The Ender's Shadow Series Box Set: Ender's Shadow/Shadow of the Hegemon/Shadow Puppets/Shadow of the Giant » (Reissue)

With a raft of science fiction awards and a dedicated following, Orson Scott Card writes imaginative and compelling novels that also explore questions about morality and religion. His Ender series is the most popular; but he also offers a fresh take on the Bible in his Women of Genesis books and has authored other history-based fantasy series.

Life on the streets is tough. But if Bean has learned anything, it’s how to survive. Not with his fists. Bean is way too small to fight. But with his brain. Like his colleague and rival Ender Wiggin, Bean has been chosen to enroll in Battle School. And like Ender, Bean will be called upon to perform an extraordinary service for humanity. A reader’s guide is available for this Starscape edition—perfect reader readers ten and up—of the parallel novel to the extraordinary Ender’s Game.

Publishers Weekly

You can't step into the same river twice, but Card has gracefully dipped twice into the same inkwell--once for Ender's Game and again for this stand-alone "parallel novel." The course readers will follow this time is of the superhuman child Bean. Raised on streets ruled by starving children's gangs, he was too weak, at age four, to hold peanuts in his hand, but ingenious enough to trick the other children into civilizing themselves--and to keep himself alive. When his genius and uncanny understanding of individuals' motivations are discovered, he is sent to Battle School, where children learn to command fleets for the war with the alien Buggers--the smallest kid ever to do so. Bean is not as perfect as Ender Wiggin--hero of the Ender Quartet, begun with Ender's Game and concluded with Children of the Mind--but he becomes Ender's ally. Though Bean is cold at first, the kind of child who weighs the costs of hugging the nun who saved him from the streets, he wants to understand the respect and love that Ender wields. Thus, Bean's story is twofold: he learns to be a soldier, and to be human. Devotees of the Ender saga will delight in the revelations about the formation of Ender's Dragon army and about the last of Ender's games. Though newcomers to the series may miss many of the novel's points, the wonders of Battle School and flashsuits and children's armies should keep them turning pages. As always, everyone will be struck by the power of Card's children, always more and less than human, perfect yet struggling, tragic yet hopeful, wondrous and strange. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Orson Scott Card's Ender Wiggin saga began more than 20 years ago with the publication of "Ender's Game," a novella that formed the basis for the enormously popular novel of the same name, which was followed, in turn, by three increasingly ambitious sequels: Speaker For The Dead, Xenocide, and Children Of The Mind. Now, Card returns to the source material of the series with Ender's Shadow, a "parallel novel" that recapitulates the central events of Ender's Game from a new, and very different, perspective.

Ender's Game, first published in novel form in 1985, describes the relentlessly brutal education of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a preadolescent military genius believed to be humankind's last, best hope against the anticipated invasion of an insectile race of aliens called the Formics. As the novel opens, the Formics -- popularly known as "the Buggers" -- have already made two unsuccessful attempts to conquer and colonize Earth, and xenophobia now runs rampant, temporarily uniting a wide range of political and ideological factions. Ender, together with a handpicked group of gifted, if slightly less brilliant children, is conscripted and sent to a remote space station called the Battle School, where he participates in a series of war games that prepare him, by the age of 9, for the responsibilities of military command. Eventually, the games turn real, and Ender leads his youthful forces to a bitter and ironic "victory" over the Buggers. His chief lieutenant in the final series of battles -- his shadow -- is a brilliant, abrasive, undersize child known, simply, as Bean. Bean is both the hero and the focal point of Card's latest novel. Through him, we re-experience -- and sometimes reinterpret -- a familiar series of events.

Obviously, large areas of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow -- the military training sequences, the climactic battles with the Buggers -- overlap, and the overlapping scenes reflect and illuminate each other in unexpected ways.

In the end, though, Ender's Shadow is a good deal more than a revisionist rendering of the earlier book. By focusing so intensely on Bean -- on his history; his personality; his bizarre, unprecedented origins -- Card moves his story into fresh fictional territory. As a result, Ender's Shadow steps outside the frame of its predecessor's concerns to become a meditation on survival, on alienation, on the nature of genius, on what it really means to be "human."

By the age of 4, Bean -- who has no known surname -- is a battle-scarred survivor whose character has been formed on the streets of Rotterdam. Homeless and alone, he makes a place for himself in a street gang/family that is run by a homicidal opportunist named Achilles. Eventually, Bean comes to the attention of Sister Carlotta, a Roman Catholic nun who is also a talent spotter for a military coalition called the International Federation. Sister Carlotta immediately recognizes Bean's immense, virtually unmeasurable intellect and recommends him to the leaders of the Battle School. At the same time, she begins to investigate Bean's shadowy background and discovers that her protégé is the sole survivor of an illegal experiment in genetic engineering and that his intellect has been purchased at an enormous, ultimately tragic, price.

As Bean progresses, with astonishing speed, through the various stages of Battle School, a single question begins to dominate the text: Is Bean, by commonly accepted standards, human? Or is he something different, something genuinely -- and frighteningly -- new? As the narrative proceeds, and the larger events of the novel move inexorably toward their xenocidal conclusion, Card's own position on the question becomes clear. With great skill and compassion, he shows us the process by which Bean develops his dormant capacity for empathy, slowly evolving from an autonomous, prodigiously analytical creature governed by Darwinian survival instincts into a child capable of connecting with the larger human community.

Bean's gradual discovery of his own humanity stands very much at the center of this moving, unsentimental examination of children robbed of their childhoods in the name of a greater good. It should be considered required reading for anyone familiar with the previous volumes of the Ender saga, but it can -- and no doubt will -- be read by people utterly unfamiliar with Card's earlier work. Ender's Shadow is a humane, involving narrative that asks hard questions and successfully revisits old, familiar settings but finds, against all odds, something new to say. It deserves the popularity it is almost certain to achieve.

--Bill Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. He is currently working on a book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub.