Children Of The Mind: Book 4 of the Ender Saga - Softcover

Card, Orson Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0356501876 ISBN 13: 9780356501871

Publisher: Orbit, 2013

Synopsis

A PLANET LIES OPEN TO ATTACK. THERE IS STILL HOPE - BUT TIME IS RUNNING OUT

The Starways Congress has gathered a fleet to destroy the planet Lusitania. Once again the human race has grown fearful.

Jane, the evolved computer intelligence, can save the world' three sentient races. She has learned how to move ships outside the universe, and then instantly back to a different world, abolishing the light-speed limit.

But it takes all the processing power available to her. With Starways Congress shutting down the Net, world by world, soon Jane will not be able to move the ships. Ender's children must save her if they are to save themselves.

About this title

Review:

Orson Scott Card's SF career began with Ender's Game, a 1977 story expanded into an acclaimed 1985 novel. Unwittingly responsible for xenocide--destruction of an alien species--while still a boy, Ender expiates his guilt on another world in Speaker for the Dead. This confronts humanity with a deadly alien-built virus whose elimination seems to demand another xenocide. The tense continuing story takes an extraordinary leap into magical metaphysics at the climax of Xenocide, of which Children of the Mind is in effect the second half. Though that virus is now defeated, this isn't believed: the planet-eating doomsday weapon still approaches. Ender's AI friend Jane, who inhabits the galactic net and is the only agency that can move spacecraft faster than light, is being killed by dismantling the net. Ender himself is fading, passing responsibility to strange young avatars of his dead brother and aging sister created from his memories in Xenocide. Even in the shadow of death there are grippingly argued political, philosophical and moral debates--plus bitter family quarrels. A master storyteller with a knack for showing painful human relationships, Card achieves almost unbearable suspense before resolving his complex tangle and finishing Ender's 3000-year story with a touching elegy. One dangling plot line suggests that Card may return again to this universe. Solid, high-quality SF despite some implausible science. --David Langford

Review:

Some of the most hauntingly brilliant writing of the decade (INTERZONE on ENDER’S GAME)

Achieves and delivers more than almost anything else within the science fiction genre, Ender's Game is a contemporary classic (NEW YORK TIMES on ENDER’S GAME)

Card has taken the venerable SF concepts of a superhuman and interstellar war . . . and, with superb characterisation, pacing and language, combined them into a seamless story of compelling power (BOOKLIST on ENDER’S GAME)

Hugo and Nebula-award winner Orson Scott Card demonstrates again that he belongs in the company of such older masters of science fiction as Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert and Ursula K. Le Guin. (MAGILL BOOK REVIEWS)

The best writer science fiction has to offer. (THE HOUSTON POST)

About this edition

• Publisher: Orbit
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0356501876
• ISBN 13: 9780356501871
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368