Shadow of the Giant

Shadow of the Giant is Orson Scott Card's swan song (well, he left one loose end) for the "Earth after Battle School" slice of what it's probably safe to call "the Enderverse", stories about a group of ambitious, self-righteous, tactically-prodigious children and the straw men they fight from time to time.

I've been a fan of the stories for a while, truth be told. The first book about child-admiral Ender Wiggin, called "Ender's Game" and read by every self-respecting kid that's ever aced an IQ test, high school entrance exam or real-time strategy game (and mandatory reading among remote pilots of USAF "Predator" drones, if my co-worker Colin is to be believed) was a fast-paced, focused story about the exigencies of war and the believably surprising emotional and cognitive maturity of six-year-olds.

Also, the author, a sometime Mormon missionary to Brazil, hadn't yet succumbed to the Brain Eater -- a condition affecting writers of primarily military science-fiction wherein their political views first veer wildly to the right, and then infiltrate their work bit by bit -- when he wrote that concise epic and its first set of sequels (though those were, admittedly, a lot less fun). Set a few thousand years down the road, the "Speaker for the Dead" books were a meditation on the nature of first contact with aliens. Some cool ideas but got dry and preachy, to the effect of "the meaning of life is Roman Catholicism".

So after entering the early stages of the Brain Eater, Card wrote a series about Ender's cooler, smarter friend Bean, a genetically-tweaked underdog who secretly made sure Ender wasn't killed or foiled or otherwise deprotagonized -- oh, wait. As expected, the "I, Jedi" approach to a, what do I call it, "retquel" maybe, is a little hamhanded and transparent, if at first harmless. It initially posits Bean as having not just a huge role in Ender's success at Battle School, but also as having an incredibly dangerous, malevolent nemesis who for some reason never appears in Ender's version of the story.  The first book -- the "retquel" itself -- was called "Ender's Shadow", and the series continued from there, until it finally wound its way (as is this review; I'm getting there!) to this last book about Bean, about the kids at Battle School and their adventures/conquests back on Earth, and their collective solution to Earth's erstwhile predicament.

It's got a few touching moments.  Certainly the story gets the parent-and-child, brother-and-brother, husband-and-wife and teacher-and-student relationships' cathartic, climactic moments out of its system by the end, and I definitely felt a pang or two, particularly at the parts where Graff and Bean get a quiet moment over e-mail, or Ender and Peter finally reach the last chapter of the original Ender novel.  I suspect some people may find the author's preoccupation with BABIES, DAMMIT to be a little bit too reminiscent of his mouth-foaming pro-Proposition 8 agitation.  And this deserves a special mention: from the "ex-gay" character of Anton ("Now I'm having babies the old-fashioned way!") to the straw-man Achillophile Randi (you win no prize if you can guess whom the author is awkwardly needling here) to the bizarre pro-America digression when talking about space funding to Petra's tiresome harping on how important it is to pretend to believe in God even if you intellectually feel, at a deep level, that you don't, Card's brain eater threatens to derail everything.

Thankfully, it doesn't.  Barely.  His skill at keeping action, narrative, and dialogue moving gets him over those weird bumps and into the home stretch, resolving just about everything (I'd say...90% of the story, which is a joke about babies).

In particular, the gigantic game of what I will now call "Riskwank" (a genre constantly popularized and repopularized, particularly by Tom Clancy in his Red Storm Rising and later Jack Ryan books -- basically, looking at a map and imagining how World War 3 would play out if the author were running things, 'cause as a red-blooded, right-thinking American Christian he's much smarter and ballsier than the clowns in charge right now) that formed the backdrop for the story wound to its inevitable conclusion (ie. we know that Ender's brother, murderous-sociopath-but-he-grew-out-of-it Peter, will eventually become Hegemon of the world in more than a "title-only" way).  It had been growing tiresome in Shadow Puppets, particularly as it had a "bad in the box" (this is how I will describe characters like the aforementioned Achilles, much like the "character" Mr. Dark from Fables 12, who pop up ex nihilo to waste our time and provide a presumably "memorale" antagonist for the overpowered, wish-fulfilling author-insertion protagonists) manipulating all the players in the game with moustache-twirling subtlety, decidedly wearing out his welcome. The Riskwank was much easier on the brain in Shadow of the Giant, because it was evolving out of a pre-existing scenario, even if we did have to trudge through Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets to get said scenario established.

So, if you feel that you have to read any more books than the original Ender's Game (and to be fair, Ender's Shadow wasn't terrible, but it definitely didn't feel necessary) you could do worse than to kill a day or two each working through the Shadow series.  Just know what you're getting into.  It's like watching a season of 24: well-crafted, full of power fantasies and too-competent, too-decisive characters,  and profoundly political: trying to posit a simple, logical, direct solution to the fact that the world is just too complicated for the author to understand.