I haven't read either of those series, so I can't really say anything about them.I said:
Did you actually meet him and have it signed?littlemissattitude said:
Sure did. Despite the fact that there were zillions of people in line (it was at a con - he was the guest of honor that year) and some of those people had stacks of like ten or fifteen books to be signed, he was quite gracious and took the time to speak with each person, even if they only had one book to have signed, as I did. It was pretty cool.I said:Did you actually meet him and have it signed?
The cool thing about the Ender Saga (the originals - "Speaker for the Dead", "Xenocide", and "Children of the Mind" - not the Bean offshoots) is that the sequels aren't really traditional sequels, and could each stand on its own.Lacedaemonian said:
There are two streams of "sequels" to "Ender's Game", and neither of these streams are really sequels to "Ender's Game" in any strict sense of the word (as in, the next one picks up more or less where the previous one left off). The first stream are the aforementioned "Speaker for the Dead", "Xenocide", and "Children of the Mind". The other stream begins with "Ender's Shadow", which tells more or less the same story as "Ender's Game" but from the perspective of Bean, a character that does not appear until about halfway or so through "Ender's Game". "Shadow of the Hegemon" and "Shadow Puppets" are the sequels to "Ender's Shadow". They follow Bean and the other Battle School graduates and are much more in the way of traditional sequels than the "sequels" to "Ender's Game" are.knivesout said:
Yeah, I wondered about his choice of terminology, too. I kind of doubt that it was a double-entendre, though. I think it mostly was just picked because the aliens looked like bugs to humans. Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of SF writers, though.I said:
Yeah, that's true. On the whole, though, I think the first book of the second stream, "Ender's Shadow", was an interesting and largely successful experiment. It asked and answered the question, "Can a writer retell a story he's already written from a different point of view and get people to actually read it?" As I said in my review of the book, it is a good read. It approaches the story from a different enough perspective - and begins with a fairly thorough telling of the story of how Bean ended up in Battle School - that it stands up even if you've read "Ender's Game". I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about the two sequels, even though they go on to explore the story after the events in "Game" and "Shadow".
