Wandering Orbit

A Shadow Too Far

Note: The Wandering below contains spoilers for Orson Scott Card’s Ender Sextet series and his Shadow Saga series.  Beware, all ye who enter here.

My usual audiences for critical reviews consist of either my showerhead or my wife when she is trapped in a car with me moving faster than she can safely exit.  Such environs don’t lend themselves to critiques full of nuance and logical flow, but today calls for something more.  And yes, I recognize the irony in passing judgement on something in the Wandering immediately following my debut argument defending a lack of cultural taste—hypocrite, thy name is Jake.  That said, this one hit close to home as it involves the legacy of my favorite character in all of fiction: Bean (aka Julian Delphiki) from Orson Scott Card’s Enderverse.  I now ride to the defense of a fictional character that were he alive would be baffled as to why I bothered.  Alas, the things we do for our heroes.   

I recently finished Card’s The Last Shadow, which tied together the Ender Sextet with the Shadow Saga.  If you haven’t experienced them, I’ll give you a moment to read all eleven books.  Finished?  Excellent, let’s continue.  I won’t rehash Ender’s Game, which earned its Nebula and Hugo Award wins as a brilliant science fiction novel.  What I do want to focus on is a minor character in Ender’s Game who received his own parallel series.  I speak, of course, of Bean, so named for his tiny size due to (again, spoilers—last warning) a genetic abnormality forced on him by a scientist too focused on ‘could’ as opposed to ‘should’.  As an international affairs enthusiast, I adore Bean’s Shadow Saga that focuses on how the world falls apart after the unifying threat of the Formics disappears overnight.  Bean plays an integral part in navigating that morass with other members of Ender’s Jeesh, eventually working with Ender’s brother to establish a new world government under the Hegemon.  Card does a wonderful job offsetting Ender and Bean.  Where Ender is a leader whose empathy enables his brilliance, Bean is the opposite—one whose brilliance thwarts his empathy.  Thus, we get a character arc developed over five books where Bean comes to grips with both his ability to love others and his short-lived mortality.  It ends with a heart-rending scene at the end of Shadows in Flight that years later still gives me pause, the culmination of Bean’s struggle and a final rest for a giant.

Which is where I pick up my first bone to start swinging.  The Last Shadow disregards the character development on Shadows in Flight for Bean’s children and makes Bean’s final moments seem meaningless.  His children have to move beyond their selfish battles to understand their father and everything he sacrificed for them, and eventually act on that wisdom to prevent their father from ruining the chance he gave them by reaching out to his long-thought-lost friend Ender.  But what do we get at the start of The Last Shadow?  Bean’s three children now grown with children of their own, but each of them as selfish and self-serving as they were at the start of the previous novel and doing their best to pass along similar traits to their offspring. 

There is some measure of comfort that one of Bean’s grandchildren approaches the problem in The Last Shadow with empathy instead of pride, proving that something of Bean’s hard-earned wisdom wasn’t snuffed out, but it is overwhelmed by all the others displaying levels of pride even Bonzo Madrid would pump the brakes on.  I recognize the need for flaws to overcome to enable character development, but this is territory already trod by the entirety of the Shadow Saga—brilliance trampling empathy to the detriment of all.  I could not appreciate their struggle through childish pride because the whole time I pictured Bean’s last steps before he died, thinking he had set his children on the right path. 

The second point of contention revolves around the story’s conflict resolution.  Summarized: the virus Ender and his family struggled against across four of the Ender Sextet’s six books turns out to be a fluke.  Oops!  Also, birds are smart and then some more attempted xenocide for good measure.  Audiences love subverted expectations, but only to an extent that fits within a rewarding frame.  If an author implicitly promises a showdown with an alien species whose biological technology makes humanity’s look like a middle school science fair, not getting that leaves me like a kid in a sugar-free candy store.  While I respect an author’s right to end a story in the way he or she feels appropriate, I as a reader maintain the right to cock an eyebrow at finishing off what amounts to an eleven book series with a shrug. 

The final and most egregious point is one that I admit is subjective.  As I mentioned earlier, Bean is my favorite fictional character.  His struggle across the Shadow Saga, the burdens he carries that no one else see, the choices made because of his emotional and empathetic growth, they all combine to form one of the most inspiring and tragic figures I have ever encountered.  He goes from being known as Bean to the Giant, and gosh dang it, it fits.  So when I saw this giant reduced to little more than a failed father figure as we move onto his flawed children’s children, I feel entitled to wail and gnash my teeth a little.  The few mentions we get of Bean in The Last Shadow carry no weight of his emotional depth, or of the burdens he bore for humanity and his brother-in-arms Ender.  Instead, we get a few off-handed comments about how smart he was and how his legacy culminates in his children fixing the genetic abnormality they all inherited from Bean.  It puts Bean back into the box of his first novel Ender’s Shadow, the brilliant boy who lacked empathy because it wasn’t technical enough to bother with.  That is the true shame of this book, that the last shadow the Giant casts is not one of his mature humility, but one of his childish pride.

Now that I’ve ranted, here’s some whiplash for you: I want to highlight a spot of wisdom from Pixar’s Ratatouille.  The food critic Anton Ego writes the following: “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy.  We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment.”  So it is with the thousand words you see above.  I am no expert critic, nor do I think I have a complete understanding of what Card set out to do with The Last Shadow.  I have written exactly one novel that remains unpublished for delicate reasons like it’s not that good.  Card has literally written more books about the craft of writing books than I have written completed stories.  I do not claim to hold any sort of superiority over him, nor will I.  What I can claim is that by identifying areas of frustration in this book, I hope to improve my own craft down the line.  If one of those self-identified issues worms its way into my psyche and changes even a scrap of what I produce going forward, this entire exercise will prove its worth to me.  That is enough.

The Enderverse is a fantastic creation of fiction, something I have and will continue to return to so long as my eyes can make out words on a page.  I will forever be grateful to Card for introducing me to that universe and the characters who inhabit it, especially Bean.  But while I cannot claim to know Card’s work better than he does, I can say is how his latest book made me feel.  I can describe my desire to defend a character of his I have grown to love over decades of reading about his struggles and triumphs.  The Giant did not need to be made small.  Bean deserved better.