Ender in Exile: in stores/libraries now - Spoilers!

[lyons24000]

I was all giddy in the bookstore. 'Cause the cover is shiny.

Your avatar fits you well.

[Darth Petra]

I was all giddy in the bookstore. 'Cause the cover is shiny.

Your avatar fits you well.

Cheese did suit me, but he was an eyesore. Meet Tim.

[lyons24000]

I don't know if I like this one that much. Is there a side of you that I'm not aware of? *backs away*

[Darth Petra]

I don't know if I like this one that much. Is there a side of you that I'm not aware of? *backs away*

The Monty Python freak side? I thought that side was obvious.

[Hector.Victorious]

Monty Python has to be the funniest TV show I have ever watched. The movies were pretty funny too. I have the box set of the TV show on DVD

[neo-dragon]

I picked up a copy of EiE in the bookstore today and skimmed the afterword. It's nice that pweb was mentioned. That should lead to some new blood finding this place in the near future. And yeah, seeing my own name in bold was pretty awesome, even if it is tucked in the middle of like 15 other people.

I'm not just saying this for the obvious reason, but I love how Card acknowledges every single person who contributes to the writing process. I don't know of any other author who does so to such an extent. Most would just say something like, "Thanks to the members of my forum for their input", if they said anything at all.

[Hector.Victorious]

Oh ya! pweb was mentioned! I almost forgot!

[wigginboy]

OK, since no one else has picked this up, I am going to be a continuity nazi. I picked up the book today and, as is my habit, read the book jacket before diving nose first into the book. I happened across a passage in the synopsis that boggled my mind. To put it into context, I will include the sentence in question as well as the previous one. "With him went his sister, Valentine, and the core of the artificial intelligence that would become Jane. He wrote The Hive Queen and The Hegemon and his sister wrote The Speaker for the Dead.

OK, am I missing something from the 12 times I have read EG or is someone an idiot here? It was my impression that Ender wrote The Hive Queen and The Hegemon and OSC wrote Speaker for the Dead. Speaker for the Dead was the name Ender used to sign The Hive Queen. Valentine had no part in writing that book, and it is well documented in the Speaker series that she wrote histories of the Hundred Worlds. I know this is a petty error but it does not fly well with me, such a devotee to the series, EG in particular.

Edited for spelling

[neo-dragon]

Mistakes in the dust jacket synopses of books aren't uncommon.

[lyons24000]

I know all about that. I was reading a book called Helix by Eric Brown about a group of people who were on a thousand-year journey (of course they were in cold sleep) and on the back it said that the journey only lasted five hundred years. That threw me off because they kept saying "I can't believe it's already been 1,000" years in the book. Then I realized it was just a mistake!

[Gravity Defier]

Er, I edited to remove the spoiler. wigginboy read it and I don't want to be responsible for spoiling the book for anyone. *leaving part of the original message*


-------------------------
(Given that I'm not entirely sure anymore, I decided to remove the major snark but come on...read the book and then make your case about being such a devoted follower.)

[wigginboy]

Well it seems like there are some slight departures from the actual continuity anyway as I am reading. Some things that should have been left alone, like Ender's homecoming. I won't say more, but I was a little disappointed. From what I've read, I like it and I hate it at the same time. More once I finish.

[CreoleBeanFan]

I picked it up on Tuesday, and finished it in one sitting. I always do that ... and it sucks because I'm so excited to get through the story that I always end up skipping/skimming and missing important plot details.

Anyway, I've now got the Audio version. I like listening to the audio presentations because the cast puts so much life into things, AND I can't skp ahead when I get "bored."

Oh yeah, and Gabriel De Cuirs voice annoys me, for some reason.

*****Spoilers*****

I find it incredibly difficult to believe that any child of Bean and Petra could be so stupid. I also found it disappointing that the portion of the book that dealt with Enders ordeal on Ganges was so short.

[UnnDunn]

Got my copy from Amazon last night. I tried to read it some but fell asleep (through no fault of the book.)

But I will be putting some serious reading time into it this weekend.

Meanwhile, forgive me if I avoid PWeb for fear of spoilers.

[Person122]

OK, since no one else has picked this up, I am going to be a continuity nazi. I picked up the book today and, as is my habit, read the book jacket before diving nose first into the book. I happened across a passage in the synopsis that boggled my mind. To put it into context, I will include the sentence in question as well as the previous one. "With him went his sister, Valentine, and the core of the artificial intelligence that would become Jane. He wrote The Hive Queen and The Hegemon and his sister wrote The Speaker for the Dead.

OK, am I missing something from the 12 times I have read EG or is someone an idiot here? It was my impression that Ender wrote The Hive Queen and The Hegemon and OSC wrote Speaker for the Dead. Speaker for the Dead was the name Ender used to sign The Hive Queen. Valentine had no part in writing that book, and it is well documented in the Speaker series that she wrote histories of the Hundred Worlds. I know this is a petty error but it does not fly well with me, such a devotee to the series, EG in particular.

Edited for spelling

I guess this means OSC is Ender Wiggin's sister. LOL. I suppose the jacket text is suggesting that The Speaker for the Dead is a colony. Anyway, I haven't even seen Ender in Exile in person yet. My Public Library system actually had the book at least from the 9th of November, but there's a long waiting list for requests. Those of you who finish the book, how would you say you liked it compared to the rest of the series. (or just first impressions)

[CaseyJones]

I'm a little more than half way through the book and so far I'm enjoying it. I've noticed some minor continuity errors when comparing EIE to the actual EG ending, such as when Ender meets up with Valentine on eros. In EG doesn't she surprises him while he is working outside of a ship. These are minor, though, and what's really neat is Card's attentinon to detail, especially when he throws stuff in from the shadow series and A War of Gifts. I'm thinking that this new addition will fit well into the series, despite my original concerns.

[Pixel]

I finished it a couple of days ago.

Just to give a heads up to people who haven't read it or are still reading it, it seems like EiE didn't turn out how even Card expected it. The book doesn't focus on Ganges primarily and Jane isn't even introduced, so don't get the wrong idea. I mean, the book jacket even mentions Jane, but that's misleading because she's not even in the book.

Overall it was a good book. Not the best book, and not exactly the most important (plot-wise) or action-packed, but it still fills in a lot of the gaps in the series. It also does a decent job of combining the Shadow series to the Ender series, which helps reassure you that the events of the Shadow series did have an impact on Ender's life and on the space colonies. I'm sure Shadows in Flight is pretty much going to do the same type of series combining, just in the future, and I can't wait for SiF

At first I was only interested in waiting for Shadows in Flight and I didn't care about Ender in Exile at all. Turns out the book was more interesting than I had expected. It is made up of many mini-plots (as you probably know by the short stories) and chances are there'll probably be one of those little plots you're not fond of, but that's alright. It also did kind've give off the feeling to me that Card might've been making up some of this stuff as he went along (meaning this stuff wasn't planned during the Ender or Shadow series,) so that could bother you, though I really didn't mind.

In the end it just shows Ender at it again, outsmarting others, causing success on individual and grand scales, and setting him up for his journey in Speaker. (I considered making an EiE review/discussion topic. Should we just use this topic?)

[Hector.Victorious]

Pixel- Do you mean Shadows In Flight? Shadow Puppets was released in 2002.

Ender in Exile Spoilers

In the beginning of ch. 20 in Ender's letter to Graff, He says that he talked to Peter and was surprised how old he looked. But, in Shadow of the Giant, Peter selects "No Picture". Did anyone else catch this?

[Pixel]

...................

Yeeeeah, I meant Shadows in Flight. That was a stupid typo. Can't believe I didn't realize that. -__- There, edited my post. Thanks for pointing that out.

EiE spoiler:

Yeah, I did catch that. I thought about it. Maybe when Peter selected No Picture he only made it so that Peter couldn't see Ender, not the other way around. Afterall, half of Peter's reason behind it was because he couldn't stand to see his brother still so young while he was old and dying.

[locke]

I finished it in one reading, and I'd compare that reading somewhat favorably to the DaVinci Code, compelling writing in one respect but a deeper desire to get it over with and get out of the mire as soon as possible. Is this better than the DaVinci Code? hard to say, it's an incredibly petty book. It is also extremely indulgent, very repetitive, and full of frustrating verbosity on the part of the author. Fan-fiction is perhaps too strong a term because it's not quite that bad and but it does come readily to mind regarding this book, some of it is so very Mary Sue it's a bit disconcerting (Taming of the Shrew, oy).

To a degree the problem of Empire is readily apparent here. Every single character makes the same fundamental decisions, has the same worldview and an identical, harmonious morality. Oddly this echoes Scott's morality very closely. Luckily, in this book, not every viewpoint character has the same tone or thought process, as every character in Empire had. Valentine is a refreshing voice of sarcasm and least changed, but she's still fundamentally altered to make all those annoying sharp corners conform more closely to a good Mormon girl. Every distinctive character from EG that makes an appearance here is beaten down by age, revelation or 'practicality' to conform absolutely in every degree to spouting the same disconcerting talking points. Even Hot Soup, saying 40,000 bachelors are a threat to society, it's impossible for me to not read between the lines there and interpret bachelor=homosexual, not with all the vicious lying invective the author has levied against that community. Even if unintended the nascent idea is there at the core of such a 'jokey' phrase.

SPOILERS: Highlight to read


And that's just a one off. Let's not even go into Ender's utterly endless saccarine letter to his parents, or Graff's equally endless letter to Ender about the glories of marraige and babies. Or the long ridiculous scene with the two xenobiologists (we know now how Speaker for the Dead is to be retconned, Novinha makes her sex/children offer, but Libo nobly refuses as any good boy has to do). Even the mother who got pregnant at fifteen spouts the same absolutely identical worldview to her daughter. Ender spouts it back to that daughter. And all those extra men that are so inconveniently on the planet? they're just drugged into an asexual stupor. Such a lovely solution that.

Girls are married at fifteen (or presumably younger, as Scott tells us it's a SHAME that on earth marrying age and sexual maturity separated in civilized society but hopefully such worrying trends can be reversed) and kept pregnant constantly so that a colony of a hundred has increased to a thousand in slightly less than two generations. This is not an unusual scenario for scifi, but rather than the usual slight distaste or even vague horror at such scenarios, we have a tone of glee to the events, trumpeting their pioneering spirit and accommodation.

I gobbled up a lot of religious fiction when I was eleven-twelve, all the left behind books then available as well as similar others. Everyone in this book behaves like those characters, they sound like them, they act like them, they spout the same platitudes in the same repetitive manner. In that respect, Ender in Exile is worse than DaVinci Code, it's every bit as bad as Tribulation Force (Left Behind 2)

In a lot of ways I hate this book, there were parts I liked, about ten pages of the interstellar voyage, for example, but other parts that just had me shaking my head. bringing in the gold bug device, for instance contradicting that lusitania was the first planet with native flora/fauna, which combined with the blood worm leads one immediately to the unifying principal of descoladores also tinkering on that planet for the next novel (or the novel after that) to fill in. So much of the book is bad, there's a novella's worth of good material here, the rest is mostly just prattle, epistles and padding.

[locke]

I hate the name of Shakespeare for a planet. forgot to get that out there.

dumb. Ganges is a good planet name, Shakespeare is not.

[Person122]

I have yet to read the book and I'm likely going to get the book from Barnes and Noble's today. Also, it says on Ender in Exile's Wikipedia page that some of the Intergalactic Medicine Show stories were put in word-for-word into the book. This must mean that all along, OSC was uploading excerpts of Ender in Exile on IGMS. (in another view, this could mean that Card later decided to just put the stories together to form a novel) I heard somewhere that Orson Scott Card showed some desire to write a Mazer Rackham novel in the future, this could mean that perhaps Mazer in Prison was some sort of experimentation of sorts. Here's the interview:http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue422/interview2.html

[neo-dragon]

I have yet to read the book and I'm likely going to get the book from Barnes and Noble's today. Also, it says on Ender in Exile's Wikipedia page that some of the Intergalactic Medicine Show stories were put in word-for-word into the book. This must mean that all along, OSC was uploading excerpts of Ender in Exile on IGMS. (in another view, this could mean that Card later decided to just put the stories together to form a novel)

I think it's the former. He's also mentioned that the opening chapter or prologue of "Shadows in Flight" might first appear as an IGMS story before the novel itself is published.

[zeroguy]

I've noticed some minor continuity errors when comparing EIE to the actual EG ending, such as when Ender meets up with Valentine on eros. In EG doesn't she surprises him while he is working outside of a ship.

Yeah, that was at ISL. I remember hearing that at least some of these small changes were deliberate; OSC didn't like how they were handled the first time, or something. Can't remember where I heard that, though I get the feeling it was somewhere around here....

[Luet]

In the afterword to EiE, he said that he didn't like some things from the last (?) chapter of EG and that in future editions it would be edited to fit the details of EiE.

[lyons24000]

I got a headache reading the first couple of chapters at the bookstore. I hate how he makes the characters mention things like, "That will never happen" or something where they talk about an event that will occur in the future and we know that it is going to happen but they don't. He has done that more then once and it is annoying.

I had to put it down after about twenty minutes. I really hope it gets better. He's dragging it on and on. Almost like he wanted to make the book longer so he stretched the dialogue to accomplish that...

[Bookworm]

With EiE out now, what is the reading order? In the Afterword of EiE, it says that EiE is a sequel to EG, taking place between chapters 14 & 15, but it also says it works better after ES. So, which is it? Are you supposed to read it between chapters 14 & 15 of EG, or after ES?

[lyons24000]

Well, I guess you should read EG, WoG, ES, the first part of EiE (until Ender and Valentine leave Earth), then SotH, SP, SotG, the second part of EiE, SftD, Xeno, CotM.

[locke]

reading order post EiE:

Ender's game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
Ender's Shadow
Shadow Series
Ender in Exile.

Ender in Exile will spoil the Shadow series for you, although I don't consider that any great loss.

I'd think reading them in chronological order would be as big a mistake as Reading the Magician's nephew first or Over Sea under Stone first in their respective series. Start with the first book, not the prequel.

[lyons24000]

I'd think reading them in chronological order would be as big a mistake as Reading the Magician's nephew first or Over Sea under Stone first in their respective series. Start with the first book, not the prequel.

Ha. I read the "Magician's Nephew" first. But with the "Dark is Rising" books I read the "Dark is Rising". I felt that there was something missing though as I was reading "Dark is Rising".

[Person122]

reading order post EiE:

Ender's game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
Ender's Shadow
Shadow Series
Ender in Exile.

Ender in Exile will spoil the Shadow series for you, although I don't consider that any great loss.

I'd think reading them in chronological order would be as big a mistake as Reading the Magician's nephew first or Over Sea under Stone first in their respective series. Start with the first book, not the prequel.

I personally suggest that the book theoretically in pretty much any order (though I'd say it'd best to read in either chronological or publication order) but it would be good for to read each sage in order and War of Gifts and some other other stories in any order (they don't really seem contribute much to the Enderverse continuum). The order in which I read the EnderVerse books was EG, ES, SftD, SotG, AWoG, CotM, Xeno, SotH, SP, EiE (the last 3 books I haven't finished yet). As you can see, I read the books in a very strange order, I wouldn't suggest anyone do the same. This summer, I had already read EG for school and I really liked it so I read ES, and StfD. Then when I reserved the rest of the book, it seemed as if the Ender Series was amazingly popular, so some of the books took a long time to come out. For the most part I got the book in the order I read them in. (I was probably too exited to wait, which explains why I read Children of the Mind before Xenocide, something Orson Scott Card admonishes against.)

As for other book series, I read the Narnia series in chronological order (that is Magician's Nephew, The Lion, Witch and, Wardrobe, The Boy and Horse, Prince Caspian, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Last Battle), for I borrowed them all in a set, and they were pre-sorted in that order. The Harry Potter series I also read in a strange order. The first one I read was Goblet of Fire, though I think I started The Philosopher's Stone for school near the same time, because I would be seeing the movie (this is back in 2005 when the 4th movie just came out). Then afterwards, I proceeded to read Order of the Phoenix and then Half-blood Prince and after that I went back to read Prisoner of Azkaban, Sorcerer's Stone, and Chamber of Secrets (in that order).

[Tcashon]

Is it just me, or do the characters not "feel" the same in EiE as they do in the other books. Something about the way the conversations are structured and some of the things Ender and Graff choose to say (note that I've only made it through 5 or 6 chapters) just don't seem to feel right like they did in the previous books. I know writing styles change over time, it's just something that's been bothering me in the back of my head ever since I picked up EiE.

The continuity issues have been driving me insane as well - for one there is a full conversation between Graff and Ender (post League war) about Locke and Demosthenes and Ender has no idea who they are. If I remember correctly, Valentine described in Ender's Game what her and Peter were doing when she came to see Ender at the lake. Even if she didn't give Ender specifics, I believe he would have been smart enough to figure it out.

And the other one someone already mentioned about when Valentine comes to Eros to meet Ender - OSC has totally turned that reunion around. I understand why he did it, I just don't have to like it

[CreoleBeanFan]

Something else that REALLY bugs me about this book ... I'm listening to the Audible presentation now ...

How in the heck did Ender become so eloquent? Where did he pick up all the military jargon, and learn the military codes and regulations? When did he have time to do all of that stuff.

The letters that Ender writes to Valentine sound like a 45 year old man has written them, not a 13-15 year old kid fresh out of battle school. I know Ender was always a serious kid, but I really wondered where he learned to write or converse like that. It certainly wasn't from the six years he spent in Battle school spouting kuso and toguro!! He was only out of Battle School for a total of a year by the time the voyage started.

Kuso.

[CezeN]

Something else that REALLY bugs me about this book ... I'm listening to the Audible presentation now ...

How in the heck did Ender become so eloquent? Where did he pick up all the military jargon, and learn the military codes and regulations? When did he have time to do all of that stuff.

The letters that Ender writes to Valentine sound like a 45 year old man has written them, not a 13-15 year old kid fresh out of battle school. I know Ender was always a serious kid, but I really wondered where he learned to write or converse like that. It certainly wasn't from the six years he spent in Battle school spouting kuso and toguro!! He was only out of Battle School for a total of a year by the time the voyage started.

Kuso.

I read the summary on wikipedia because I know its going to be along time before my library gets the book. Spoiler below VVVV
I cant believe that for once Ender gets his ass beat.Can any of you spoil that specific "battle scene" for me????
btw- how do you do spoilers right

[UnnDunn]

I just finished EiE, and I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, I enjoyed reading it. Despite all the flaws mentioned or about-to-be-mentioned (by me), OSC is still a great storyteller, and his skills continue to be evident in this novel.

But this book is largely empty. When you take away the overly-long exposition (it takes 60-70 pages just to get started) and you take away what is acknowledged to be a rewrite of chapter 15 of EG, what you're left with is two novellas in the style of A War of Gifts: someone causes a problem, Ender is called in and solves the problem in his trademark style. Twice.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I do kinda feel shortchanged. I mean, EiE is sold as a novel, not an anthology of short stories. I went into it expecting something approaching the weight, complexity and nuance of SftD. What I got was AWoG x 2 + filler. A fun read, but ultimately forgettable, something that I am unlikely to re-read.

Oh well.