As the fourth book in our 2019 Siblings’ Book Club, we chose the companion book to Ender’s Game, an optional read from our Club 2018. While some might say that Ender’s Shadow is a great standalone novel, I disagree and think you’d be cheating yourself to read only the one. While Ender’s Game serves as a titanium skeleton to the Ender series, Ender’s Shadow adds meat to those bones. Together, they’re a giant of a story.
By adding meat to the skeletal structure of Ender’s Game, I mean that Shadow is more human and personal, and it also helps explain, from a side-angle, issues that were questionable or unexplained in the first book. In this later book, for example, we get a much clearer view of Earth through the events of the story, and more specifically, we get to explore Roterdam. I also liked seeing Col. Graff more often in this story, sensing more of his humanity and love for these kids. The nun was an interesting character as well, present and investigative and loving, and yet distrusted and dangerous from Bean’s perspective.
We also get to know Bean on a whole other level, and, far from what I had anticipated, he ends being a manipulative little twerp rather than the kind and friendly child we figured he might have been. This affects the story in a way, because it changes a key component for the original story. Whereas in the first book, Bean had been Ender’s only real friend, that relationship is virtually non-existent in this later book. Throughout Shadow, Bean remains that same manipulative twerp that a reader just can’t love, even during their time in battle school when he was supposed to be the innocent friend, and right up to the point where he finally realizes (mid-final-battle) that Ender really is their only hope. The relational disparity between the two books is distracting, though Card likely viewed it as simply another layer to the story.
This brings me to the author’s role and thinking in these books. While I don’t often like to read Introductions (because they can easily give the story away), I enjoyed the introduction to my edition of Ender’s Shadow, in which Orson Scott Card describes the process of writing this book. He tells how he began the project (published fourteen years after the original book) in tandem with other writers, but then realized that only he could write the story. That’s pretty arrogant thinking from an outsider’s perspective, but really quite rational from a writer’s.
Ender’s universe was his own brainchild, and every character and event existed because he wanted them to. While fan fiction is a thing, and while many successful fiction authors will invite ghost-writers or co-authors to develop their ideas on a grand scale, no author should expect his universe to be better expanded by any creative mind besides his own. George Lucas did a wise thing, for example, in holding onto his Star Wars rights for so long, and while Disney writers will now develop his universe far more than he ever could, it simply will not be the same as if Lucas alone designed it. Much is lost when the original brain behind any great story ceases to be part of its development. But these are merely my opinions.
Having already read both books by Orson Scott Card, I cannot go back in time and read them out of order. That being said, I cannot know how well Ender’s Shadow would stand up as a standalone novel, though I have an inkling. Too many links between the books exist to suggest that someone new to this universe would pick up on and enjoy them without having Game as a backdrop. Take for example the statement, “The Enemy’s gate is down.” This quotation was a huge part of Ender’s own growth in the first book, becoming even a battle cry in the first book. But when Bean hears it in Shadow, the meaning would be completely lost on a reader who lacked the proper background.
For these reasons, I think a reader who’s coming to Shadow as his first Ender novel must feel this same sense of lostness on multiple occasions throughout the story. Shadow is not a standalone book and it ought not be read first. Ender’s Game is the essential key that, I’m sure, holds all the other stories together (the series is quite extensive, I hear), so I’m glad that I read Game first. All that being said, I highly recommend these two books but only if you read them in order. Otherwise, don’t waste your time with just this one.
©2020 E.T.