The Last Shadow

I picked this up again and ended up listening to most of it during a long bike ride today. I attempted to contribute a summary to Wikipedia when I got back to town, and the plot of this novel sounds fully unhinged in that sort of voice. By the time you're talking about sentient parrots who encace a child's head in cement made of their poop, you're kinda far afield. But that sort of summarizing does not do justice to the book, which is mostly a competence porn space opera where the characters are competent at science that cannot be directly depicted rather than engineering. Interspersed with that is, of course, the familial relationship commentary that colors much of the back half of this series in particular. It is mostly what I thought it was going to be and also mostly pleasant even as very little occurred.

The part I was a bit disappointed by was surprisingly not that there is no complete reveal about the origins of the Descolada virus; it was that the discovery of surviving Formics towards the end of "Shadows in Flight" warranted perhaps a paragraph. To me, that reveal signified that the Hive Queen had lied to Ender, at least by omission, for their entire relationship. What could that mean? Certainly not that she is evil or duplicitous, but perhaps more complicated. But it seems like it was not terribly significant.

Forturnately, Orson Scott Card made the mistake of giving "Ender's Game" a hopeful ending about mutual cooperation and understanding that had to carry on through the rest of the series until it received a biological component via the philotic network. Writing himself into that corner, Card has no choice but to write these stories mostly empathetically, which much be a challenge for someone so committed to being contemptible in public. Nevertheless, I enjoy them when I pick up the next one every several years. So it goes.