I was in either my junior or senior year of high school, if I recall correctly. It was, at any rate, the first science fiction convention I was going to go to, with a friend of mine and her mother. One of the guests of honor was Orson Scott Card, who I'd never heard of. My friend shoved Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead into my hands and said, "YOU HAVE TO READ THESE."
I more or less missed the convention, curled up in bed, reading the story of Ender Wiggin as it existed at the time. Like many an academically gifted kid before and since, I gulped it down. Yes. This was a true story. It's a nutty story about alien invasions and a convoluted plot about having to believe a real war was a game because only a brilliant child who didn't know he was doing it could win it, but it was also a real story about a kid who was isolated and lonely, whose ambiguous relationship with the power structures left him with no one who understood him, with the exception of one kid, possibly even smarter, but younger and less socially adept. It was the story of the equally bright brother and sister, who weren't chosen for the program for other reasons, but who felt frustrated, bored, and out-of-place in an everyday school. And proceeded to take the world over by interesting uses of "the nets," a fairly prescient notion of an internet as it would become in a few years (and may become again, if it gets stepped on and reined in a lot).
Someone knew how all of that felt. It was repeated in Speaker for the Dead, with young Novinha, though that novel was less interested in the visceral character creation and more interested in the speculative part of speculative fiction.
The following sequel novels, Xenocide and Children of the Mind, had strong points to them, but never reached the intensity of EG and SftD. I liked a lot of the introduced characters, but the speculation got more than a little odd. (Beating lightspeed travel by wishing was probably the worst, though the philosophical wrangling over a lethal but possibly sentient virus also got a little tiresome.) Then there was the parallel series, beginning with Ender's Shadow, telling the story of Bean, the aforementioned younger child who became Ender's friend. I liked many things in the Shadow series, and disliked many things in it, about in equal measure. Bean's story was too much of a trauma conga line, basically, and I would have liked more of Peter's plot and less of the ridiculous villain Achilles de Flandres. Seriously, I kept expecting him to grow a mustache just so he could twirl it absurdly; the problem wasn't that he was scary. It was that I never believed in him for a second past his initial moment of threat in Bean's early story. He was a believable threat in that context. Everything after it was just eye-roll-worthy.
So basically, I didn't jump straight into the Formic Wars series, which are the prequel to the main series, telling the story of the First Formic Invasion, co-written by Aaron Johnston (I neither know nor care who wrote what in the story). I finally decided to give it a go.
The first book (Earth Unaware), largely concerned with miners out in the Kuiper Belt, left me vaguely intrigued, but I wouldn't have been in a rush for the second, except that I had nothing else pressing on my list. It wasn't bad, per se, just kind of a pedestrian story. We get to meet the main players, including rich mining magnate Lem Jukes, working class "free miner" Victor Delgado, and Wit O'Toole, the head of the international strike force which would obviously become the international fleet. Lem and his dramas aren't thrilling, though there's some interesting work with perspective and unreliable narration. Victor is a good character, though his story arc seems little herky jerky for the first half of the novel. Wit's the most interesting, and in the most interesting setting (Earth... unaware!), plus he gets us to the only known character, Mazer Rackham, who is rejected from the strike force... but he also gets the least screen time.
The second and third books, which are really a single story, from the actual invasion through the destruction of the scout ship, are much better.
Or maybe I just really like the action scenes, and they are super action heavy. I learned for myself how difficult action scenes are to write, and I have a great deal of respect for people who can write them well, and use them to advance the story and the characters. It's much harder to have a character grow while you're also maneuvering him through battles than have him gaze at his naval for a few chapters and tell you all about himself. They also introduce a Cardian character on the level of Ender or Bean in young Bingwen, a boy trapped in the devastation when the Formics begin their attack in southeast China. Through the course of the books, he attaches himself to Mazer and later to the strike team, but is most striking in the third book, when, with the help of a medical device designed for soldiers on the battlefield, becomes a de facto medic. All of the characters make their way into the same sphere for the final attack... and then we're left with a young woman discovering, after the devastation, that the second invasion is on the way.
I will be joining the series in progress this May, when The Swarm comes out.
