Children of the Mind

Author: Orson Scott Card
Started: 3 Oct 2010
Finished: 9 Oct 2010
Format: Paperback
349 p / 7 d
49.9 p/d

OK, now that is more like it. Almost 50 pages per day and a book finished in a week. Compared to the text book before this, that is just lightning speed… Of course, I’m usually much faster with fiction and this was an easy read.

This is of course the next book (#4) in the Ender Series. I’m working my way through the series to get to #11, which Brandy gave me for Christmas or a birthday or something a couple of years back. :-) I had finished the last one back in April.

This one continues directly from the previous book with no gap in time whatsoever. It follows a couple of “characters” who are essentially just artificial extensions of Ender himself as they (and others, including the original Ender) try to prevent the destruction of a planet and a sentient computer network.

Continuing the trend of the last couple of books in this series, what goes on is decreasingly about events and actions or even characters, but instead is Card exploring a particular concept of the nature of the soul and what it means in relation to the various characters in the story, the species they belong to and toward the whole of the universe I guess. This is all an interesting thought experiment. He proposes a physical extra dimensional sort of thing that embodies the soul or the will or whatnot, and which essentially possesses physical objects, with the “stronger” of these things being able to take control of complex entities such as human beings and with the ability to “intertwine” with other of these things as embodiment of relationships between people, etc. He then pursues some of the ramifications of that sort of structure. As I said, interesting thought experiment.

Overall a good book, if you are into the kind of book that is really more about exploring ideas and concepts that being a page turner based on plot alone.

Oh, and of course, the most interesting character here continues to be Jane, the sentient computer network. But then again, I’ve always had a thing for sentient computer networks.