Duffy Pratt's Reviews > Shadow of the Hegemon

This book moved along at a pretty good clip. It was easy to read and kind of entertaining. I like Bean. So it was OK.

Except that it was really pretty terrible. All the Battle School kids are back on earth and they are basically shunted away as being "just" children. That means that all the kids who won the war for mankind's survival now have subordinate roles. And that's just fine.

But then there's Achilles. He got into Battle School, and was there for a couple of weeks. He got kicked out and sent to a mental hospital because he has this slight problem that he's a sociopathic serial killer. So naturally, first Russia and then India and then presumably China put him near the top of their power structure and allow him to get them into major wars and to negotiate critical non-aggression treaties. The adults thus all trust the proven sociopathic killer with no track record of competence, while they all seem to mistrust the Battle School vets?

Somehow, in his incredibly annoying afterward, Card seems to justify all this by the examples of other great men like Alexander and Napoleon. (I may have Card's position wrong. I couldn't bear to do anything but slightly skim this afterward. It read sort of like the end of War and Peace. Mercifully not as long, but also seemingly devoid of content. For me, all it showed is that perhaps Card is even more arrogant than his main characters.) But Alexander was the son of Philip of Macedon, and the student of Aristotle. There's a reason he was leading armies. Napoleon may be a better example, but he at least proved himself in some engagements. By contrast, Achilles sole claim to fame was that he was thrown out of Battle School and into a mental hospital.

Finally, this thing takes place at least 100 years in the future. There's space travel, communication faster than the speed of light, etc... It's supposed to be science fiction. But for all practical purposes, there's no science fiction in it at all. Here, I give Card a pass, because it's pretty clear that he's just not interested. And yet, I still have a problem with it. The Battle School environment in Ender's Game and in Ender's Shadow is pretty cool. But in terms of how things work, it's really hard to square that environment with the state of technology here on Earth, which is pretty much straight from the mid-nineties. And it's also troublesome because they do have instant communication, not restricted by the speed of light. Thus, if Ender could command the fleet in the fight against the Formics, then he and Valentine could also at least have some contact or input into the Earth's events. Instead, its just ignored.

Yeah, this book was OK, but I'm no longer excited to continue the series. Maybe someday.