A Not So Fitting End...

Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card

Before reading this, I already knew what to expect having already ingested the previous three books in this series – Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide, so I’m not sure what exactly about this book was a disappointment. Card finally gives us a kind of end to Ender’s 3000 year life and many plot points that arguably should have already taken place in Xenocide. Unlike the ending to the Harry Potter series, we are not left feeling a sense of sadness and loss at losing a character we have already followed for a thousand pages. Instead, we get another failed attempt at a philosophical science fiction novel. The dialogue is almost endless, one of my major criticisms of the last two books, but here, the religious and spiritual debates reach a crescendo, for me, it was almost too much and almost forced me to stop reading the book. But alas, having loved Ender’s story, maybe only in the beginning to be honest with you, I had to see how everything played out.

I cannot decide whether Card’s note at the end of the book, where he tries explain what it is he was and is trying to do and where he discusses the work of Oe and Endo (both authors I adore), was a good idea or a bad one. For those having read the previous two volumes and presumably this one since you see the note at the end, you already figured that he had an intense interest both in Asian culture and writing and in creating some kind of moral pedagogy in his work. Unfortunately, his finished project does not stand up as well to other writers who have successfully done it—Endo, Oe, C.S. Lewis to name a few—because the philosophy and religion and other spiritual aspects of the novel are so in-your-face and all-consuming that the plot and the storylines disappear.

Anyways, at least I can say that I’m done with this book series…

Interesting Quotes:

“Life is a suicide mission.”

“Do the dead tips of fingernails feel bad when you pare them away?”

“It’s all fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward, but they’re never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.”

Science Fiction Philosophy

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

In the middle of my last law school exam, someone looked at my copy of Xenocide and asked me if I had been disappointed by the direction the series had taken. Although stressed from the upcoming exam (anyone who has survived their first year of law school can understand), I looked at him and told him that I was disappointed, especially considering how remarkable the book that started it all - Ender's Game - had been.

At some point, Card decided, or maybe it was in him all along, that a book of science fiction philosophy would be more appealing than continuing the epic adventure of Andrew Wiggin and his family in the same kind of fast-paced, exciting prose. For those familiar with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time Series, this book is the kind of filler that you find in the last few books of the series. Don't get me wrong, if science fiction philosophy were a genre unto itself, then this would do very well; however, considering how almost monumental the first book was, this shift (started in Speaker for the Deadi) is incredibly disappointing. If I wanted philosophy and discussions concerning the human psyche I would turn to Sartre or the Bible. But Card is not content with advancing the story and instead gives us 300 pages of fluff.

Maybe I'm being too hard, but I've really been expecting something more from this series. Some things do happen - Ender et al figures out how to travel faster than the speed of light, the piggies and the humans learn how to tame the descolada virus, and we are introduced to a world called Path where certain individuals can commune with the gods. Unfortunately, that's almost all that happens. The buggers, humans, and piggies are still stuck on Lusitania and the fleet has yet to arrive. That is how the book starts and that is how it ends.

For those who want an end to the series, you, like myself, have to march on, but for those who have finished Ender's Game should read Ender's Shadow and possibly move on to something else.

Some interesting quotes:

"Every day all people judge all other people. The question is whether we judge wisely."

"Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover."

"Parents always make their mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist they are right."

Uninspired

Girl in Landscape by Jonathan Lethem

Based on some of the comparisons on the back of the book, you would think that Lethem's science fiction novel was some sort of masterpiece. One critic went so far as to compare the book to Nabokov's Lolita. I'm not sure I see the comparison other than a very subtle, as in so subtle you not only barely register, but truly do not care, current of sexual tension that reveals itself at the very end of the book. I still for the life of my cannot figure out how this was published to so much acclaim, other than the theory that the book picked up steam after he published Motherless Brooklyn (which actually was a magnificent book, one that deserves all of the acclaim it has received).

The novel is about Pella Marsh and her dysfunctional family living in some post-apocalyptic future. At some point, the Marsh's, following the death of Pella's mother, relocate to another world that was once inhabited with a super-evolved race that, other than a few stragglers, went off to colonize the rest of the universe. I think part of the disappointment is the lack of concrete description. So much is left unsaid, and although the writing school mantra "show don't tell" works with books dealing with things that are familiar to us, here, in a world where there is nothing to anchor us but the writer's descriptions, anything short of a full-blown explanation (peppered with descriptions and what not) of what it is we are supposed to be experiencing. Although some of the concepts are highly interesting, there is simply too much missing from this book for it to be nothing more than an early outing from a now celebrated and much improved writer. John Gardner said that your first novel is something that should be locked away in your desk, never to see the light of day, and I wonder if Lethem should have done that with this book.