I started reading Ender's Game on the flight to Tanzania at the beginning of the summer. For the last couple of years, people encouraged me to give the book a chance. My pal James Casey even let me borrow his copy of the book for like a year, but when he moved, I returned it to him in the same condition in which I received the book; I hadn't took the book off my shelf. I wasn't interested in the series because I didn't have a clue what it was about. It looked like generic science fiction, and I honestly don't want to read generic anything.
Then I saw a movie trailer, which piqued my interest for two different reasons: 1) the trailer actually looked cool and 2) I normally want to read books before I watch the movies (so I can be that guy who says that the book was so much better.) I downloaded the whole saga before leaving for Tanzania, thinking that I may get through one of the books.
Ender's Game is a great book and an easy read. I don't really want to write a personal response because it's like writing about what makes High Fidelity a great movie. People who have watched High Fidelity would be like..."Of course, it's great. You don't need to waste 500 words telling me what I already know." (Unless you're the type who likes to read reviews to reinforce your own opinion about something, which I'm guilty of from time to time). I finished it in two or three days and was stoked to read the next book. I was excited to see what was next for young Ender.
So naturally I loaded up Speaker for the Dead and I was a little disappointed. The book jumps 3000 years ahead in the universe and takes Ender from boyhood to middle age*. Not only does Orson Scott Card jump the universe thousands of years ahead (essentially killing all but two characters from the first book) but he changes the tone and expectations of the novel. Ender's Game is essentially a adolescent lit, action-sci-fi novel. It's a fun book while Speaker for the Dead is more of an adult drama, which isn't bad at all. It's just wasn't what I wanted. I wanted adventure and space battles. It's more just talking heads. Not that talking heads are bad. The book's themes and core ideas are really interesting and relateable. It's just that most of my reading consists of literary fiction, which is talking heads. I just wanted more dumb fun.
In the end, Speaker for the Dead was a good book although not as great as Ender's Game. I finished it while I was in Tanzania, and I was excited to start the third book Xenocide. I had adjusted my expectations. I let Card make the changes to his characters and universe that he wanted to make. I wasn't going to be a baby. If he wanted to write more space drama, I could go along with it.
If Speaker for the Dead kind of disappointed me, Xenocide left me bummed out. It ended up being a faux-philosophy novel. The narrative in between all the "philotic" and "ai a" rants was engaging, but I found Card's need to go on and on about the spirit of life and the philotic web that connects all thing boring and non-germane. And I think that the splitting of Ender's ai a was dumb (if you haven't read this then you should know that I'm not spoiling anything because you have to read the book to even get half of all this jargon).
I'm over halfway through the final novel in the quartet, and Children of the Mind is really just part two of Xenocide, so you can image how I feel about it.
BUT
Even after saying all of that, I want to say that I really love the series. I keep reading because I love the characters. Even though the plot and Card's need to philosophize annoys me, he has me with Ender and Valentine and Miro and Jane. And I believe the characters are what make a novel meaningful. There's the critical part of me that wants to complain about how the series gets progressively worse, but the completionist in me is okay with it. I have to see it to the end.
The title of this post makes a strange comparison between the Ender Saga and the Rambo Series, but it makes perfect sense (at least in my mind). They both started out with the strongest entry and slowly moved away from what made the series great. But I can't help be care about the fate of John Rambo just like I cannot help but care about Ender Wiggin. Reading the last book Children of the Mind is a lot like watching Rambo (2008), I can't help but grimace at certain plot choices, but I can't stop enjoying myself.
*Deep space travel in the Ender series takes years but to the person traveling it feels like months, so if you go into deep space, you age four months while everyone in the universe ages forty to fifty years. Ender travels a lot so he can live for millennium while only aging a little.
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