Fascinating, But Definitely Not the Big One

People often ask Orson Scott Card why he doesn't write something else as popular as Ender's Game. His response is, he wishes he could. He's tried.

Then along comes Ender's Shadow. Not a sequel, not a prequel -- I guess that makes it an equel? But the book certainly isn't an equal to the legendary novel that spawned it.

Not that Ender's Shadow isn't fascinating to read. There's lots of room for a novel to be good, even if it doesn't measure up to the most popular book by one of the biggest science fiction authors ever. Shadow on its own would be judged a good novel, well worth reading. It's not its fault that it will inevitably be compared to The Big One.

Where Ender's Game is the story of a very young Ender Wiggin, boy savior of humanity, Ender's Shadow is the story of his even younger sidekick, Bean, who is his right hand man from Battle School all the way to the victory over the Buggers. Shadow covers the same time period, but from Bean's point of view. This is what makes Ender's Shadow so fascinating: many gaps in the original tale are filled in as we follow Bean on his adventures that Ender, and we, never knew about.

But contrary to Card's claim that either book can be read first, I can't imagine appreciating Ender's Shadow nearly as much unless you read Ender's Game first. There's very little duplication between the two books -- what's covered in the first is glossed over in the second -- and I can't see how people could truly understand the Battle School without first reading Ender's Game: how the games and the politics among the children soldiers work, and even what happened during the individual training battles that Ender and Bean participated in.

But we do get an in-depth understanding of Bean, who starts out as a street urchin in Rotterdam on the verge of starving to death. We are introduced to his superior intellect -- the very sort of intellect the Battle School is looking for -- as he parries with a street gang for a morsel of food instead of being murdered by them. You might expect that he ends up in charge of the gang, like any self-respecting brilliant kid strategist, but that would be too cliche for Card. Instead Bean begins manifesting his "behind the scenes" approach to power, from whence the book gets its name, by becoming the shadow power behind the figurehead leader of the gang. He influences the leader to do things that help the gang scavenge for more food than they've ever had before. His ideas are so effective, they end up being adopted by all the gangs in the city, and the watchful eyes from the Battle School begin to notice an amazing thing happening among the anarchic urchins of Rotterdam: they are becoming civilized.

Because Ender's Game is Card's most popular (and lucrative) book, it might be tempting to attribute a mercenary motive to him for writing Shadow -- trying to cash in even more on the Ender phenomenon. I wouldn't fault him for wanting to do so, as long as he wrote a good book in the process -- but that conclusion would not be accurate. Card had considered opening up Ender's universe to other authors to write in. He even lined the first one up. But as he developed the story with the other author, he began to realize that he cared very much about Bean's story. Card wrote Ender's Shadow for the same reason he's written every other of his books: he wanted to write a story that mattered to him.

Card takes an intriguing mix of elements and synthesizes them into a complex and -- well, I can't get Spock's favorite word out of my head to describe Ender's Shadow -- fascinating novel. But through my entire reading experience, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. The characterization didn't seem quite truthful -- carefully, cleverly, and consistently crafted, but not quite truthful. I couldn't place my finger on why.

Perhaps it's because, in Ender's Game, we like Bean. He seems a good and decent kid who is loyal to Ender. In Ender's Shadow, we learn that many of the likeable things he did in Ender's Game were motivated by calculating and cold-blooded self-servience. Bean turns out to be quite the sociopath -- understandably so, considering his harsh upbringing. In fact, I found myself wondering if he was still better than a real boy would turn out under similar circumstances. But it was disappointing to find the Bean of Ender's Game was an illusion.

I can't fault the author for this. He was being true to the character he created. But the end result is that Ender's Shadow is a fascinating (there's that word again) intellectual study that doesn't affect the reader at the emotional level that Ender's Game does. Perhaps it can't, given the nature of the story. Perhaps it's as good as that story can be, and only suffers in comparison to its towering, emotion-laden cousin.

Nevertheless, Ender's Shadow is still a book that holds its own against other notable science fiction books by Card and other authors. None of my reservations should deter anyone from reading it. Just don't expect Ender's Game. Expect a very different book.

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D. Michael Martindale
dmichael@wwno.com