Xenocide

Author: Orson Scott Card
Started: 26 Mar 2010
Finished: 10 Apr 2010
592 p / 16 d
37.0 p/d

I continue to make my way through all of the Ender Series on my way to the latest in the series which Brandy gave me awhile back. This time it is Xenocide, the third book in the series.

The third book is a bit more blah than the first two books. It is still an interesting book and examines some fun concepts, but it seems that the first two books had more big, new and surprising things. This one just sort of continues the story. You explore the notion of different levels of alienness some more. It makes you think about what makes a person a person, and about how much you have to change a person before they aren’t really the same thing any more. Fun stuff to philosophize about. But it did seem like somewhat treading the same waters that were covered in the last book.

To be clear though, it is still a fun story, and leaves me wanting to read Book 4. I think when I read this series before many years ago, I only got to Book 4. So I’m eager to go ahead and read Book 4 (the plot of which I can’t say I really remember) and then get on to Book 5 and beyond.

I will also say that in this series the character I’ve always enjoyed the most is “Jane” the sentient computer network. I remember when I was a teenager reading a lot of books that had sentient computers as characters, and it was always something I was drawn to. Of course we still don’t have good sentient computers. They really need to get back to working on that.