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Xenocide : Volume Three of the Ender Quartet

Xenocide : Volume Three of the Ender Quartet

List Price: $7.99
Your Price: $7.19
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good book, gimp ending.
Review: This book was really good until about three quarters of the way through. Believable, interesting, thought provoking, suspenseful, etc., right up until it got toward the end. The end was absolutely gimp. Just plain gimp. He works the characters into a situation that seems hopeless. You're on the edge of your seat to find out how they manage to get out of it. Suspense factor of 10. Then he takes the readers suspension of disbelief far over the edge and sprinkles the characters with varitable pixie dust and calls it a happy ending. Gimp gimp gimp. I give it a five because it was so good for a while and I really liked the other two books

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The best of science fiction is this series.
Review: This book is a great sequel. I reccomend it. It is about 600 pages long, but its worth the reading time. It took me 2 months to read it, but thats because I am only ten years old. Read this

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: How is this book's superiority overlooked?
Review: "Ender's Game" was very good, entertaining, and thought-provoking. "Speaker for the Dead" had some interesting ethical problems among its characters. But Xenocide is in a class by itself! It makes exploring a handful of ethical questions incredibly, incredibly interesting (which I wouldn't have thought possible before reading it--I normally like books with big explosions and bug-eyed aliens). This is a novel that shocked me by breaking (far) out of the mold of what I thought I could expect from a novel (as did Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series). If my estranged son was a writer, and as my only gift I could leave him 10 books, this would be one, because I think that it tremendously expands the envelope of how fascinating a book can be when it questions foundations of human interaction that are normally overlooked. As I was reading it I became filled with a growing excitement at the possibilities that the novel had opened; where in most novels, after reading a certain amount, you can provide a fairly rigid structure for the rest of the novel, and know that the reasonable possiblities are limited, this is a novel that allows so many meaningful possibilities (to occur in a manner that would be consistent with the rest of the novel) that it is extraordinarily exciting to read

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The third Ender book meets Card's usual excellence.
Review: Xenocide is more on Card's philosophical side, but nonetheless is a highly entertaining and powerful addition to the Ender Saga. Learn what happens to the three senitent species of Lusitania, and the ongoing attempts to neutralize the descolada virus. Find out how Miro deals with his devastating handicap. For a third time, Orson Scott Card has managed to capture the feelings and emotions of his charecters in such a way that the reader can hardly put the book down

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not as exiting as ENDER'S GAME, decent though.
Review: An adequate apology for SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD. Definitly a good book, but not near as good as ENDER'S GAME.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Part 2 of a trilogy
Review: Most people who have read "Ender's Game" and "Speaker for the Dead" will like this novel, not for its content but because they love Ender. Card wrote Game as a stand alone novel and Speaker as the first of a trilogy, (he may not have meant to from the beginning, but that's how these books play out). Readers familiar to trilogies know that in most cases they follow a rigid pattern, 1) Setup, 2) bridge, 3) conflict and conclussion. Speaker set up the saga with more style than most trilogies, and is a great novel on its own. Xenocide is just a bridge which disappointed me, and from what I've seen from other reviews, quite a lot of people as well. I was expecting another great novel, but what I read had a "to be continued" feel.

The book is above average for a bridge or arc, which is usually a good thing. However, with our expectations so high from the first two books, this novel falls short of absolute brilliance, and is instead just a good read. We meet a supporting cast of new characters, some hateful and seemingly villianous, which is something new to the series. We are introduced to the dark side of Starways Congress who seem to act out of spite and anger for no real reason. This was the most troubling aspect of the book for me. The first books of the series gave us moral ambiguity and actions bourne of neccesity rather than evil. The story always gave us hope for the future, but the darkness introduced here dims that a bit.

The story still takes place on Ender's "home" world of Lusitania, where the three species are gearing up for the threat of destruction by Starways Congress. We still get the moral dillemas typical of the series, but they feel just a bit contrived at times. Ender's wife acts too standoffish to be true to life. One wonders how Ender ever fell in love with her, and stayed with her for so long. The Sci-fi/fantasy aspect of the book overtakes the human drama which made the series so great and feel so real to the readers. If you get through this book, the conclussion of the series waits on the other side in the novel "Children of the Mind", which gets a lot of the greatness back. If you've read the first two, stick with it. If you haven't read Ender before, please don't start here. If you start here, don't give up on it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Superb, Dont listen to these other dolts
Review: This book is amazing, as is all the ender books. People who have read this are too stuck on Ender's game. They want action, but its called creating a story people. You can't have action action everywhere....if you really are a vivid reader and can grasp storylines, then the storytelling is action on itself. This book leaves off after Speaker for the Dead. I was dreading reading this book because people were bashing it so hard. But im glad i took my own advice. This book is amazing. If you read Ender's Game and Speaker...read this you WILL NOT be dissapointed. Thank u

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: OK, but a disappointing conclusion to the series
Review: This series went downhill a bit in each subsequent book. Ender's Game was stunning. By Xenocide, the pace was slow and plodding, the characters too heavy with baggage from the previous 2 stories. Still a good book, just in no way measures up to Ender's Game.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A Necessary Disappointment
Review: I don't give poor reviews lightly, but this book was honestly a disappointing continuation of one of my favorite stories. It fails to stand anywhere near where "Ender's Game" and "Speaker for the Dead" rose. I admit that "Speaker" required a sequel, but this is not what I was hoping for. This book is too drawn out and far to slow to develop. Imagine taking the amount of plot content in "Speaker" and then spread that across three separate story lines. Then you have "Xenocide". Card's direction may have required some support from these other story lines, but the complexity that was beneficial to the previous novels causes this book to become slow and convoluted.

I give credit only because there are individual points of brilliance that dot this novel's landscape, but they are overshadowed by the fact that this story is meant to follow such excellent predecessors.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Concepts
Review: "Xenocide" is the third part in Orson Scott Card's masterpiece, the Ender series. "Ender's game" was an excellent book, fast-paced, with great characters, and a hint of what was to come in the next books. "Speaker for the dead" features the same character, Ender Wiggin, now in another planet, and in the second book Card introduced some very different and intriguing concepts concerning planet Lusitania and its inhabitabts, the pequeninos and the mortal virus descolada.

In "Xenocide", Card picks up his story 30 years after he left it in "Speaker...". This is a good decision, because Novinha's sons, presented to the readers in the previous book, are now grown up, which leaves room for more character development and further interactions between them. If the pequeninos are not as present in "Xenocide" as they were in "Speaker...", they still are part of the most important happenings in the book. The Hive Queen and the buggers are also an important part of the plot.

"Xenocide", as a book - plot, characters, writing style, pace - is very similar to "Speaker for the dead". Many previous reviewers complained about the "philosophycal" parts of the book - especially when the setting is the world of Path - a planet colonized by the Chinese, where the society is split between servants and the "godspoken", enlighted people that display abnormal behaviour in order to purify themselves. I, on the other hand, think that Card's concepts portrayed in the book are very cool. Genetic manipulation, a sentient virus, interaction between three very different species, faster-than-light-travel based on Plato's teachings, all these strange ideas interact during the course of the book, and I can't help but think Card is a very talented concept sci-fi author, and he's not afraid to display his very different thoughts in his books. To me, "Xenocide" was never a boring read, on the contrary, I was always eager to see what the author was going to propose next.

This book is clearly not a standalone. In fact, it has no ending. I recommend reading "Xenocide" with "Children of the mind" close at hand; even if it may be the weakest book in the series, this fourth installment contains the final moments of Ender Wiggin's saga.

Grade 8.3/10



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