Customer Reviews

Shadow of the Hegemon

5 star:		(74)
4 star:		(60)
3 star:		(29)
2 star:		(26)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

This was an ok book...definitely NOT one of Card's best books. I enjoyed Ender's Shadow and I guess in a way, it was interesting to see what happens to all the Battle School kids after the war was over. But the plot was not really all that exciting and the character development in the book was starting to get weird. I mean, I enjoyed Ender's Game because it was a book about children. In my mind, these will always be children and when he started having them talk and do grown-up things, it just didn't sit right with me. And then at the end...there was that little insinuation about Bean and Petra... That was bizarre and I didn't like that.

I enjoyed Children of the Mind very much. In this book you can see the aftermath of the Bugger Wars. You can see a better look at Bean,Petra, and Achilles. These main characters were always my favorite and I feel Mr.Card did a very good job exploring these characters more. You have Bean, the super genius child. You have Achilles the teenage criminal mastermind out for blood and to rule the world by harnesting the top battleschool alumni children. And you have Petra the damsel in distress that's capable of taking care of herself using her mind, skill, and even charm. Put these three characters together with other interesting people, future bamboozled political situations, and lots of guns, brains, and Orson Scott Card and you have a book that is garenteed to keep you on the edge of your seat, never wanting to put it down.

This book by Orson Scott Card, is a very good sequel to Enders shadow. It gives more depth about the character known as bean. They tell about his personal life and how he struggled to stay alive. Bean is my favorite character in the Enders game series. He shows the most wits and learns the fastest. He develops emotion, which he has never felt before. Bean, ends up saving the world along with a team of super intelligent kids that think they are playing a game but in reality they are actually commanding star ships in a galaxy where the buggers reside.

Not only is Bean a survivor of 25 which 23 were burnt down, he ends up finding his parents and eventually meets his long lost bother. His savior, who is also like his mother, finds Enders brother Peter. Bean helps peter become Hegemon.

To me this is the best book of the series, because to me Bean was my favorite Character, because of his intelligence and his past experiances.

It's rare for me to only give a Orson Scott Card book three stars, but Card seems to have really stumbled with this one. Although the book is very entertaining, it also has some very serious flaws.

One major problem with Shadow of the Hegemon (and the one that I found to be the most bizarre) is that it doesn't really appear to be set in the future. Card never tells us exactly what year it's supposed to be, but we know that humanity has spent several generations fighting a major interstellar war, we've built fleets of starships with weapons capable of destroying entire planets, and we've unlocked the secrets of faster-than-light communication. Yet for some reason, virtually all of the technology - military and otherwise - in Shadow of the Hegemon seems to be from only a few years in the future. People are still flying around in helicopters, shooting gunpowder machine guns at each other, and generally living their lives and fighting in the way one would expect two or three years from now. The world's geo-political situation is also largely unchanged, with most of the world's nations characterized by political stereotypes from today. Although this in itself doesn't really ruin the book, it's all jarringly incongruous with the previous books in the series.

A second, more fundamental problem has to do with the way in which the main characters in the story interact with their world. The battle school children seem more like forces of nature than actual characters. They seem to be so far above the rest of humanity that they come to dominate everyone and everything they come into contact with, despite that fact that most of them are small children. The entire world seems to bend itself to their will, and they alone are able to successfully oppose each other. Of course Ender's character had that sort of importance in 'Ender's Game,' but there was also an elaborate backstory to explain how a single child came to have such an important role in deciding the fate of humanity. In 'Shadow of the Hegemon' it seems that Card again wanted to make his child characters pivotally important, but he never really comes up with a credible explanation for how any group of people - no matter how brilliant or well trained - could end up so incredibly influential in world affairs.

Despite all that, 'Shadow of the Hegemon' is still a very entertaining book. The plot is quite entertaining in spite of its problems with consistency and believability, and the action proceeds at a brisk pace. Although Card seems to give his battle school children far more credit than plausibility allows, they're all quite fascinating and well-developed characters. It's genuinely interesting to watch Bean, Petra, Achilles, and company spar with each other for world domination. Even with its flaws, Shadow of the Hegemon is still better than most of what you'll find on bookstore shelves.

I am sure that I am not the only one that suspects that Card wrote Ender's Shadow to take one final squeeze out of the cash cow that is Ender's Game. How fitting the book is called Ender's Shadow, because it IS the same story, the same characters, only paler in comparison. Bean is an interesting character and perhaps Card should have expounded more on the other battle school kids earlier, but to retrofit the story this way is just plain unnecessary. It lacks the newness, uniqueness, and ultimately - the surprise ending of the original. Most of the book is rehashing the same events of EG, but with a seething, gnashing jealous, yet superior, Bean in the background. With the help of Sister Carlotta, he does redeem himself from being a soulless, arrogant Napoleonic runt, though not by much. What is next? We will find out that it was Petra - the real uber supremo genius, not Bean, not Ender - who won the war?

What is new: modern technology that justifies Bean's abnormal genius traits. There is one particular scene that some may find ludicrous involving Bean's miraculous feats of survival whilst in diapers. This first book is insubstantial, but I do recommended giving it a run anyway, as the rest of the series takes an arc that a lot of Ender fans were yearning for - the first couple of years post Battle School. The tale takes on mythic proportions as the young prodigies assume leadership of various nations and battle for control of Earth - against an arch nemesis named, quite suitably, "Achilles". It is less sci-fi and more speculative political drama with a dose of Card's singular use of child heroes.

I have read through other 2 books in the Ender's series including Ender's Game and the Speaker for the Dead. Though it's really a pity that I didn't cover Ender's Shadow,I am still quite like this book,because Card's plot is just unresistable. You can never predict what is going on next. Also I like Card's feature of beginning every chapter with a small passage (emails, most times), they give you small hints or brief accounts of what is happening. It IS really a perfect book if there is not that thing. And that's why I didn't give it a full mark. As a Chinese, I cannot accept the fact that Achilles ended up going to China and that China appears in the book as an evil country. I think Russian peaple will get the same feeling when they saw Mother Russia be described as a country which would destroy the peace of the world for its own privilege. I believe China would never do such evil things.

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.

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.

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.

This book was fun. The action and characters are good. I miss the theological depth that is present in some of the other books but it was worth reading.