An Ender to end all...but it won't

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, sociology

Orson Scott Card is chief among a handful of authors who can make me weep, even when I can see the crux coming. He is a master at making a reader care about all his characters, even the unpleasant ones.

Ender in Exile is the tenth Ender volume. There is no need for me to review it in detail, for Card has a huge and devoted following, and the Google query +review +"ender in exile" yields more than 1.5 million hits.

Focusing on an idea, rather, I found the concept of the Formics' star drive quite fascinating: point it where you want to go (and be sure you are not too near a solid body larger than your ship), activate it, and it takes matter from in front of you, annihilates it either wholly or in part (it isn't too clear which), and ejects energy (& matter?) on your opposite side, providing thrust, 2-3 G of it. In some unmentioned way, antigravity is part of the package so the passengers aren't squashed by a few years at several G's.

Much of the story occurs in a starship carrying upwards of 4,000 colonists, most of them in "stasis" of some sort. The trip is about forty light-years, but subjective ship time is about two years. That ship is about like rolling up the town of Boothwyn, PA and shooting it off into space, or perhaps it is more like taking off with a couple of the dormitories at UPenn: room for most of the denizens to be "sleeping", and only a small number to be awake, studying things they hope will make them useful on the colony world. The more folks in stasis, the less food you need to carry.

It takes a lot of energy to push a body to relativistic speed. That 2-years-for-40 ratio means the kinetic energy of the loaded ship is about four times its rest mass. That means, during the main acceleration phase (7-12 months), the ship has to intercept at least four times its mass for the Formic drive to work on. Basically, if you can see your target in a telescope, there isn't that much mass density along the flight path.

Oh, and a side issue I've never seen anyone address: When plotting a flight path to a star you can see, you need to project the proper motions of any stars that are visibly "close" to that path, to make sure none is on a collision course. I can see how not seeing an intercepting body can provide a surprise for a story line.

I guess I can't get away without a discussing the characters a little. Ender is Card's ultimate altruist: able to make nearly any enemy into a friend, even at some cost to himself (and the cost is very high in this volume); and bearing the burden not only for exterminating the Formics (AKA Buggers in Ender's Game; the new name means "ant like") but all the others who died because of his actions and decisions.

In this book the story of his finding the hive queen is told in more detail. She it is who provides Ender with a meaning beyond himself, and the other eight Ender books work out how Ender redeems himself in his own mind by finding her a home.

I always thought it clever that Card produced children who are so bright that he could write dialogue and e-mails for them in fully adult voices, and didn't have to make his children sound like kids. Writing dialogue for an ordinary gradeschooler can only be done well when your own kids are small and you can crib from them!

Well, Mr. Card, you've done it again. You made me weep, not only for Ender but for Achilles (Jr).