Beyond Ender's Game: Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind [BOX SET] (Paperback)

by Orson Scott Card (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Beyond Enders Boxed Mass Market Set
Contains: Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind


Speaker for the Dead:
In the aftermath of his terrible war, Ender Wiggin disappeared, and a powerful voice arose: The Speaker for the Dead, who told the true story of the Bugger War.

Now, long years later, a second alien race has been discovered, but again the aliens' ways are strange and frightening...again, humans die. And it is only the Speaker for the Dead, who is also Ender Wiggin the Xenocide, who has the courage to confront the mystery...and the truth.


Xenocide:
The war for survival of the planet Lusitania will be fought in the hearts of a child named Gloriously Bright.

On Lusitania, Ender found a world where humans and pequininos and the Hive Queen could all live together; where three very different intelligent species could find common ground at last. Or so he thought.

Lusitania also harbors the descolada, a virus that kills all humans it infects, but which the pequininos require in order to become adults. The Startways Congress so fears the effects of the descolada, should it escape from Lusitania, that they have ordered eh destruction of the entire planet, and all who live there. The Fleet is on its way, a second xenocide seems inevitble.


Children of the Mind:
The planet Lusitania is home to three sentient species: the Pequeninos; a large colony of humans; and the Hive Queen, brought there by Ender. But once against the human race has grown fearful; the Starways Congress has gathered a fleet to destroy Lusitania.

Jane, the evolved computer intelligence, can save the three sentient races of Lusitania. 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, and the Starways Congress is 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 the Author

Born in Richland, Washington in 1951, Orson Scott Card grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He lived in Brazil for two years as an unpaid missionary for the Mormon Church and received degrees from Brigham Young University (1975) and the University of Utah (1981). The author of numerous books, Card was the first writer to receive both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel two years in a row, first for Ender's Game and then for the sequel Speaker for the Dead. He lives with his wife and children in North Carolina.

His works have been translated into many languages, including Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Product Details

• Paperback: 1408 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (September 27, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765341921
• ISBN-13: 978-0765341921
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.6 x 3.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #301,600 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

180 of 190 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nice to see these together, October 5, 2002

By	T. Kephart - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I hate reviews that don't tell you that this is a collection of 3 books: books 2-4 in the Ender's Series. So if you buy this, don't buy them twice as "Speaker For the Dead", "Xenocide", and "Children of the Mind". Now that I've got the most important info I look for in the reviews section out of the way, I might as well review it.

First off, I like the bundled collection method of publishing older books in a series... omnibus paperback editions tend to fall apart on the first reading.

First time Ender's series readers may prefer to skip these. Going from Ender's Game to Ender's Shadow and continuing the Shadow series (the newer books) probably works as an alternate series path to follow the main action.

That said, addicts need to have the full Ender's experience, and will eventually have to read these books. And they will regret reading them out of order if they skip over the slower paced books in the series (this collection) to get to the more exciting books (pretty much all the rest ), so get this collection and save the headache of trying to find the individual books.

As for the content of the books in this collection, check out the reviews on the individual books themselves.

63 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An incredible writer..., December 15, 2002

By	J. Wiener "Musician" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I also read Ender's Game in 8th grade (i'm now 16) and was astonished by the clear and quick writing and action packed story. The following summer i picked up Speaker for the Dead and started off rather disappointed by the slow, pensive prose that proved difficult to sit through, at first. After accepting it for what it was, I realized that Card's writing was slower, but nonetheless incredible. In these three books, which read like a trilogy more than sequals to an original, are packed with social commentaries and modern references that really make you think about our society as we experience it. Though it takes a while to get going, these novels have a deep, rich, suspenseful story line that keep the pages turning. Ender's game reads like an action movie, play by play, blow by blow, all linear and in order. These novels have recurring themes, changing ideas, plot lines and characters that come and go and all come to a climax in the end of Children of the Mind. Trust me, if you just suck it up and deal with the technical writing of Speaker for the Dead and the dense analytical philosophy of Xenocide (both of which i appreciated and enjoyed, but were rather slow going) Children of the Mind really brings it all together. If you skip these three, you'll be sorry you did.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great collection from Sci Fi's grandmaster, March 19, 2002

By	Bryan Erickson (Eagan, Minnesota) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Don't be fooled, these sequels have little to do with "Ender's Game," despite the marketing hook into Card's early work that remains his opus magnum. They are literal sequels and center on the same main character of Ender, but other than that have as little to do with "Ender's Game" as possible: they happen on another planet decades after the original, with only one other overlapping character. However, they take the intriguing step of asking, after the hero saves the day, then what? Ender saved humanity in the first installment - where does anyone go from there to live happily ever after? The second through fourth novels explore Ender's quest to live a life that means something more than merely saving the world - by meaning something to the people around him. The best one is Xenocide. By the end of Children of the Mind, it seems like the author has run out of steam - as witnessed by a highly contrived magical return of Ender's siblings, while minor characters flip-flop on their motivation in a way that uncomfortably seems like the author himself considers it arbitrary by this point. It's no wonder that Card found greater inspiration by going back to the setting of the original Ender's Game to start a new thread of novels with the Shadow series. Still, Card's novels are the greatest and most human of any living sci-fi writer, and with few exceptions, he's never in better form than here.