Guest Review of Ender in Exile

	Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card 377pp (Hardcover) My Rating: 6.5/10 Amazon Rating: 3.5/5 LibraryThing Rating: 3.82/5 Goodreads Rating: 3.86/5

Though I am usually a rational sort of person (in a fluffy, out of touch with reality sort of way) I am also sometimes a bit of a sucker. One of the ways I'm sometimes a sucker is my habit of being loyal to authors and stories that have been good to me in the past even when they don't necessarily deserve it any more. Thus I have a shelf full of post-1990 Robert Asprin, and thus I read something like Ender in Exile. Orson Scott Card is responsible for both my favorite standalone book (The Abyss) and two of the best sci-fi novels of the last quarter-century (Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead). More recently though, he is also responsible for the later, weaker books in the Alvin Maker series and the almost unreadable Shadow Puppets. Ender in Exile falls somewhere in between, good enough to read even if you are not the pathological completist that I am but not so great that the Ender universe would suffer if it were skipped.

Ender in Exile is a midquel that takes place between chapters 14 and 15 of the original Ender's Game. Having played his game to its conclusion, Ender Wiggin now finds that he must deal with the consequences of his actions--both intentional and otherwise. The political and military powers that no longer need him view him only as a potential threat and rival, so Ender accepts a position as governor of an exocolony where time and distance will insulate him from Earth, and vice versa. Despite using the governorship as an excuse to leave the system Ender's true interest is in trying to understand the Formicans, the race he previously called the Buggers and has spent his entire life being trained to fight.

But Ender's drive to succeed means that even a job taken as an excuse has to be done right. So instead of taking the easy path and allowing the incompetent Admiral commanding his colony ship to usurp his role as governor, Ender engages in a different sort of war to protect his position and the colonists under his care. In doing so he meets the Toscanos, a pair of colonists fleeing their lives on Earth who are determined to insert themselves into the political process on Ender's new home. But even if Ender can navigate all of the problems of being a stellar governor, they are still only distractions from his larger goal of getting through the aftermath of his war with the Formicans.

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If that plot summary seems a bit confused, it is with good reason: Ender in Exile is a book that seems very confused about itself. The first half of the novel is the story of Ender's trip on the colony ship and his fight with Admiral Morgan for control of the new colony. The next third is about Ender's life on the colony, and a final segment briefly and off-handedly describes one of the most significant events in Ender's multiple millennium-long personal narrative. If this seems somewhat unbalanced, that's only because it is.

So, what is so important that it forces Card to deal with a critical topic in roughly fifty pages? The story of the Toscanos, a caricature of a mother and daughter who are into social climbing and internecine feuding. They almost feel like they were included as comic relief from Ender's interminable brooding and introspection, but they never reach the point of actually being entertaining. Instead the pair just comes off as a convenient plot device that allows Ender to explore his feelings of guilt and anger about being used in Ender's Game. Even worse, they are also exploited as a convenient device for Card to hammer on his favorite topic, the importance of the parent-child relationship. Though, based on how often Card's characters tell us how important it is to have as many kids as possible, presumably bad parent-child relationships fall into the "we'll make it up in volume" category.

Ender in Exile also continues Card's repudiation of the original Ender's Game that he started with the Shadow series. In Ender's Shadow Card goes out of his way to make sure that his original premise--a special individual can be a great person, while children have all the potential of adults and should be given the same respect--is subverted by the idea that the really important child was not normal in any sense of the term and was only capable due to genetic engineering. Exile continues this pattern by letting us in on the secret that the other exceptional Wiggin children, Peter and Valentine, were only great because they were being subtly manipulated by their parents. Even Ender himself is infantilized to a degree that seems incompatible with his character in Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, or Xenocide. Card seems to be trying to add depth to the children, now teens, but instead only ends up damaging the work he created more than twenty years ago.

Despite all of these flaws, Exile is still a good book. Card retains his ability as a storyteller, and his voice kept me wanting to read on a page-by-page level even when the larger story seemed to wander--or, occasionally, was completely rudderless. Relationships have always been Card's strong point, and the interaction between characters remains a reason to read. The only exception to this is when he tries to force his everybody-have-kids message into the picture, at which point things begin to get stilted. But I have come to accept this as part of the price of reading a Card story, much like reading Spider Robinson means accepting his evangelism of hippie culture. The story would usually be better off without it, but it is more rewarding to work around the problem than to get hung up on it.

Ender in Exile is not a strong addition to the Ender universe, but it does fill in some gaps in the timeline and Card's ability to weave an engrossing tale makes it a rewarding, if occasionally annoying, read. 6.5/10

Guest Shameless Retroreview Plug: The Abyss

For many years, back before I decided that choosing favorites was a no-win proposition, The Abyss held a rather bizarre distinction for me: it was both my favorite book and my favorite movie. This is bizarre, of course, because novelizations of movies are very rarely good, much less great, and film adaptations of books very rarely manage to capture the full power of an exceptional novel. But Orson Scott Card and James Cameron created such an exceptional pair of complementary works that neither seems diminished by the strength of the other. It would therefore be completely impossible for me to review the book without referencing the movie, and so I am not even going to try. Card's novel is absolutely faithful to what appears on-screen, but also expands the story to provide extra background, more depth of character and relationship, and a completely new angle on the events as they are perceived by the abyssal aliens themselves. The result is a moving tale about love, the bonds the form in a tightly knit group of people, and what it truly means to be human.

Card opens his novel well before the beginning of the events in the movie by introducing each of the three (four, really, but more on that later) main characters with stories from their childhoods. We learn how Bud developed both an ability to allow a group of people to mesh and his hatred of the sea; how Lindsey came to be a masterful bitch and engineer; and how Coffey turned into a man capable of simultaneously loving his friends and dispassionately executing his enemies. These are not just throwaway backstory chapters though, as they are frequently referenced throughout the story and demonstrate a motivation for each character that makes their later actions seem not just logical, but inevitable given their histories.

After these three introductory chapters Card rejoins the plot of the beginning of the movie with the accidental sinking of the ballistic missile sub USS Montana by an unknown craft. Unlike the movie, however, we immediately know how and why this happened because it is told partially from the perspective of the aliens that did it. This is the first time we meet the Builders, as they call themselves, and the first hint that Card's novel will not just be a redecorated version of Cameron's script. While the movie only treats the Builders as a mysterious complication to the human events that are taking place, Card builds a full-fledged alien race with its own culture, voice, and reasons for intervening (or not) with the humans. Though the Builders do not appear in the novel with much greater frequency than in the movie, their greater transparency creates a mirror Card uses to reflect on both individual humans and humanity as a race beyond their somewhat clichéd treatment in the movie.

The sinking of the Montana, along with parts of Bud's childhood chapter, also serve to introduce the fourth main character in the novel: the ocean itself. No mere setting, The Abyss shows the ocean as a malevolent, hungry bitch. Every time somebody enters the frozen water and returns alive is a victory, and every struggle to survive is very clearly not man vs. nature but man vs. man. There is, of course, a long history of this sort of treatment throughout literature, but the unique properties of the ocean at abyssal depths gives a new face to the old character that makes it feel quite different. Bud's history only adds to the personal feeling of the struggle.

Having set up each of his main characters, Card finally introduces the main plot. Following the sinking of the Montana, the Navy is desperate to keep its secrets out of the hands of the Soviets. Unfortunately, they don't have the resources to attempt to salvage the sub themselves, at least not with a hurricane bearing down on the site of the wreck. Instead they're forced to use an experimental underwater drilling rig, the Deepcore II, as a platform for a team of SEALs to visit the sub and destroy any sensitive hardware and documents. Deepcore is run by Bud and his crew, a close-knit, thoroughly civilian group of oil workers who are not happy about being forced to abandon their test well and sent to explore "World War III in a can."

In the process of getting Lt. Coffey and his SEAL team down to Deepcore though, the Navy accidentally picks up a stowaway: Lindsey Brigman, the engineer who designed Deepcore, and Bud's almost-ex-wife. Bud's crew may not be happy about moving the rig, but Lindsey is furious, and her wrath is a force of nature on par with the sea itself. Though her knowledge is an asset to Coffey's mission, her attitude definitely isn't, and she becomes a source of friction for the two well-oiled machines of the SEALs and Bud's crew. For Bud himself she is more than just an annoyance; she is love and pain, devotion and cancer.

The Abyss: love story, character drama, and the best submarine chase in cinema history

Though the plot continues forward from there, these are really the main components of the core of the story. The Abyss really isn't about the cold war, or nuclear weapons, or even aliens; it's about relationships. James Cameron has said he wrote the script as a love story, and the movie reflects that. But Card's novel expands the focus from Bud and Lindsey's relationship to close relationships in general. He shows two contrasting models for these relationships in Coffey's military SEAL team and Bud's civilian rig crew, though the contrast isn't what you may expect. Coffey and Bud share many of the same characteristics as leaders, but they differ in one key area: why they do what they do. Coffey chooses to follow orders because he believes he is protecting a greater cause; Bud sees and will work for a greater cause, but his primary focus is always on his crew. As he puts it, "When it comes to the safety of these people, there's me and then there's God." All other concerns are secondary. This is really the only reason why you couldn't picture Bud in Coffey's position, acting in what he believes are the interests of the greater good while slowly losing his grip on reality due to pressure-induced psychosis; Bud's highest priority is his crew, so his 'greater good' would never include putting them in danger.

The internal dynamics of the two groups are also portrayed remarkably well by Card. Though his dialog matches the movie word-for-word, he also gives an explicit subtext to each line. In some books this might be anywhere between distracting and destructive to the narrative, but it works in The Abyss because this character study is part of the narrative. In any group as close as the rig workers or the SEAL team, every sentence will have significance that isn't understood by outsiders. Card's recognition of this and decision to spell out these undercurrents of meaning reminds the reader that, despite their omniscient perspective outside the story, they really don't understand what's happening because they are not part of the group. The reader needs to be told what's really being said, where a true insider would already know without having it spelled out. The strengthening of this wall only serves to make the groups appear closer together, and the subtext makes for a fascinating look at how families (for that is what they really are) behave.

I may be a special case because my history allows me to strongly identify with an aspect of each of the three main characters' personalities, but I find The Abyss to be a novel on par with Card's strongest works of the time, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Similarly, I also believe Cameron's movie is better than the mega-hits he made leading up to it, Terminator and Aliens. Neither is technically perfect, but I think they surpassed the high water mark of 2001 that Card identifies in his afterward as the best movie-novel combination to date because they took the simplest, most common story possible-a love story between man and wife-and built a truly remarkable work of fiction that succeeds on every level from personal struggle to philosophical debate with global consequences. I heartily recommend both.

9.5/10