There is no gap whatsoever between the stories of Xenocide and its successor, Children of the Mind. The latter picks up the story exactly where the former left off.
But between the books there was a five-year lag in the real world. Xenocide came out in 1991 and Children of the Mind in 1996.
Why would that be?–especially when, as Orson Scott Card explains in an afterword to the audio book version of Xenocide, that the two were originally one novel that got so long it had to be split in half.
My suspicion is that it was because Card simply had problems getting Children of the Mind to work. He talks periodically in his audio commentaries about how there were times he’d be writing something and it just wouldn’t be working, and he knew it, and it was only later that the solution occurred to him.
I suspect that, due to the time lag between the two works and the fact that there are minor inconsistencies between them, that Card just had a really hard time writing Children of the Mind because it wasn’t working.
Some would say that the novel still doesn’t work.
I’d be one of them.
And I’m not alone.
The very first thing he says in the audio commentary at the end of this fourth book is (I’m going by memory here), "A lot of people really hated a lot of things I did in this book."
He mentions in particular that his publisher hated a plot point that occurs at about mid-story in this book.
Personally, I didn’t hate that plot point, in which a character undergoes a transformation so dramatic that it’s debatable whether the character has technically died or not.
I felt profoundly ambivalent about it, mainly because by this point the character had become so tired of life that reading about the character was no longer interesting.
Still, I understand why people would be mad about it. What happens doesn’t provide the kind of resolution you expect at the end of a major character’s story arc. It feels like the character has just been whacked off into left field instead of being given a satisfying resolution.
Speaking of left field, that’s where it felt like a major plot point at the end of Xenocide came from, and that plot point dominates the present book. If you didn’t like the "Where did this come from?" twist at the end of Xenocide, you’re likely to have trouble with the new book, too.
On the religion front, the basic crypto-apologetic appeal for Mormonism that developed in the previous book remains in place.
The only real development is that now we have some dealings with a Japanese-colonized planet and a Polynesian planet, both of which are polytheistic.
On the Polynesian planet the Christian God is openly mocked as a (quotation from memory) "perfectly balanced Nicene paradox," while lesser, finite gods are jovially celebrated, with one of the powerful characters already established being acclaimed a living god by the Polynesians, with no cross-examination of this claim.
The thing that I really hate about this novel, though, is not the way it handles religion.
It’s the way it’s written.
Card has indulged his introspective tendencies so much that now he’s positively wallowing in them.
Vast swaths of the book feel like they were written according to the following formula:
- Something happens.
- Character A notices that something has happened.
- Character A tries to figure out how he feels about this.
- Character A reviews his entire life history and how the new event relates to it while trying to sort out his feelings.
- Character A decides that the thing is either poignantly beautiful, something to be serenely accepted, or something to be opposed as a cruel injustice of the cosmos.
- Character A wonders how Character B will regard the new event.
- Character A reviews the entirety of Character B’s life history trying to figure out what Character B will think and how logical or illogical that is.
- Character B notices the event.
- Characters A and B talk about the new event, leading to either a moment of supreme unity between them, a moment of resigned acceptance, or a verbally and/or physically violent confrontation, possibly followed by a tearful reconciliation.
- Go to Step 1.
Not all of these steps occur, or occur in the same order, every time something happens, but the plot just inches painfully forward amid reams and reams of introspective monologue or emotion-laden dialog.
By this point the series has become a brooding, science-fiction soap opera, with no plot development, however small, that can occur without being emotionally analyzed in excruciating detail.
The reader wants to scream, "CAN SOMETHING PLEASE HAPPEN HERE TO END ALL OF THIS INTROSPECTION!!!???"
Also in this novel the main character–Ender Wiggin–continues to become increasingly less relevant to moving the plot forward and ever more personally passive, though that doesn’t stop the other characters from obsessing at great length about Ender and what he feels and thinks about things.
While the plot proceeds with glacial slowness, the characters do eventually manage to deal with the planetkilling fleet that is now (finally, after three novels) poised to destroy Lusitania. How they do that is actually pretty cool, and has some nice humor elements in it.
But though we do get closure on that plot point, the novel leaves another, newer plot point completely unresolved–namely: "Who are the people who created the killer virus from the previous novels and why did they make it?"
It is this question that, in the audio afterword, Card said he felt too anticlimactic to answer in the novel or in a sequel, though he was besieged for years by fans wanting to know it.
Fortunately, he’s now decided that it is worth answering, and he plans a new novel that will connect the Bean fork of the series with the Ender fork that I’ve been reviewing.
Currently, I’m reading the Bean fork, and when I have it done, I’ll review it, too. (So far, I’m liking it much better than what happens in Xenocide and Children of the Mind.)
For my money, the first book of the Ender fork–Ender’s Game–is simply brilliant (and not in the phony, British sense of "brilliant"), and well worth reading. The second book–Speaker for the Dead–is brilliant but flawed. The third book–Xenocide–is probably debatably worth reading for the interesting stuff in it, but it is profoundly flawed. The fourth book–Children of the Mind–is simply the endlessly talky horse pill that you have to swallow if you want to get some kind of closure on the events set up in the previous three books.
NEXT (WHEN I’M ABLE TO RETURN TO REVIEWING THESE BOOKS): The first book of the Bean fork . . . Ender’s Shadow.
I've got a problem.
