Ender's Shadow
This is Bean's installment of Orson Scott Card's Ender's saga. It is a great character building book for those who have read Ender's Game and want to know more about Bean and his background. Here is the description from the back of the book: Welcome to Battleschool. Growing up is never easy. But try living on the mean streets as a child begging for food and fighting like a dog with ruthless gangs of starving kids who wouldn't hesitate to pound your skull into pulp for a scrap of apple. If Bean has learned anything on the streets, it's how to survive. And not with fists. He is way too small for that. But with brains. Bean is a genius with a magician's ability to zero in on his enemy and exploit his weakness. What better quality for a future general to lead the Earth in a final climactic battle against a hostile alien race, known as Buggers. At Battleschool Bean meets and befriends another future commander - Ender Wiggins - perhaps his only true rival. Only one problem: for Bean and Ender, the future is now.
Stats for nerds
25recommend
42mentions
39people
2007–2025years
62% recommend29% neutral10% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Possibly better than the original.
IIRC this was the first book in the universe that the author wrote, but publishers insisted it was a bit heavy, so he wrote Ender's Game as an easier entry into the universe. On the topic of Ender's universe, the whole Ender's Shadow thread is also a great read. The first book is covering some of the same events but from the perspective of Bean.
- I usually care more about the ideas than characters / prose and the recs below kinda reflect that.
Anyways, in no particular order ...
Also want to second some of the other recs in this thread.- Adiamante by Modesitt (1996), pacifist environmentalists vs cyberpunk warmongers. It's a lot of philosophy and a bit preachy at that but the world building was pretty thorough. - Last and First Idol by Gengen Kusano (2018). Similar to Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, it parodies various aspects of Japanese culture over a period of eons. (It's a set of three ~70pg stories). - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky (2010). Parody where the main character investigates how to exploit magic. Kind of like xkcd / what-if but in the Harry Potter universe. Author is controversial and the story's pompous /r/iamverysmart vibes can be offputting but I enjoyed it.- Greg Egan's stuff - There is No Antimimetics Division by qntm - Sequels to Enders Game and the Ender's Shadow spinoffs by Orson Scott Card. - Dragon's Egg and its sequel by Robert L. Forward. - Ender's Game and especially Ender's Shadow. I hesitate to recommend OSC at all due to his Problematic™ personal politics, especially as a member of the maligned group, but they had a big impact on the way I see The System in which we all live.
Spoiler-free: based on a shared societal belief in a looming existential crisis, a group of young adults attend a military school whose curriculum revolves around a war game with sports-like rules. The System uses the war game to identify for positions of relative prestige those students most willing to interpret the game rules in creative ways, most willing to question assumptions brought with them from the school-world into the game-world, but naïve enough to believe the game is over once they've “graduated” from it. The books explore the many ways in which the “real world” : school-world :: school-world : game-world.
- Speaker for the Dead is good, but the series starts to get a bit... weird. Fairly religious, although still in a space-y way. Maybe that was just my middle school take and I should re-read it.
Ender's Shadow (Ender's Game from Bean's perspective) is also excellent.
- For me "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo, "Ender's Shadow" by Orson Scott Card and the Bhagvad Gita
- "Ender's Shadow" and the mirror "Ender's Game" are some that I read once in a while too
"1984" is a big one for me.
"Lord of the Rings" as well.
