Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss

XENOCIDE by Orson Scott Card

1 view
Skip to first unread message

wal...@vax.oxford.ac.uk

unread,
Oct 14, 1991, 3:49:08 PM10/14/91
to

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

A Review by Andrew J. Walley (copyright 1991)

Having finished this novel only minutes ago, I thought I'd give you my
first impressions. Since this is the third part of the most successful
trilogy in SF in terms of awards (Parts 1 and 2 - Ender's Game and Speaker
For The Dead - won the Hugo and Nebula awards for the year they were
published) I was expecting a suitably rousing finale. Xenocide is good but
not the masterwork it needed to be to finish this trilogy on a high note.
I'm not faulting Card for this as he had already done the impossible
writing a better, more thought provoking book than Ender's Game but
Xenocide remains a disappointment.

Resolving storylines generated in the first two books seems to be Card's
main aim, together with the introduction of the strange society of the
planet Path for variety. Card's ongoing ethical dilemma of whether anyone
has the right to destroy a species, amply explored in the first two books,
is watered down and wasted in the third book, whose title seems simply
ironic now I've finished it. Card fails to deal with some of the elements
of the plot which is simply frustrating after wading through pages of
discussion about the nature of sentience and the origins of the soul.

These are deep philosophical issues that Card proceeds to gloss over with
an appealing mixture of pseudo-science and mysticism which then allows him
to solve some of the problems confronting his characters in ways which are
no more than wish-fulfilment (literally !). Equally bad is the fact that
many plotlines are simply left unresolved. There is an obvious market for
a sequel and if Card is playing his readers for the fools that marketing
men think they are then he has been sadly misled. Xenocide fails to deliver
the satisfaction that I derived from the first two books where insight and
empathy were coupled to an action/adventure plot in a way that has been
rarely seen in SF. Read it but expect to feel cheated when you turn that
last page. I did.

%A Orson Scott Card
%C London
%D 1991
%G ISBN 0-7126-4773-2
%I Legend, Random Century Group
%O Hardback
%P 463 Pages
%T Xenocide

0 new messages