Ender's Shadow

Ender's Shadow is the fifth book in Orson Scott Card's Ender Series.

Ender's Shadow covers roughly the same time span as Ender's Game, but from the perspective of the character Bean rather than Ender. Bean is an experiment in DNA tampering to create a super human. While he is brilliant, his growth pattern has been altered. He grows slower than most children, but will continue to grow until he becomes a giant and dies prematurely, most likely from heart failure. Bean was created alongside 22 other children who were destroyed when the government caught on to the experiment. Bean was the only child, infant really, to escape by hiding in a toilet tank. He was saved but ended up on the mean streets of Rotterdam.

He is homeless and nearly dead from starvation when he convinces a crew, a small gang of homeless children, to try to get a bully to protect them. The plan temporarily works. Achilles (pronounced in the French as ah-SHEEL) makes the crew into a family, an angle which he manipulates to gain greater and more consistent access to food for himself and his family. Card again focuses on the inhuman cruelty that children can inflict on one another. Achilles eventually kills one of the kids, Poke. Poke had grudgingly allowed Bean into her crew and offered him food when he was close to his last breath. Bean blamed himself for Poke's death and his haunted by the memory.

Eventually, Bean gets to Battle School and the gist of the plot follows the history of Ender's Game. Except, if you thought Ender was a snotty know-it-all, you will hate Bean. Bean is occasionally wrong, especially when it comes to certain social interactions. Bean's role is much more important in this version of the story. He is powerful but always works behind the scenes, sometimes even literally in the shadows. This book is kind of obtuse, like an exclamation mark instead of an ellipsis. There is just no subtext. The religious elements are much more dramatic, thanks in part to the helpful nun Sister Carlotta. However, it is difficult to tell if Card is intentionally ambiguous or just incapable of making a coherent theological statement.

I did enjoy reading the book, up until the end at least. The happy ending, Bean reunited with his biological parents and his unaltered twin brother, who just happened to be in Bean's launch groups . . . it's too much. That kind of ending might give me diabetes. And the problem of his uncontrollably, fatal growth is somehow forgotten. The end to the bugger war is likewise emotionally dead. Ender's realization, his horror, his guilt, his grief, this is what made the original worth reading. But Bean knows all along and Bean does not seem to feel the consequences of wiping out an entire sentient species. He just has the happy ending. It couldn't be more cliche if he ended up married to Petra.


*Added on August 12th*
I would like amend my final conclusion. The family-reunion end, that was cheap. But I did not give proper credit to Bean's response to the final battle. In Ender's Game, Ender felt the weight of his xenocide, the loss of a species which had connected to him personally. He felt sacrifice of the human pilots but it did not linger in his regrets. Because I was comparing Ender's Shadow to Ender's Game, Bean to Ender, I let myself forget Bean's response to the pilot's death.

Bean was aware, almost the entire time, that he was not staging mock battles for training, that real people died when he lost a ship. Bean realized that the pilots were willingly sacrificing themselves, throwing their lives away in the hope that one of them would survive long enough to save humanity.

I feel that religious people are often terrible at putting religious depth into fiction. Since I am an academic studying religion, I get a bored by pulp religion. You know, the kind of stuff that shows up the history channel or in hospital gift shop books. I've got nothing against religion or spirituality (although I think faith is criminal) but I don't like anything cheap. The great thing about religion is its complexity, its ambiguities. People who think religion offers easy answers might as well be living in Aldous Huxley's futuristic dystopia.

Just before the pilots plummeted to death, Bean sent a private message to them, paraphrasing 2 Samuel 18:33. And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" Absalom, David's son, started a rebellion. This epitaph is what David cried when he heard his rebellious son had died. I know that the import of the message is "would god I had died for thee" but I wonder what else can be built from it.

Absalom had also killed his brother, Amnon, who raped their sister Tamar. Amnon had been heir apparent until Absalom avenged his sister. Absalom hid for three years in his grandfather's kingdom before his father took him back. Absalom began his rebellion by building support for himself, promising justice and offering humility. Absalom was captured in a humiliating fashion. His handsome head and flowing hair were caught in a forked tree while his mule ran off without him. He was trapped until Joab put three spears through him, against Daddy King David's wishes.

He did the right thing, he was exiled, he was a murderer, he rebelled, he promised justice, he was killed against the king's commands, he was grieved. All these things were true of the pilots as well. King David had a curious relationship with his children. He loved them in their terrible flaws. His mourning frightened others because it went against the mores and customs of the time. Things to contemplate.

Ender's Game

Ender is a young child (ages 6-12 through the story) who was bred with the expectation that he would save the world from an alien species called the buggers, more properly known as the formics. The formics are an intelligent, insect race. The humans and formics have clashed twice before. Once in hand to hand combat and again when the humans repelled an invading force. Ender struggles terribly as his teachers intentionally turn the other students against him to isolate him. They also push him harder than any other student, testing his limits and ability to command under stress. Meanwhile, his siblings, Peter and Valentine manipulate politics on earth through aliases online. Ender attempts to throw his final exam by making the unethical decision to wipe out the entire race of formics. However, his exam was not a simulation, as he had been told, but actual battles and skirmishes, his commands carried out by real pilots, many of whom died in order to follow his tactics. Ender is haunted by the number of lives he has taken. However, Valentine offers him a chance at redemption by convincing him to govern one of the first human colonies. There, he discovers an unhatched queen and a message left to him by the dead race. He publishes this message under the pen name "Speaker for the Dead" and carries the egg from planet to planet in hopes of hatching her and bringing the formics back from extinction.

This simple plot is the foundation of a complex study of humanity. Ender is the third born in his family, which is an embarrassment to his parents since population is strictly controlled and a third child is a symbol of pettiness and lack of patriotism. However, Ender's birth was ordered by the military. Peter, the eldest, had originally been the hope of the military but is sadistic and sociopath tendencies frightened them. Valentine was also promising but she had too much of what Peter lacked, empathy.

Ender was somewhere in the middle. Peter resents his brother because Ender's very existence is an enormous sign the Peter was inadequate. He often hurts and terrifies his brother. Peter is not the only one. Ender is bullied at school on Earth and during his military training. Ender, fearing that he will be continually bullied, pushes any physical assault to the limit anticipating that his enemy will never want to fight him again. Two of his attackers die as a result of his retaliation. His teachers and manipulators try to keep him ignorant of this but Ender eventually realizes what he has done. Ender sees his empathy as part of his darker side. He knows his enemy inside and out. When he attacks them, he knows them so well that he loves them they way they loves themselves. But it is that knowledge that allows him to beat them, that love that leads him to kill them.

The formics feel the same about humanity. They manipulate one of his games to reach out to Ender and understand him. They enter his dreams, communicating with him and learning about him and his species. When he arrives on one of their colony planets to govern the human pilgrims, he discovers an artificial landscape that had been shaped in his dreams and nightmares. It is there that he finds the queen's egg and learns completely about his enemies.

Ender does not have a chance to enjoy or experience childhood. His life is made of artificial and real challenges. He constantly struggles with the rest of humanity and with himself. His lessons are harsh as are his reactions. He is not able to trust anyone, even Valetine is used to manipulate him.

After Ender leaves, Peter struggles to destroy his own inner demons. He feels that his sadistic tendencies are wrong but he is driven to them and enjoys the suffering he causes. He convinces Valentine to help him channel his energy and help save humanity. Together the orchestrate political strife on Earth which errupts into a short war. At the end of the war, Peter is able to control humanity. While Peter is tempered into a politician, Valentine struggles to retain her identity as she is drawn to power and manipulation. Despite being children, their parents are nearly inconsequential. For all three children, adults cannot be trusted or relied upon. Their difficulties are faced as mature individuals. None of these children are given the possibility of childhood, they become wise and aged before their time.

Children playing war games, saving the world and the human race, it is difficult not to draw comparisons between this book and the very real and very tragic Children's Crusade. Those medieval children believed that in their very innocence lay their success. Since the crusades were wars of religions, the children who marched off to battle believed that their faith and purity would enable God to fully protect them and lead them to victory. Of course, that is not at all what happened. In Ender's Game, the children's innocence and purity are methodically destroyed, their trust violated, their faith in adults used against them. As soon as Ender discovers the motive behind the games, the rules change. His attempts to circumvent his manipulators only play into their hands, making him complicit and guilty even as he is incapable of escaping his fate and unaware of the consequences of his actions.

It is also easy to see this book as a critique of certain education systems, which are goal driven and do not prepare students for life (or peace). Actually, I doubt at all that Card had this in mind but I do. All of the children in the military academies realize that they can let their studies slip because the game is all that matters to their teachers. At the end of the war against the formics, none of those students will have skills relevant to a world without the constant threat of invasion. Ender sardonically notes that, due to his training and excellence in military tactics and murder, no one thinks he is capable of maintaining peace and order.

Most reviewers ignore the fact that the formics were not actually an invading force when Ender kills them. The formics were unaware that the humans were an intelligent species, treating them as one would treat a wild animal that attacked. The so called second invasion was an attempt to colonize Earth without hostile intentions. However, they were attacked and their queen destroyed. The main complication was communication. The fornics communicated telepathically, shared all information and knowledge automatically. They were incapable of speech and ignorant of language. And of course humans are incapable of telepathy. The feared third invasion never was. It was a preemptive strike, which means that the formics were defending themselves, their queen, their species. And yet, they held no hostility to mankind, no hatred to Ender. Like Ender, they learned to love their enemy. A rather Christian sentiment, powerful because it was complete love as humans can never truly feel toward their attackers. Unless you are the Dalai Lama.