Here’s a question I’ve seen come up quite a few times: Is the Ender’s Game series by Orson Scott Card worth reading? And, if so, should you bother with sequels?
As a young adult, Ender’s Game was one of those books that stuck with you and transformed you and informed everything you read from that point forward in your life. Revisiting the book a few years ago as an adult, it was not quite so utterly mind-blowing, but it was still a really good piece of science fiction and I recommend it highly.
Speaker for the Dead, on the other hand, is one of the best science fiction novels ever written.
So, basically, yes. I enthusiastically recommend these books and I think your life is poorer if you haven’t read them.
With that being said, here’s my recommendation for tackling the Ender-verse:
(1) Start with Ender’s Game and read through the original sequence of novels until you don’t like them any more. Then stop. They aren’t going to get any better.
Ender’s Game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
(2) Now, pop over to Ender’s Shadow. Read through this second sequence of novels until you don’t like them any more. Then stop. They are going to get a lot worse very, very quickly.
Ender’s Shadow
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets
First Meetings
Shadow of the Giant
Shadows in Flight
I stopped reading about midway through that sequence, so I don’t have any opinion on the Ender inter-quels:
A War of Gifts: An Ender Story
Ender in Exile
Nor do I have any opinion about the prequel trilogy:
Earth Unaware
Earth Afire
Earth Awakens
But I suspect I’m not missing anything.
http://www.hatrack.com/osc/stories/enders-game.shtml is worth reading. Spoils the first novel, I suppose, but I’d argue that it was better as a short. Speaker for the Dead is good, everything else in the Enderverse is rubbish. In general anything Card wrote after he got really politically active is bad, which is kind of convenient for me.
Or, you could make a point of not reading anything by Orson Scott Card because he is a vile bigot. Just putting that out there as an option.
I agree with the assessment of Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. I always advise people to stop there. You can go ahead and read Xenocide if you must. But, if you want to preserve your enjoyment of the series, I generally advise people to stop there. Once you’ve read Children of the Mind you can’t unread it. I wish I could unread it.
When I read Ender’s Shadow, I kept expecting something to happen that justified telling the same story from a different point of view. I don’t think I ever found something that justified it.
>>Or, you could make a point of not reading anything by Orson Scott Card because he is a vile bigot. Just putting that out there as an option.
Thought police.
Ender’s Shadow: Good
Ender’s Game: Good
Speaker for the Dead: Good
Everything Else: Bad
It’s kind of hilarious to me, seeing discussion of Ender’s Game on a site dedicated to interactive fiction in the 2020s.
Seriously, as a GM, think about that giant and its stupid cups. Think about all of the work you would need to do to get the average group of PCs (not even a bunch of traumatized child soldiers) to consider a solution that WASN’T trying to kill it before it even finished explaining the sadistic choice.
That threw me as a kid, but I really can’t picture anyone taking it in stride now.