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| Ender in Exile | 
 enlarge | Author: Orson Scott Card
Publisher: Tor Books
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $14.45
You Save: $11.50 (44%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  42 reviews
Sales Rank: 848
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0765304961
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780765304964
ASIN: 0765304961
Publication Date: November 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
After twenty-three years, Orson Scott Card returns to his acclaimed best-selling series with the first true, direct sequel to the classic Ender's Game. In Ender’s Game, the world’s most gifted children were taken from their families and sent to an elite training school. At Battle School, they learned combat, strategy, and secret intelligence to fight a dangerous war on behalf of those left on Earth. But they also learned some important and less definable lessons about life. After the life-changing events of those years, these children—now teenagers—must leave the school and readapt to life in the outside world. Having not seen their families or interacted with other people for years—where do they go now? What can they do? Ender fought for humanity, but he is now reviled as a ruthless assassin. No longer allowed to live on Earth, he enters into exile. With his sister Valentine, he chooses to leave the only home he’s ever known to begin a relativistic—and revelatory—journey beyond the stars. What happened during the years between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead? What did Ender go through from the ages of 12 through 35? The story of those years has never been told. Taking place 3000 years before Ender finally receives his chance at redemption in Speaker for the Dead, this is the long-lost story of Ender. For twenty-three years, millions of readers have wondered and now they will receive the answers. Ender in Exile is Orson Scott Card’s moving return to all the action and the adventure, the profound exploration of war and society, and the characters one never forgot. On one of these ships, there is a baby that just may share the same special gifts as Ender’s old friend Bean…
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| Customer Reviews: Read 37 more reviews...
 Ender and Valentine are back, and Card cleverly ties up loose ends November 13, 2008
60 out of 63 found this review helpful
This book is more properly considered part of the Ender's Shadow series, rather than a sequel to Ender's Game. It is stylistically like the Shadow series, features many of the same characters, and ties up loose ends from those books.
Card has found a clever way to do that, while centering the story on Ender and Valentine. Readers of Ender's Game will recall that Ender and Valentine left on the first colony ship because there were some good reasons Ender could not return to Earth. This book picks up just before that voyage begins.
However, that voyage takes decades because of time dilation. So the events of the Ender's Shadow series all unfold during the voyage.
That allows a different slant on those happenings, while also resolving much of what happened to Ender during that period. Ender still has some life issues to face, and this novel shows us how he faces them.
I don't recommend this as anyone's introduction to the world of Ender. Read Ender's Game for sure before this. I'd also recommend at least the first couple of books of the Ender's Shadow series as prerequisites. The more of the series you've read the better you'll lke this, though I don't think you needed to read all the way through that series to enjoy this book. (By the way, it's unnecessary to read Speaker for the Dead and its sequels. They take place later in the timeline and you won't suffer any loss of enjoyment if you have not read them.)
However, if you liked Ender's Game and want to know what happened to Ender as a teen in more detail, this is the story for you. And if you felt there was one major loose end at the end of Shadow of the Giant, you're right and that loose end plays into the story as well.
I was pleased because the sequels to Ender's Game (Speaker for the Dead, etc.) really didn't give me a satisfying view of Ender's character. I concluded at the end of that series that Card really didn't like Ender that much, based on the life he lived in those novels. Perhaps I was mistaken, or perhaps Ender has grown on Card over the years, because the tone of Ender as a character is completely different here than in those books.
There are some minor inconsistencies in this story and the other books and stories in the series. Card details these in the Afterword. The biggest conflict is with the story where the computer character Jane is introduced, which was in the collection First Meetings in Ender's Universe. For me these inconsistencies did not get in the way of the story.
If you have read and liked just about any of the Ender books before, you'll definitely want to get this one to complete some disparate storylines. If you're like me, you'll read it fast. It just came today; I finished it before bedtime and felt motivated to write this review right away.
Good Book - Great for Ender Fans November 11, 2008
18 out of 23 found this review helpful
This book lies directly between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. It also wraps up some of the story from the Shadow books. I think that anyone new to the Ender saga would be well advised to read the books in published order and save this for later, even though it fits in earlier from a chronological point of view.
The book is very cerebral and much of the emotional impact relies upon familiarity with the works already out there. Sometimes really getting a feel for what is going on requires knowing events from Ender's Game and the other books.
Card is a good author and writes well. The characters are strong and it is an extremely interesting story dealing with many themes already brought up in the Ender books. It is one more opportunity to dig deeply into ideas about leadership, morality, survival, regrets, forgiveness, the sanctity of life, etc.
I think the people who are going to enjoy this book the most are those hardcore fans who will be happy just to have more. The good news for them is that this is a solid effort, not just something cranked out for more profit. They will be able to enjoy spending some more time in the world they have come to love.
 Deeply alienated by Card's recent work. November 26, 2008
17 out of 29 found this review helpful
A disappointing, socially unimaginative flattening of a character and a world I once loved very much. This novel was rife with ideologically and spiritually conservative addresses to the reader that seemed to diverge from the far ranging and broad discourses of the other books, at least the way I read them so many years ago. I felt alienated by the Wiggins of this novel, theirs and the narrator's presumptions about people's personalities and biological determinism, the absence in this world of any challenges to what seem like universally unquestioned ideas about family, gender, sexuality, social order, ethnicity and race--it's like ages of progressive thought on Earth were erased in order to create a universe where stereotypes turn out to be God's funny way of using DNA.
What the narrator of this novel would have you interpret as the human individual's inability to escape her or his own genetic make-up is truly, to my eyes, an author's inability to let his characters be anything but allegories for an outmoded, oppressive conservatism at a time when authors should be offering something much, much better than an intergalactic expansion of the middle-class Anglo-Christian exceptionalism that has done so much to hurt the world.
There's my elitist, queer-nerd, politically irked two cents. A dedicated reader of the Alvin, Homecoming and Ender series, as well as many stand-alone works, it pains me a little to say this will be my last Card novel for sure.
 Totally unnecessary November 29, 2008
16 out of 21 found this review helpful
Card keeps adding to the Ender series, but has no stories left to tell. This book fills in gaps between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead... but we already know what happened from those books. The actual detailed description of every event is dull, and the characters have no spark here.
Intent vs. Consequences! November 16, 2008
14 out of 17 found this review helpful
Ender is acknowledged as the victorious warrior against the notorious buggers threatening Earth in Orson Scott Card's momentous first novel, Ender's Game. Ender in Exile is the sequel to that first novel, revealing Ender's life-long quest to free himself of guilt in the death of Stilson, Bonzo and all the formics in the universe. But Ender clarifies this issue by stating he's not to blame for their deaths but he is responsible. Intent is not the issue but consequences are.
While Ender is attempting to reconcile his outer reputation as a savior of the earth with his killer, instinctual responses and consequences, the reader discovers the evolution of so many who touched his life and he theirs in some way during that questionable, short time span.
Colonies are being formed on all the former formic worlds and it is through the ansible email communications that we learn how Peter, Ender's brother, evolves into the Hegemon, a world leader who can wreak peace or devastating war on earth. What will he honor, knowing his own destructive, evil nature?
Hyrum Graff could retire as the engineer of the ultimately victory Ender won; instead, he has bigger plans as Minister of the Colonies now in the process of being rebuilt and shaped by humans traveling in and out of stasis to their destinies as the creators of a different world than strife-ridden Earth. Who is smarter about that process, the court-martialed, shamed Graff or Ender and what is the destiny of those affected by these plans?
Ender's sister, Val, is the single-minded relative and person who has Ender's best interests in mind and agrees to sacrifice her relationships with Peter and her parents to be a guiding force to heal Ender of the crushing burden he carries for past actions and as the first Governor of the planet, Shakespeare. How will Val reconcile her sacrifice and Ender's resistance to her advice? Are they really opponents or is there more behind their genius plans and conversations?
What about other members of Ender's "jeesh" or battle squads, those with him and those banished before and after the final war with the Hive Queen? While he might be worshipped by many of the world, what of Bean's descendant, Achilles, who carries a twisted story of the past and is determined to wreak punishment on the one who hold's the world's highest regard? This and so much more fills Ender in Exile with a story that covers the gap between the end of the war and the Speaker for the Dead story in Orson Scott Card's brilliant science fiction series.
A brief afterworld expresses not only thanks to the countless individuals who supported and assisted Card in this huge endeavor but also offers a singular message to those to whom this story is really directed, a significant, needed and moving tribute indeed.
Ender in Exile can be read as a stand-alone novel, with enough repetition for a new reader to understand what preceded this novel. It's also an excellent prequel to Speaker for the Dead which took a huge leap beyond the past bugger war. That Orson Scott Card manages to fill this gap and at the same time create a new story within a grand series speaks of his superb skills as a writer with enough imagination and creativity to shape stories within stories, changing, maturing character perspectives and worlds interweaving present, past and future science fiction to thrill both faithful and newly found readers of every persuasion.
Reviewed by Viviane Crystal on November 16, 2008
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