This final book in the Ender Quartet spends most of its time tying up loose ends from Xenocide than moving the story along. The fleet still threatens the planet Lusitania, Jane still faces imminent destruction, Miro is still angstful about his love life, and Ender's still going a bit mad. Everything is tied up neatly at the end, but by and large these latter two novels - Xenocide and Children of the Mind - feel superfluous. I admire Card for his amazing SF ideas, especially the development of the Piggies, but there wasn't much point in putting all the aiua business in the Ender universe. But that's okay. Now I know how it ends, and if I care to reread the series in the future, I'll simply stop after Speaker for the Dead. ( )

Though it touches on some interesting topics, overall I found Children of the Mind (the fourth book in the Ender series) to be a bit of a let down. The story seems to shift, as it progresses, from a futuristic sci-fi tale to one dominated by religious overtones. A good read, but my least favorite of the series (or the Shadow series, for that matter). ( )

In Xenocide, Card moved the Ender series from the soft science fiction of Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead into the realm of fantasy, splitting Ender's soul, or aiua into three bodies and postulating a method of faster than light travel that involves thinking people and things from one place to another. In Children of the Mind, the fantasy-ization process begun in Xenocide reaches its conclusion and the Ender series descends into mushy gobbledygook. (Is "fantasy-ization" an actual word? That's as close as I can come to a description of what happened to the series).

By the time most series reach the fourth book, the various plot threads have multiplied to the point that the action requires several characters. Card sidesteps this issue by breaking up Ender into three characters, original Ender, pseudo-Peter, and pseudo-Valentine and sending one of them on each of the major plot points. This, of course, side-steps Card having to go through the process of having new characters carry on the story, keeping Ender front and center. The fact that pseudo-Valentine is actually Ender is made truly creepy by the fact that actual Valentine is still around. These pseudo-characters are also the "children of the mind" of the title, although lip service is given to a Catholic monastic order that has this name, the order doesn't actually have any impact on the story. Oddly, the most boring and pointless of the story lines is the one original Ender ends up in as he tries to convince his wife Novinha that he actually loves her and she should let him live with her in a sexless and empty marriage. Why he continues to pursue her despite her outrageously nasty behavior is unexplained. Of course, several of the other characters excuse Novinha's daughter Quara's continuous nasty behavior and get mad at pseudo-Valentine when she calls out Quara for acting like a spoiled child. For some reason, the idea that everyone should excuse as acceptable the unacceptably obnoxious behavior of those around them forms a major subtheme of the story. I think this is just a way to clumsily try to make Ender into more of a martyr figure (as if having the "guilt" of being an unwitting xenocide was not enough), by showing that he tolerates people around him who behave in a way that would drive most civilized people to shun them and uncivilized people to smack them. The fact that pseudo-Valentine is called onto the carpet for reacting against this same sort of obnoxious behavior seems to undermine this point though.

In any event, in Xenocide Card established that Jane, being a super-powerful computer personality, could create faster than light travel by thinking things and people from one place to another. (This also explains how Ender magically created pseudo-Valentine and pseudo-Peter, and how Miro was magically healed, and how every living being is connected by supernatural "philotic bonds"). The book connects the planet Path-based Han Quing-jao story from Xenocide with the Lusitania-based story of all the other characters by having pseudo-Peter teleport to Path and meet the servant Wang-mu and take her with him on his attempts to keep Starways Congress from shutting down the ansible computer network connections that sustains Jane. In their quest, pseudo-Peter and Wang-mu visit a Japanese culture planet and then a Polynesian culture planet, meeting up with philosophers and religious figures from those worlds (apparently, in the future, humanity stops melding cultures and becomes obsessed with preserving several thousand year old cultural memes). There is a lot of philosophical wailing and gnashing of teeth, and for no real apparent reason, Wang-mu falls in love with pseudo-Peter.

Meanwhile, pseudo-Valentine joins up with the freshly reborn Miro (who, in another fantasy twist, has had his debilitating physical and mental injuries healed by magic) to survey suitable colonization planets so that the inhabitants of Lusitania can be resettled (using Jane's magical interstellar teleportation) and save the Humans, Pequinos and Buggers threatened by the Lusitania fleet (which is planning on using the Doctor device to destroy the planet and contain the Descoladra virus). Eventually, they find out that they are actually looking for the original planet of the beings that created the Descoladra virus to try to find out why they have been cleansing planets of life with their biological weapons.

While this is going on, original Ender falls ill and slips into a coma (having become more interested in his other two bodies, which makes some sense, since this one is trapped in a marriage with the exceptionally nasty Novinha), making Nohvina realize she loves him (a little too late), and getting Plinkt all excited that she will be able to Speak at his funeral. Jane also needs to take over pseudo-Valentine's body (which is apparently okay, because pseudo-Valentine is only a manifestation of Ender, although pseudo-Valentine isn't sure she wants to have her pesonality destroyed), and Ender is supposed to transfer into pseudo-Peter (odd, because pseudo-Peter is explicitly described as being a nightmare conjured up by Ender). This will supposedly cleanse Ender's soul of the guilt over having been duped as a child into destroying the Buggers home planet - Ender's guilt is an interesting element, as Card clearly intends us to believe that Ender Should feel guilty about his unwitting actions. I find this hard to swallow, as it is clearly established that Ender was duped and a child at the time. Card's version of moral responsibility is one that seems to basically tar even those who are minors who were deceived into doing something wrong.

If this sounds needlessly convoluted, it is. It is also fairly tedious and boring in execution, as characters spend a lot of time whining to one another, and moaning about their personal problems. Meanwhile, the planet Lusitania, countless humans, and two entire alien races are threatened with destruction, which makes one wonder about the sanity of the characters involved given their focus in the minutia of their personal lives. The story meanders: pseudo-Peter must first convince one philosopher so he can convince another philosopher, so they can convince someone else and on and on in a tedious progression. Miro and pseudo-Valentine must survey dozens of plents while Miro falls in love with Jane and both pseudo-Valentine, and all of them (plus original Valentine) spend lots of time talking about their feelings for one another, but never to each other, because that would make sense (and result in all the personal moaning and whining being dealt with in a short period of time, which will not do, as Card seems to think dragging this out in lengthy passages is necessary).

Finally, when pseudo-Valentine and Miro find the planet the creators of the Descoladra virus come from, they spend a lot of time debating whether the inhabitants are ramen (and thus killing them would be immoral), or varelse (and thus killing them would not be immoral). This is paralleled by the Jane story, as Starways Congress tries to kill her, and the Lusitania fleet story, as fleet admiral Lands goes against orders and tries to destroy Lusitania with the Doctor Device.

In the end, all of the story lines turn out to be pointless. The shut down order that should kill Jane is given, but Jane is able to hide her mind in the mother-trees and a rigged up computer network. Lands tries to destroy Lusitania with a very obvious attempt to make a parallel with Ender's own story from Ender's Game, since he consciously decides to try to destroy Lusitania despite orders not to, and destroy not only the entire human populace of the planet, but as far as he knows the entire race of Pequinos and the entire race of Buggers. This is, of course, to be contrasted with Ender's own experience in which he unknowingly was duped by those in authority in attempting to destroy an entire race of aliens. (Why Ender feels guilty over having been duped is, of course, not explained, but he does and the characters harp on this for pages at a time). Like most of the rest of the book, this parallel is pretty ham-fisted, and in the end, since Jane neutralizes the threat with magic, not very important.

The only truly interesting part of the story, the decision as to whether the Descoladra makers are ramen or varelse, is not resolved. The only conclusion arrived at is that because we cannot know whether we will ever be able to communicate with them, humanity cannot rule out the possibility, so treating them as varelse would always be immoral. Hence, the only conclusion that the book seems to come to is that the entire "hierarchy of alienness" is mostly a sham, because using this logic, nothing could ever be varelse. Having spent most of his time writing about the trivial and petty interpersonal sniping between mostly unlikable characters, Card doesn't have enough time in the narrative to actually do much more than introduce the Descoladra makers as an intriguing mystery, and then drop the story.

Overall, this is a disappointing ending to the Ender series. With a cast of characters that range from ineffectual doormats, to the nasty obnoxious people who walk over them and a collection of stories that turn out to be completely pointless, the book is really a long poorly thought out mish-mash of philosophical posturing that refuses to actually explore the one interesting area that comes up - which is of course the only plot point that Jane cannot solve with her magical powers. When Ender dies, the reader simply doesn't care (since his soul goes into pseudo-Peter anyway), making the whole Ender funeral seem anticlimactic and pointless as well. All pretense at actual science fiction is abandoned as the book bogs down with magical "aiua's", magical "philotic bonds", magical teleportation, and a bunch of random philosophizing that amounts to a giant pile of scientific sounding but ultimately meaningless gibberish. Basically, Card could have written the sequel to Xenocide in one sentence: "Jane solves all the problems with magic." It probably would have been better if he had. ( )

The Ender's Game series should have ended with Speaker for the Dead. Those books are two of my all time favorites... but now I count Xenocide and Children of the Mind among the worst I have ever read, since both are major disappointments that ruin this series.

First off, "Children of the Mind" is a horribly chosen title - there are a few pages at the beginning about Children of the Mind of Christ, but that is the only time they are ever mentioned. Surprisingly, barely any time at all is devoted to the piggies, buggers, or the planet Lusitania like in past books.

When problems arise, there's always a magical solution - it is Deus Ex Machina, just like in the Xenocide book. Need to stop a nuke heading for the planet? Well, just have Jane teleport it somewhere else. But not before teleporting everyone off planet. When the Jane A.I. needed saved, her essence/soul/Philote simply jumps forms to the Piggys' trees, then she overwrites a human form by jumping into Valentine. Rather than have a rational use of innovative technology, instead there's an inexplicable spiritual cop-out.

There's also plot holes, like when the computer network is shutdown in order to kill Jane, they have all ansibles turned off. Yet, during this time, the different teams talk to one another over the ansible! (Peter/Wang-Mu talk to Miro/Valentine/Quara when they are orbiting the Descolada planet.) And then there's the Peter team trying to track down who actually sent the fleet to Lucitania, which leads them to a Samoan philosopher, who can see Philotes and knows of Jane and sees her as a god. Why would he have influenced the fleet to be sent in the first place?

I used to read everything by Dean Koontz until reading Odd Hours, and this book did the same thing for this author. I used to be a fan of Orson Scott Card... right up until I read Children of the Mind. ( )

Not nearly as good as the first three in the trilogy. Seems to have been added on to tie up a lot of loose ends. Middle part really drags with a bit too much angst and soul searching by the characters. Not much in the way of new concepts. Picks up a bit towards the end and in fact gallops through the wrapup quite quickly. ( )