Earth Awakens questions and comments
Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2014 3:05 pm
Just finished Earth Awakens and haven't found any discussion boards on it, if they exist please link me to them.
I liked the book, and am an avid Enderverse fan, but instead of wasting time with praise, let's just jump straight into my questions.
1) I want to know why the Formics were eviscerating people. It isn't clarified in the book, so I'd like to hear peoples theories or i've somehow missed the definitive reason in some other book i'd like to know please. My theory is that the worker Formics are checking to see if the people have some sort of special organ that only queens have. Having not found it, they would likely be confused about the seeming freewill of the individual humans. The organ thing is mentioned by Victor, and also in Shadows in Flight. Can anyone explain this to me?
2) Ukko Jukes character arch seems a bit muddled to me. They spent a long time convincing us that he was a terrible father to Lem, then a while convincing us that all of Lem's notions were due to misunderstandings, then at the end he pulled that dirty trick with the email that doubly ruined Lem's love life. So he was a villain toward his son in that respect after all. Furthermore, it seems he knew about the Formics coming via the parallex system and chose not to say anything such that he could pull off the long elaborate plan to eventually maneuver himself into the hegemon position. So he was at least indirectly responsible for the deaths resulting from the Formic invasion due to his not allowing earth time to prepare. So in that sense he was a definite bad guy. No real question here except why did they bother making him look like a good guy at all? Seemed strange to me.
3) Let's talk about the Formics, I still don't really understand them. It's quite hard to believe they didn't know that they were essentially trying to exterminate another sentient species, perhaps to their knowledge the only other one in existence. But it seemed to me that throughout Ender's thousands of years with the hive queen they had come to an understanding that it was all a misunderstanding and the queens didn't realize what they were doing. How could this be? This was something that bothered me in Shadows in Flight that it seemed to reveal that the queen did know the whole time that she was enslaving other sentient beings (the workers/mates) and also that they really did come to understand what the humans were long before the war ended. So was she just lying to Ender all those years? I thought they mind-melded, was Ender so grief stricken that he was fooled, and so genuinly fooled that his notion of the truth, as written in The Hive Queen was able to convince all of humanity as well? Seems unlikely. I guess the second formic war might reveal more. But if anyone cares to explain the Formic point of view to me, I would appreciate it.
4) Lastly, a nitpick. There were like a hundred typos in this book. Get a new editor next time. It detracts from the experience.
I liked the book, and am an avid Enderverse fan, but instead of wasting time with praise, let's just jump straight into my questions.
1) I want to know why the Formics were eviscerating people. It isn't clarified in the book, so I'd like to hear peoples theories or i've somehow missed the definitive reason in some other book i'd like to know please. My theory is that the worker Formics are checking to see if the people have some sort of special organ that only queens have. Having not found it, they would likely be confused about the seeming freewill of the individual humans. The organ thing is mentioned by Victor, and also in Shadows in Flight. Can anyone explain this to me?
2) Ukko Jukes character arch seems a bit muddled to me. They spent a long time convincing us that he was a terrible father to Lem, then a while convincing us that all of Lem's notions were due to misunderstandings, then at the end he pulled that dirty trick with the email that doubly ruined Lem's love life. So he was a villain toward his son in that respect after all. Furthermore, it seems he knew about the Formics coming via the parallex system and chose not to say anything such that he could pull off the long elaborate plan to eventually maneuver himself into the hegemon position. So he was at least indirectly responsible for the deaths resulting from the Formic invasion due to his not allowing earth time to prepare. So in that sense he was a definite bad guy. No real question here except why did they bother making him look like a good guy at all? Seemed strange to me.
3) Let's talk about the Formics, I still don't really understand them. It's quite hard to believe they didn't know that they were essentially trying to exterminate another sentient species, perhaps to their knowledge the only other one in existence. But it seemed to me that throughout Ender's thousands of years with the hive queen they had come to an understanding that it was all a misunderstanding and the queens didn't realize what they were doing. How could this be? This was something that bothered me in Shadows in Flight that it seemed to reveal that the queen did know the whole time that she was enslaving other sentient beings (the workers/mates) and also that they really did come to understand what the humans were long before the war ended. So was she just lying to Ender all those years? I thought they mind-melded, was Ender so grief stricken that he was fooled, and so genuinly fooled that his notion of the truth, as written in The Hive Queen was able to convince all of humanity as well? Seems unlikely. I guess the second formic war might reveal more. But if anyone cares to explain the Formic point of view to me, I would appreciate it.
4) Lastly, a nitpick. There were like a hundred typos in this book. Get a new editor next time. It detracts from the experience.