Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not on par with the first two..., 18 Oct 2001
By A Customer
First two books in Ender series are wonderful reads with a gripping storyline and excellent writing. Well, the third book has the same excellent writing but lacks the storyline.No wonder Mr.Card is a great writer; whatever he writes he writes it good. Unfortunately Xenocide serves the purpose of bringing up a number of muddled ideas rather than telling a story. As a matter of fact there are so many ideas (overcoming an intelligent virus, how to save Jane, the Godspoken, Novinha's frustration against Ender, Ender's "split" personality, piggies' rights, virus rights, Bugger's way of thinking, Inside and Outside, faster-than-light-travel and some more minor things) that all comes to frustrating complexity and since the author does not have enough "time" (number of pages) to devote to each idea, almost everything except a few becomes muddled. At the end, since the author creates more problems than necessary for a book - that can be handled in a single book - in order to neatly tie all that mess up, he has to resort to deus ex machina by means of hard sci-fi. Well Mr. Card is a great writer of characters, but he's not that great in hard sc-fi; thus his attempt makes you feel kinda cheated. Overall this is an inescapable book. If you've started Ender Saga you'll have to read this. Thanks to Card's writing, it is still a fun read but especially with its ending it is unsatisfactory.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A wealth of emotional, scientific and philosophical conflict, 23 Mar 2005
Third in Orson Scott Card's "Ender" cycle, "Xenocide" charts the events on the planet of Lusitania, home to all three sentient species in existence, two of which are not represented anywhere else in the universe. All living things on Lusitania are subject to a virus, the Descolada, which attacks and modifies the genetic information of the host and is evolving rapidly to the extend that combating it requires constant alteration of viricides in both non-native sentient species. Yet the native species, the Pequeninos, require the Descolada to survive, as it forms the means by which they transform into the different phases of their lifecycle. Any species looking to leave the planet would be required to take the Descolada with them, as it adapts and becomes a necessary part of any organism's genetic make-up. This is one of the main problems the planet is faced with, but the second is equally serious:
Lusitania is under threat of being annihilated by a fleet sent by Starways Congress, because the planet's scientists have broken the law of not interfering with alien species by helping the sentient Pequeninos to gain a foothold in agriculture. Rather than sending the scientists to trial and certain lifelong exile, the colony rebels and is thus to be turned into an example.
The narrative hinges on Ender Wiggin and those around him, with a wealth of emotional, scientific and philosophical conflict between unique characters against a background of questions more normally expected in moral philosophy.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Worth a read, but not as good as Ender's Game or Speaker for, 17 Dec 2005
A book in which the main character (Ender) and his friends battle with a number of problems: how to get all the inhabitants of the planet Lusitania off the planet before a fleet sent by Starways Congress destroys the planet, how to make a killer virus (the descolada) non-dangerous without destroying the pequeninos (the intelligent native species of Lusitania), and how to save Ender and his step-son Miro's friend Jane, a virtual personality that dwells in the galactic ansible network (a sort of interplanetary Internet) before Starways Congress turns off all the computers and kills her (yes, Jane is female). In this book Starways Congress are definitely the bad guys: they want to kill Ender and all his friends, to wipe out the pequeninos and also the Hive Queen (her species are not actually given a name other than 'buggers'). As if this is not enough, Starways Congress have also been genetically tampering with the inhabitants of a planet called Path, turning the people there into slaves unable to function without performing bizarre 'cleansing' rituals because they suffer from a peculiar version of obsessive compulsive disorder. However, the people of Path do not realise that they have been tampered with, believing instead that they have to do the rituals that they do because they hear from 'the gods'. Until the virtual personality Jane liberates them with the harsh truth, but even then some are not prepared to listen.
I found this - the third instalment in the Ender saga - to be a good book, but not quite as good as Ender's Game or Speaker for the Dead, parts one and two. Much of the book was concerned with philosophical discussions between the book's main characters about the nature of the universe, reality and the soul, which I felt detracted from how good this book might have been, as there was often too much discussion and not enough plot. Also the sub-plot about the planet Path (mentioned above) was slightly cumbersome.
Still, the main plot is strong and there is a good twist near the end of the book, so I give this book three stars.
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