Book Review: Shadow of the Hegemon

Ender's Shadow

I read and enjoyed Ender’s Shadow a few months ago and enjoyed it enough to follow up with the second of Orson Scott Card’s “Bean books,” Shadow of the Hegemon. Unfortunately just like with the books in the Ender Wiggins series focusing on that hero, there was a precipitous decline in how much I enjoyed the follow-up.

This is mostly because Card is writing a very different kind of book. Ender’s Shadow was mostly a book about genius children out in space, suffering hardships, outsmarting the grownups, jockeying for position among themselves, and getting trained to fight horrible aliens. And it features a pretty strong character who is coming of age, at least as much as a 5-year old COULD come of age. That’s all cool stuff! People are DOING stuff!

Shadow of the Hegemon, in contrast, is a story about global war, often told in a very abstract way. The gist of it is that after the Battle School genius children are released back into the world, several powers aim to control these “national resources” for themselves in bids for military power to be used in the inevitable war that follows mankind’s realization that there’s now no alien threat to unit it. Bean’s old nemesis Achille is behind most of this in his own bid for world domination/revenge, but Peter Wiggin –the slightly unhinged brother of Ender Wiggins– has a hand in it too, as does Bean who is really just trying to rescue one of his friends and redress one wrongdoing from his past.

You can tell that Card tries very hard to keep this story from reading like a history book (even though he was inspired by just those kinds of books) and having all the global action fed to the reader by talking heads. He’s got Bean and the others mixing it up in assassination attempts, military maneuvers, and espionage, and there’s a prominant plotline involving the kidnapping of fellow Battle School graduate Petra Arkarian by Achille. And I always thought that Peter Wiggin had potential for a really interesting character –the ultimate puppetmaster and shaper of public opinion driven by his own obsessions that don’t fit neatly into good/evil moulds when you look closely at them.

But Card falls short in my opinion. A lot of the REALLY BIG ACTION in the book –like battles between India, Burma, Pakistan, and China– have obviously huge implications for the plot and the characters, but they’re robbed of a lot of their drama by being so abstracted. The credibility of the whole thing is also strained by having so many amazingly brilliant children pulling off such coups and pushing around of major world governments. It starts to seem like Bean, Achille, and Peter Wiggins are pulling this stuff off less through sheer intelligence and more through …magic! Or the needs of the plot, take your choice.

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