Earth Awakens

This book continues where “Earth Afire” left off. The Formics are having their way with China and doing a number on any attempts against them in space too.

Finally in this book we start to see some of the actions to make a more cohesive Earth, one more reflected in “Ender’s Game” or “Ender’s Shadow” play out. Things are finally coming together.

This book is probably the fastest paced and most action packed of the trilogy thus far. It provides a solid conclusion to the First Formic War.

The blending of the character perspectives and actually having the characters meet and interact is much better in this book than the prior two and much closer to the woven tapestry feel of William Gibson’s “Sprawl Trilogy”. I hope any subsequent books using these multiple character viewpoints by the Card / Johnson duo come across as well and fluidly.

Lastly the book ends on a properly ominous note, one that bodes as a good tie in for a series on the Second Formic War.

I would actually be happy to have some filler as to the formation of the International Fleet (IF) and the Hegemony. It would be great to read about the struggles and development of these institutions taken for a given in subsequent books.

Lastly, I’m going to express a bit of inner turmoil in purchasing and reading Orson Scott Card’s books. I get it, he’s a person with his own religious and political views. He’s also a Mormon and has on multiple occasions either denounced homosexuality or joined organizations that I would say are questionable in regards to their advocacy on how to treat part of the human population.
There’s a real aspect of cognitive dissonance that I see here. You have an author who is by far most famous for his science fiction, his most popular series heavily based in the triumphs of a united humanity and its children, and in theory one would expect that in a world moving toward such unity that racism, bigotry, and many other contributors to hate of those who are “different” would fall away. And yet, you have an author who while writing about this will publicly state and back beliefs that would harm chances at the acceptance necessary for such unity as the human race.

I guess in many ways I would implore Orson Scott Card, if I could, to view the world as his character Colonel Graff does and to value all of humanity and seek to protect everyone’s future.