Worth a read, but not as good as Ender's Game or Speaker for the Dead

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	• Xenocide (Ender, Book 3) Orson Scott Card Tor Books, 1992 - 608 pages average customer review:based on 211 reviews view larger image
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Unique Masterpiece

I was slow to warm up to Speaker for the Dead after Enders Game. It was kind of like coming off of a blockbuster, and going to see a more tamed down sequel. However, the saga takes a more philosophical approach as it evolves from book to book. Card masterfully takes philosophical arguments regarding the orgins of religion and weaves them into the plot, giving the story a richness that I have found in few novels. I appreciated the references to Christianity and biblical concepts. With these comments in mind, this is not a book you want to approach in a fast-food manner. Its not a Star Wars type of novel.
I would have given it 5 stars had Card focused a little more on the plot.

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this is a good book

This book is the third in a series of four. It is about the struggle to save life on a planet known as Lusitania after Congress gives orders to destroy it out of fear that a virus that the native species carries will destroy all of humanity. The characters go about trying to neutralize the disease without disrupting the life cycle of native species. Overall the book is good but the characters seem unrealistic and the plot gets a little boring about half way through it. Towards the end some of the events seem so nonsensical that they shouldn't even take place in a science fiction book set 3000 years in the future. This book is good but not as good as its counterparts Enders Game and Enders Shadow.

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A great book of ideas and brilliant characters.

Xenocide is the third book in the Ender-saga. The first book (Ender's Game) is a dark military adventure about a boy bred for the destruction of alien enemies. The second book (Speaker for the Dead) is a totally different kind of story. Book one is about warfare, book two is about trying to understand another species (diplomacy) to avoid disaster. Xenocide builds more on the characters and setting of the second book. Book one and two should be read before diving into book three.
Lusitania colony has broken contact with Starways Congress. The act of rebellion is in response to Congress's decision about the fate of the "Piggies" or pequeninos, little aliens who live in the forests of Lusitania. The piggies' life cycle is very strange. And all indigenous life on Lusitania became entangled with the descolada virus which is deadly to humans (and earth life) so Congress is prepared to annihalate Lusitania to keep it from spreading to other worlds.
Ender Wiggin is legendary as both the military genius who saved humanity thousands of years ago from the Hive Queen and as Speaker for the Dead, founder of a humanist religion. Few know that the military genius (presumed to have died long ago) and the diplomatic Speaker are one and the same person.
Ender married Novinha, so he is also the step-dad to the brothers and sisters in the family that makes up most of the scientific community of Lusitania colony. They are a volatile family unit, prone to argue about their principles (is it right to kill this species and not that one? Is this virus showing signs of intelligence? Was it designed? Does that matter when our own survival is at issue?) and about their dysfunctional family history (which is covered in book two). They are in a race against time to come up with a replacement virus for the descolada that won't be fatal to earth life while killing the original virus off. And among this crisis, we have the Hive Queen, who is still alive and well but trying to co-exist with humans and piggies. We also have the intelligent computer program Jane, who also may die if Congress has its way. And the "godspoken" characters on the planet Path, who get mixed up in everything and will find the very core of their foundational beliefs shaken.
I love the way this author takes the convictions of the characters very seriously, whether they are religious, scientific, or philisophical. Lusitania is a Catholic colony, Path is steeped in Chinese religion, Novinha's family is an amalgamation of conflicting scientific and religious views, and so on.
This book does get into some far out ideas, and that seems to be an issue with some reviewers who say the end is too hard to swallow.
There is an approach to S.F. that demands that the science of everthing in these stories is sound scientific extrapolation of the physics of what "could" happen. People in this group want lots of technical details about the workings of everything in the story. But lots of science fiction flies in the face of that mandate. For example: Time travel stories don't seem to use Einstien's theories much. It's just something that is possible in the story. Shelley didn't explain how Frankenstien gave life to his monster. And other magical things are taken for granted in S.F. too, like the abundance of planets with breathable atmospheres just like earth's. Many alien races are still described as humaniod in much S.F.. (More varied species are present in S.F. literature than T.V. and film, but aliens more than not have human ways of communicating and acting).
In book two (Speaker for the Dead) we learn the piggies, who are animal intelligence, are ritually killed and transformed into intelligent trees. That's pretty out there too, so why all the objection to the weird discoveries in this book? Larry Niven, author of Ringworld invented the word "bolognium." It refers to inventions S.F. authors come up with that don't or can't exist. Niven invented "scrith," an impossibly strong building material that is the only thing in existence that Ringworld could be made of. Bolognium is used more than the hard S.F. crowd would like, but as I illustrated, it is a staple of the genre.
There are limits to how much bolognium certain readers can take. In a S.F. story, it's way off base to have a character pull out a magic wand or sprinkle fairy dust to make things right. So I can see where that crowd is coming from. But I didn't object to the weird solutions at the end of this book so much. Taken as a whole, you have to also look at all the interesting views about philosophy, the value of life, the possibility of where souls come from, and so on that the author gets into. A book with ideas like that is fun to read. So if you want to get into the heads of some brilliant characters and can accept that in desperate circumstances humans will consider impractical, wild ideas and every once in awhile they results in breakthroughs, then you will probably like this book.

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Worth a read, but not as good as Ender's Game or Speaker for the Dead

The third book in the Ender saga, in which Ender and his friends wrestle with a number of problems, which first arose in part two of the Ender saga, Speaker for the Dead. One of the problems facing Ender and his friends is that Starways Congress, the governing body that rules the Hundred Worlds and all the colonies of mankind throughout the galaxy, has sent a fleet of ships to Lusitania armed with the Little Doctor, a weapon that can reduce whole planets to spacedust. The fleet was originally sent to discipline the Lusitanians because they broke protocol in dealing with the pequeninos, the intelligent native species of Lusitania. But apparently Congress has authorised the fleet to use the Little Doctor and obliterate Lusitania, because it seems that Congress has found out about the existence on Lusitania of the descolada virus, a killer organism that has the potential to wipe out all of mankind. The descolada is the second major problem confronting Ender and his friends and the decision by Congress to destroy Lusitania forms one of the book's central moral issues: is Congress right to want to wipe out Lusitania? Are they acting as tyrants, or for the good of all mankind? Ender, all his friends, his adopted family the Ribeiras and also his sister Valentine and her family are all inhabitants of Lusitania, as are the only two other sentient species of life yet found in the galaxy besides man: the already mentioned pequeninos, and the buggers; insect-like aliens that Ender brought to Lusitania after almost wiping them out in book one of the Ender saga, Ender's Game. But with the approach of the fleet that Congress has sent, it seems that Ender and everyone he has ever loved or cared for may perish, as well as the buggers and the pequeninos. The galaxy is so vast that it is going to take the fleet sent by Congress decades before it can get to Lusitania and carry out it's mission, despite the fact that starships can travel at near-light speed. Ender and his friends are using the time that they have to find out whether it is possible to travel faster than light, that is, instantaneously, at the same speed that communication takes place by ansible (a sort of inter-galactic communications network), so that they can get everyone off the planet (humans, buggers and pequeninos) before the fleet arrives and blows the planet to kingdom come. But there is a dilemma: nobody can leave Lusitania until a cure has been found for the descolada. Ender and his friends cannot risk letting the descolada get off Lusitania, infecting the rest of the galaxy and potentially wiping out all of mankind. But it is not simply a matter of killing the descolada as the virus is central to the native pequeninos' life cycle, and if the descolada is simply eliminated by some sort of vaccine, it would mean the end of the peqeuninos. Ender and his friends have to find a way of making the descolada non-lethal, so that it does not kill other species, but can still allow the pequeninos to exist as a race. This is why the book is titled Xenocide, because all the known species of intelligent life - mankind, peqeunino and bugger - are in danger of extinction. Ender and his friends must find a way that all three can survive.

I found this to be a good book, but not quite as good as Ender's Game or Speaker for the Dead. Much of the book was concerned with philosophical discussions between the book's main characters about the nature of the universe, reality and the soul, which I felt detracted from how good this book might have been, as there was often too much discussion and not enough plot. Also the sub-plot, involving a planet called Path and it's people who have been genetically modified by Starways Congress, was slightly cumbersome.

Still, the main plot is strong and there is a good twist near the end of the book, so I give this book three stars.

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A rip-off ...but still worth a read

I love Orson Scott Card. "Ender's Game" is one of my favorite books and it's hard not to have such strong compassion for Ender. The story is good and Card is a truly gifted author. But there were some very strong downfalls.

The saga continues as Ender recruits the help of his sister, Valentine, to help save the planet Lusitania (including the sentient alien species of Piggies and Buggers, the human colony, and his own family) from total annihilation. The threat of rebellion and fear of the deadly descolada virus entices Starways Congress to send a fleet to wipe-out the entire planet with the Little Doctor weapon. A second xenocide seems to be on the horizon unless Ender and company can figure out a way to stop it.

The plot itself fits flawlessly into the scheme of the saga and, as expected, the dialogue is smart and sharp. So much of this book is a mix of philosophical debate and an intense discource of various physics theories (AI, lightspeed travel, etc). Reading this book made my feel like my IQ jumped about 30 points!

The focus seems to be less on Ender and more on his step-son, Miro, and Valentine. Miro is such a beautiful character that I admittedly ended up with a slight crush. Jane is another a scene-stealer. Some of the new characters are from the newly introduced world of Path: Si Wang-mu, Han Fei-tzu, and Han Qing-jao. Two other "new" characters also make an appearance: Peter Wiggin and Young Val (though they are not who they seem).

What is disappointing is the way the story ends. The book does not end with any sort of conclusion...not even a cliff-hanger. There is absolutely no resolution to any of the conflicts. After so many chapters of deep philosophy and physics there is no pay-off at the end. All that rhetoric for nothing. In fact, it isn't until the afterword in "Children of the Mind" that Card admits to the reader that "Xenocide" "was originally intended to include everything in Children of the Mind as well." What a rip-off! Smells like a sneaky plot to goad an extra $8 out of loyal readers.

If you have plans on eventually figuring out what happens to Ender and Lusitania, I would suggest purchasing "Children of the Mind" in addition to "Xenocide." It's an extra (and unfair) expenditure but necessary to complete the story. And a good story it is.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, page 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

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