Children of the Mind

Wraps up the series neatly enough . . . until you stop to think about how ridiculous the entire premise is or how annoying it is that everything seems to fit so nicely together.

I suppose I have to recant the part of my [b:Xenocide|8648|Xenocide (Ender's Saga, #3)|Orson Scott Card|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1316131283s/8648.jpg|1150594] review where I called the "birth" of Peter and Young Val "unnecessary." That was obviously a crucial episode for what Card had in store for the series conclusion. But I still won't take back the opinion that it's annoying.

Positives: After starting slowly, the plot did pick up around halfway through and was sufficiently interesting to keep me turning pages; there was a scene where the mothertrees started show more to fruit which was beautiful. . . by far the most emotional part of the book for me; there was much creativity in the solution to the Jane problem.

Negatives: Overall, the book was simply annoying. We were subjected again to far too many pages of the completely useless and unbelievable Quara, the inner turmoil of Miro (this time as he's deciding between Val and Jane), the completely incredible romance between Peter and Wang-Mu, tedious scenes between Ender and the second-least sympathetic character in the series Novinha (Card, if you're going to make her this unlikeable, you can't continue to subject the reader to her), and "recaps" from the previous books that went on for long paragraphs and I ended up just skipping. The chapter intros by Qiang-Jao brought nothing, and if anything had only the effect of reminding me of one of the most annoying characters from the previous book.

The entire concept of Peter and Young Val was inconsistent. They either have free will and are their own people (in which case Ender is like a God, to have enough soul to split in two), or they're not. If the former, they wouldn't need Ender anyway to continue living, and if the latter, there's no way they would ever be able to experience self-pity. There's no in between.

And did it really have to end with everyone living happily ever after? Sure Ender died, but we were clearly not meant to care for him at all by this stage in the series. Miro gets his Jane and Peter and Wang-Mu get to be soulmates after the least romantic courtship ever. Wang-Mu will remain one of the most underdeveloped main characters ever, with no answer as to what was motivating her to behave the way she did.

Overall, this and Xenocide could have been greatly condensed into one 500-600 page novel and been a masterpiece. show less

I know several readers, myself included, who were blown away by Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. They then found the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, to be equally as riveting and eagerly reached for Xenocide, book three in the series, with the highest of expectations--only to be slammed with disappointment. This otherwise serviceable book, with an original premise and interesting characters, crashes to an unsatisfying and confusing ending that combines the worst attributes of deus ex machina and sequel hooking. Back in the mid-90s, it seemed that only the most devoted of Ender fans dared to approach the fourth book, Children of the Mind. The rest of us avoided it like the descolada virus itself.

This situation may have changed over the show more ensuing decade as Card has published a number of prequel and sequel books in the Ender universe including a notable series about the life and times of Ender Wiggin's schoolmate, Bean. As the story world has expanded, characters have been fleshed out, political systems have been better defined, and the original quadrology has been reframed into a new context. Xenocide-burned readers may finally be ready to take tentative steps toward CotM--or at least that's my theory, after receiving an endorsement of the book from a friend who described it as "not as bad as everyone thought it would have to be."

So I read the book and it was, indeed, not as bad as everyone thought it would have to be--but it's no Ender's Game, either.

It helps to know that Xenocide and CotM were originally conceived as a single volume, which was divided in half when the page count climbed higher than the publisher was willing to accommodate. CotM's confusing and disjointed opening takes place only moments after Xenocide's confusing and disjointed ending, and neither book feels complete on its own. I'm sure the author did the best he could but the result still reads like a botched operation to separate conjoined twins.

CoTM starts in the middle of the action with no easy recap for those of us who haven't read the previous book in a while, so a better transition would have been appreciated. Perhaps something like I've done in this episode of Book Review Theater...



EXTERIOR - EXTRASOLAR PLANET WITH THREE MOONS IN AN ORANGE SKY, WHERE PEOPLE STROLL ALONG A BOARDWALK THAT SEPARATES A BEACH ON ONE SIDE FROM URBAN BLIGHT ON THE OTHER - LATE EVENING

A cardboard box appears from nowhere. Peter Wiggin and Si Wang-mu emerge, look around in confusion for a moment, and confront the first man passing by.

PETER: Excuse me, sir?

MAN: Yeah? Whatta you want?

PETER: I'm an extra-universally created simulation of Peter Wiggin, the late Hegemon of the Free People of Earth, under the spiritual control of Andrew "Ender" Wiggin who is and will remain, until his imminent death of old age, reviled and celebrated, respectively, as Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead.

WANG-MU: And I am Wang-mu, a former slave with artificially-enhanced intellectual capacity, ironically named after a Chinese goddess. Also ironically, the so-called free people of my society were in fact enslaved to outside powers by virtue of their genetically-crafted OCD tendencies while peasants and slaves like myself remained actually free.

PETER: With the aid of Jane, a unique [b:artificial intelligence|27543|Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach (2nd Edition)|Stuart J. Russell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167881696s/27543.jpg|1362] originally created by an alien race that's falsely presumed to be extinct at the hands of my apparent younger brother and puppetmaster, we are travelling from Wang-Mu's home world--

WANG-MU: The Planet Where Everyone Is Chinese.

PETER: Right. From Wang-Mu's home world, The Planet Where Everyone is Chinese, we were meant to find The Planet Where Everyone Is A Pacific Islander by way of The Planet Where Everyone is Japanese.

WANG-MU (looks around): With my advanced intellect, I've determined that this is not any of those worlds.

MAN: Nah. This is The Planet Where Everyone Is From New Jersey. Got a problem with that?

PETER: Not at all, my hairy knuckle-dragging friend. It would seem that Jane is playing a practical joke on us, or perhaps manipulating our journey in the same way that everyone around us seems to be constantly manipulating everyone else in some way or other.

WANG-MU: Including ourselves.

PETER: I'm sorry for taking up your time, but we really must be going. A fleet is approaching The Planet Where Everyone is Brazilian with the intention of blowing the whole thing up, not knowing yet that a cure to the dreaded species-scrambling descolada virus has been found, or that their actions would mean genocide for the last remaining Buggers as well as the native Piggies and Jane herself--who is unique enough to be considered her own species. Did I mention that Jane has the ability to pop people in and out of the universe, allowing them to create impossible objects, bring people back from the dead, and cure brain damage or deformities of the body?

WANG-MU: Which is why we must prevent Congress from shutting Jane down by persuading some influential philosophers that the events of World War II back on Earth are still relevant in space so many thousands of years later.

Peter and Wang-mu step back into the cardboard box, which promptly vanishes.

MAN: What a couple of self-important jerks!

review theater>

Something like that would have helped a lot, although the premise does seem rather silly and far-fetched when you try to boil it down to a few short paragraphs of exposition. It also reveals a major weakness of the story world: the assumption that Earth would colonize new worlds on a nation-by-nation basis and that the resulting planetary cultures would not change or evolve noticeably from their progenitors. This detail seems glaringly unrealistic in light of Card's obsession with such anthropological details as food, architecture, and language.

Ender himself hardly appears in this book, and perhaps the most memorable character from Xenocide, OCD-laden genius Han Qing-jao, is missing entirely--only represented in CotM by tantalizing excerpts from her philosophical writings, which serve as thematic chapter headers. But Qing-jao's presence would perhaps have been redundant since she is far from the series's only deep-thinking philosopher and author of impactful works that have changed the lives of billions or trillions of people. In addition to Quing-jao, this would include Ender (author of a trilogy that has stayed continuously in print for over three thousand years), Valentine and Peter (who manipulated world governments through their pseudonymous writings as Demosthenes and Locke), Aimaina Hikari (whose works inspired attempted xenocide), Grace (whose writings inspired Hikari), Malu (whose works inspired Grace), and Plikt (who, as the speaker for Ender's death, has a lock on a future bestseller as well).

Only Ender's stepdaughter, Quara, seems to lack the bug for philosophizing and authorship, so of course the other characters use her as a punching bag for their verbal abuse--which highlights another annoyance I experienced with this book. Every scene is either a dramafest of angst and confrontation or an excuse for long philosophical soliloquies that usually include at least one Shakespeare quotation. Or often, both. Almost without exception, every philosophical theory presented in the book is then subsequently picked apart and discarded as childish and simplistic compared to the unexpressed deeper thoughts that all of our genius characters are keeping to themselves. This makes for one long, emotionally draining, and often pompous book.

Bottom Line: Every reader of thought-provoking science fiction, age 10 through 110, should pick up copies of Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. My prior warning to avoid Xenocide is tempered somewhat, but anyone who continues onward in the series should read Xenocide and Children of the Mind together and be prepared for an exhausting and confusing ride. show less

Children of the Mind is the second half of Xenocide which explains why the residents of planet Luistania are still looking for a way to escape the decimation of their planet. This is also the final book in the Ender quartet. The survival of the children of the mind hinges on Computer Jane's ability to move the humans, buggers, and pequeninos to a more hospital planet for colonization without overtaxing her bandwidth. Every jump takes her down a notch. Meanwhile, Peter Wiggin, Ender's older brother, travels to meet with the Starways Congress to convince them to stop their campaign to destroy Lusitania. Only Peter isn't Peter. He is another entity of Ender. In fact, Ender has three bodies: his own, Peter's and Young Valentine's. Children show more of the Mind, like the other books in the series gets a little didactic and preachy. show less

Look - Ender was quirky, but cute.

But the rest of the books are drivel.

A sure sign of a floundering author is when the rate of new unexpected inventions matches the rate of new unexpected crisis points.

Can't cure Malaria? We'll invent faster than light travel.

Can't fix hatred? We'll invent new physics that re-defines the soul.

Give me a break.

The book is choke full of "moral dilemmas", all clumsy and contrived, as if the author just discovered the concept of a dilemma and is out to prove he can make the biggest one. My dilemma is bigger than you dilemma!

But the point of a dilemma is that you have to CHOOSE. If you resolve it by inventing new physics that allows you to eat your cake and have it too, then you're not doing it right.

In the show more dictionary, under the definition of "deus ex machina", there should be a picture of this book series. show less

This book was so bad that it made me want to take a star off of the first three books in the series. All of the plotlines built up throughout the series are brought to disappointing deus ex machina conclusions. The idea that if you want it, it will be is so easy and such a lazy way to resolve the plot and moral corners that the author wrote himself into. Very unsatisfying. Sometimes it's not the author's job to resolve every single issue he touches on and it's either hubris or a lack of understanding of the depth of moral, ethical and philosophical issues to try.

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 show more 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 planets 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. show less

Children of the Mind, fourth in the Ender series, is the conclusion of the story begun in the third book, Xenocide. The author unravels Ender's life and reweaves the threads into unexpected new patterns, including an apparent reincarnation of his threatening older brother, Peter, not to mention another "sister" Valentine. Multiple storylines entwine, as the threat of the Lusitania-bound fleet looms ever nearer. The self-aware computer, Jane, who has always been more than she seemed, faces death at human hands even as she approaches godhood. At the same time, the characters hurry to investigate the origins of the descolada virus before they lose their ability to travel instantaneously between the stars. There is plenty of action and show more romance to season the text's analyses of Japanese culture and the flux and ebb of civilizations. But does the author really mean to imply that Ender's wife literally bores him to death? --Brooks Peck show less