Ender in Exile

Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Got the thing from a lovely second hand book shop in Brixton, turn left when you get out of the tube and second left - it's down that road on the right. Being second hand (cheap) and a reminder of the first book in the series I read when I was sixteen, this one is a pleasure to read. A bit like a holiday to times past...

The plot of the original book is far too fantastical to try to summarise; I've noticed that much from reading the odd review of 'Ender's Game' before - they tend to leave me with that feeling, 'Bloody Sci-Fi nutters - they'll read anything'; the characters are reasonably well 'explored', so there's enough there to empathise with (to use reviewers parlance), the sci-fi ideas (i.e. future technology) give the author plenty of scope to get his characters from one side of the galaxy to the other without breaking into a sweat (which ultimately lead you to consider faster than light travel and transportation via de-materialisation and re-materialisation). It's all good fun.

So, in short, we're talking about a series of books about a child who is psychologically messed with to produce a human being who is capable of mass murder on a planetary scale and, as a consequence, able to save lives on the same scale. An intelligent monster who is entirely human and so equally adept at creating harmony out of the chaos he may well have caused (or, at least, was held responsible for) in the first place.

So: I like it. Although it's only a bit of fun. The characters' interactions are far more interesting than the storyline itself - which makes me wonder why I'm reading sci-fi AGAIN!

Fancy buying it? Here's a link to Amazon and the Ender series: The Ender Quartet Box Set: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind.