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Title: Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card ISBN: 0-8125-6595-9 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 09 December, 2001 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.85 (195 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Shadow of the Hegemon
Comment: Earth has been saved from the Formics by Ender, but who will rise up to save the people of Earth from themselves? Shadow of the Hegemon is the hair tingling story of Bean and his adventures to save Earth from the plans of his power hungry archenemy Achilles.
This book is somewhat unbelievable, because many of the strategies used by characters in it would never work. Of these one is Achilles convincing the Russian, Chinese, and Indian government to forfeit all their power to him when he didn't even spend a month in Battle school, when there were many other children that had graduated.
If you look beyond the unbelievable parts of this book it will have you sitting on the edge of your seat and wanting to stay up all night reading it.
Rating: 1
Summary: What has happened to Card?
Comment: Nobody liked Orson Scott Card's great books more than I did: Speaker for the Dead, Ender's Game, and the first few books of the Alvin Maker series are real classics.
Which makes my disappointment at reading Shadow of the Hegemon all the more heartfelt.
If you are a complete OSC fanatic, or a 16 year old science fiction fan, go ahead and read it. It does have a certain amount of Heinlein-esque derring-do and fun. For anyone expecting more from a book, like fully fleshed out characters, a fully imagined universe, or even a modicum of plausibility, you can do much better.
The story continues the adventures of Ender Wiggin's sidekick Bean from Ender's Game; after being returned to Earth at the end of the Formic War, Battle School kids have become prized commodities and the ones from Ender's group become sort of pawns in an immense and totally implausible geopolitical game. Inexplicably, one battle school reject, a psycho street kid from Bean's past, as taken over Russia and has led them try to capture all of Ender's team. Petra is captured, Bean is on the run, and Peter Wiggin is on the way to not only becoming Hegemon but having a miraculous transformation into a nice guy, apparently because his parents told him (once) that they were as proud of him as they were of Ender. A couple of leaks to the captured kids, except for Petra who's dragged off by the pscyho to India; she inexplicably follows him around missing many opportunities to escape as he plots India's attack on Burma and Thailand, then all his plans fail but WAIT he was actually working for the Chinese all along, and Bean allows him to escape when he finally rescues her. And Bean and Peter are so successful that China ends up capturing India, Burma, and Thailand whom they were helping...this is a dumb book in so many ways I can hardly describe them, but of course I'll try anyway:
a) Ender's Game had a level of believability because the war there was essentially a video game; it's easy to believe that kids would be great at that sort of 4 dimensional strategy. It's almost impossible to believe that kids, no matter how smart, could have that sort of effect in a real world military campaign, in any century. I've never soldiered, but I have enough respect for what they do to know that to lead them, there's no amount of genius that would substitute for some real world experience.
b) Achilles is a ridiculous bad guy--he FAILED OUT of Battle School--so if Battle School was so good, why would he be any better than all the Battle School graduates? Let alone able to convince three successive governments to let him run their country without showing any success. This is so ridiculous as to be insulting to the reader
c) Petra who is supposed to be tough is ridiculously weak and lame: we hear about how she is battleschool trained and Achilles isn't so she can take him in a fight, but she only tries attacking him once, very late in the book, and lets him get the drop on her...she's alone with him and the prime minister of Pakistan and never tries to get away from him. If the book were deeply written enough to imagine some sort of Stockholm syndrome at work, that she was somehow under his spell, it would have been more believable but that is clearly not what we are told.
d) This is an incredibly thinly imagined and poorly conceived future world. We're told in an afterword that he's read one book about India and one book about Thailand...but his understanding of geopolitics and of war is something a smart 9th grader should surpass. China is able to conquer India because India moved ALL their soldiers to Burma and Thailand? Come on! The geopolitics of the book have been compared to a game of Risk, and that's really about the level it is: incredibly simplistic. So simplistic as to be just dumb. Reflecting no understanding at all of how relationships between countries, at peace and war, really work, and making no attempt to try and guess how 200 years might change things.
e) Lastly, the whole issue of character and genius are just not working any more. To write effectively about genius, the author has to actually SHOW the reader that his character is highly intelligent, not just repeatedly tell him. Card is unable to convince me that any of his characters are really smart, which makes the whole house of cards fall part.
This is really a disappointment compared with good contemporary sci-fi as well as with Card's great work. And very sad because of the quality of Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. It is, unfortuantely, consistent with some of the mindless pulp he's been turning out in the last few years, like Pastwatch and the whole Homecoming series, and I'm afraid that the Alvin Maker series may have gone downhill as well. Obviously I liked his best work enough to keep reading this stuff--but I sure hope he'll concentrate on salvaging his talent and deliver us something better...this is nothing but a disappointment.
Rating: 5
Summary: Five stars for the Hegemon.
Comment: Very witty book in which the characters are realistic, the insights interesting, and the plot has enough action to keep a 13-year old boy on the edge of his seat. It goes very deep into human nature and brings out some of the flaws in civilazation and human behavior that we see today, that have always been here, and will never go away. Card manages to bring many hypothetical situations into his story withot changing the course of history. All in all a very well written book.
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Title: Shadow Puppets (Ender, Book 7) by Orson Scott Card ISBN: 0765340054 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 03 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card ISBN: 0812575717 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 15 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card ISBN: 0812522397 Publisher: Tor Science Fiction Pub. Date: 15 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Xenocide : Volume Three of the Ender Quartet by Orson Scott Card ISBN: 0812509250 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 15 August, 1992 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Speaker for the Dead : Author's Definitive Edition by Orson Scott Card ISBN: 0812550757 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 15 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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