a great buy.
Rating: Summary: children heroes Review: A group of very gifted children face the task of saving humanity. Ender, Bean and the rest of the cadets will inch their way into your mind and stay long after the final page is read. One of the best series I've read in a long time.
Rating: Summary: Orson Scott Card: Beyond Ender's Game Review: All three of these books put together in one collection was a great idea. I had trouble finding these books seperatley at a resonable price. As other reviews have said, these books are much slower paced than Ender's Game and the parrallel series that follows mainly Bean and Petra. But, their content is great with very thoughtful story lines. For those people that just want the fast paced and high intensity action books, stick with Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets. But if you want to find yourself actually thinking during a book, get this set.
Rating: Summary: Orson Scott Card: Beyond Ender's Game Review: All three of these books put together in one collection was a great idea. I had trouble finding these books seperatley at a resonable price. As other reviews have said, these books are much slower paced than Ender's Game and the parrallel series that follows mainly Bean and Petra. But, their content is great with very thoughtful story lines. For those people that just want the fast paced and high intensity action books, stick with Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets. But if you want to find yourself actually thinking during a book, get this set.
Rating: Summary: Beyond Ender Review: Contrary to what people say. This set of book has much to do with Ender's Game. Not only does Ender's Game give insight into Ender for the next books but it also shows the way humanity reacted to a threat to their race. The whole saga is about the evolution of humanity. In Ender's Game the human race reacts violently against the aliens even without a perfect understanding of them but what had to be done was done. The next 3 books show how people after the bugger wars react to a similar situation. Ender is more like the role model of humanity's goal. All humans despise Ender for what he did in the Bugger wars but then a threat of a similar nature comes around and history starts to repeat itself. All in all, The Ender Saga is a look into the human mind and a look at humanity's evolution over the course of 3000 years. It was very well written and always interesting and exciting. Probably the best books i've ever read or will read.
Rating: Summary: A great collection from Sci Fi's grandmaster Review: Don't be fooled, these sequels have little to do with "Ender's Game," despite the marketing hook into Card's early work that remains his opus magnum. They are literal sequels and center on the same main character of Ender, but other than that have as little to do with "Ender's Game" as possible: they happen on another planet decades after the original, with only one other overlapping character. However, they take the intriguing step of asking, after the hero saves the day, then what? Ender saved humanity in the first installment - where does anyone go from there to live happily ever after? The second through fourth novels explore Ender's quest to live a life that means something more than merely saving the world - by meaning something to the people around him. The best one is Xenocide. By the end of Children of the Mind, it seems like the author has run out of steam - as witnessed by a highly contrived magical return of Ender's siblings, while minor characters flip-flop on their motivation in a way that uncomfortably seems like the author himself considers it arbitrary by this point. It's no wonder that Card found greater inspiration by going back to the setting of the original Ender's Game to start a new thread of novels with the Shadow series. Still, Card's novels are the greatest and most human of any living sci-fi writer, and with few exceptions, he's never in better form than here.
Rating: Summary: passable, but don't expect too much Review: Ender's Game is one of my favorite books of all time.
These three books are not. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying these are straight drivel or anything. They are worth the read. They just don't live up to Ender's Game, Shadow Puppets, and Shadow of the hedgemon. The off world sequels got a bit too "magic" for scifi. One of the things I hated about the science in these books is that they never resolved where the energy for the ansible based creation/movement came from. The thinking program idea started off well but ultimately became a deus ex machina solution to just about every conflict in the book.
The ansible based death was a bit tacky too. There was no good explaination as to why he disolved the way he did. Even assuming that all the ansibles in his body would dissociate, that wouldn't leave a goo behind. And if the ansibles weren't dissociating why wasn't it a normal death?
The giant virus was done decently, though they would have had more tools to research it since it had to replicate. That's getting a bit picky though.
Rating: Summary: An incredible writer... Review: I also read Ender's Game in 8th grade (i'm now 16) and was astonished by the clear and quick writing and action packed story. The following summer i picked up Speaker for the Dead and started off rather disappointed by the slow, pensive prose that proved difficult to sit through, at first. After accepting it for what it was, I realized that Card's writing was slower, but nonetheless incredible. In these three books, which read like a trilogy more than sequals to an original, are packed with social commentaries and modern references that really make you think about our society as we experience it. Though it takes a while to get going, these novels have a deep, rich, suspenseful story line that keep the pages turning. Ender's game reads like an action movie, play by play, blow by blow, all linear and in order. These novels have recurring themes, changing ideas, plot lines and characters that come and go and all come to a climax in the end of Children of the Mind. Trust me, if you just suck it up and deal with the technical writing of Speaker for the Dead and the dense analytical philosophy of Xenocide (both of which i appreciated and enjoyed, but were rather slow going) Children of the Mind really brings it all together. If you skip these three, you'll be sorry you did.
Rating: Summary: Nice to see these together Review: I hate reviews that don't tell you that this is a collection of 3 books: books 2-4 in the Ender's Series. So if you buy this, don't buy them twice as "Speaker For the Dead", "Xenocide", and "Children of the Mind". Now that I've got the most important info I look for in the reviews section out of the way, I might as well review it. First off, I like the bundled collection method of publishing older books in a series... omnibus paperback editions tend to fall apart on the first reading. First time Ender's series readers may prefer to skip these. Going from Ender's Game to Ender's Shadow and continuing the Shadow series (the newer books) probably works as an alternate series path to follow the main action. That said, addicts need to have the full Ender's experience, and will eventually have to read these books. And they will regret reading them out of order if they skip over the slower paced books in the series (this collection) to get to the more exciting books (pretty much all the rest ), so get this collection and save the headache of trying to find the individual books. As for the content of the books in this collection, check out the reviews on the individual books themselves.
Rating: Summary: Nice to see these together Review: I hate reviews that don't tell you that this is a collection of 3 books: books 2-4 in the Ender's Series. So if you buy this, don't buy them twice as "Speaker For the Dead", "Xenocide", and "Children of the Mind". Now that I've got the most important info I look for in the reviews section out of the way, I might as well review it. First off, I like the bundled collection method of publishing older books in a series... omnibus paperback editions tend to fall apart on the first reading. First time Ender's series readers may prefer to skip these. Going from Ender's Game to Ender's Shadow and continuing the Shadow series (the newer books) probably works as an alternate series path to follow the main action. That said, addicts need to have the full Ender's experience, and will eventually have to read these books. And they will regret reading them out of order if they skip over the slower paced books in the series (this collection) to get to the more exciting books (pretty much all the rest ), so get this collection and save the headache of trying to find the individual books. As for the content of the books in this collection, check out the reviews on the individual books themselves.
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