Written by Rich Rogers“Earth Awakens.” Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. 2014. Tor Books. Hardcover. 400 pages. $25.99.
The final book of the first Formic Wars trilogy (Card and Johnston have signed a contract for the trilogy of the Second Formic War) begins with readers wondering what’s going on with the two heroes of the series, Victor Delgado and Mazer Rackham. At the end of the last book, Victor had just found his way into the Formic ship, and Rackham had just been arrested by the Chinese for blowing up one of the Formic landers and showing the world it could be done.
The Chinese soon realize their mistake, and know they need Mazer and the Mobile Operations Police to help them against the Formics, and Victor, after working his way through the Formic ship, realizes he knows how to scuttle it.
Given that this book takes place 100 years before the events of “Ender’s Game,” and that Mazer played a role in that novel as well (sorry if I spoil things for those of you who have never read “Ender’s Game”), we know the eventual outcome. The interest is in the details, seeing how things get there, and what happens to people along the way.
The action flows easily, and the story never lags. We get some interesting characterizations. Some have criticized the book, saying the characters here are two-dimensional cutouts and/or acting irrationally. I’ve enjoyed Card’s writing for long enough that I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt to see what comes next, but it may be a while. There’s no word on when the next books will hit the shelves.There are also complaints that Bingwen is too advanced for his age, but child prodigies are the core of the Enderverse, and Card and Johnston appear to be making Bingwen the first Ender. (Although, I admit that there is one point where they even stretched it for me a bit).
Some might see Victor as immature and unable to get past prejudices, but there are definitely people like that, and given what happened to Victor’s family, his reactions to things are easily understandable. More frustrating is the father-son relationship between Ukko and Lem Jukes. Card and Johnston have created something with many layers that is not easily defined. There are times when it seems that Ukko is trying to help his son grow into the man who will take over the biggest company in the world, and then, seen through Lem’s eyes, he’s egocentric and manipulative, and not above using his own flesh and blood to achieve his own personal aims. It’s a tangled, layered, and knotted situation that should easily make things interesting in the next trilogy.
It has also been said that the politics, particularly in this final book, aren’t real. I have two answers for this: First, it’s amazing how infantile governments can be (witness Putin’s attempts to rebuild the old Soviet empire the same way Stalin did), even in the face of disasters on a global scale. Second, there just wasn’t time or space in this book to go into all of the international political machinations, and they gave a reasonable compromise with the space they had available. This is as much an action novel as anything else. For the pages they had, Card and Johnston did a good job at creating real-world politics, corporate politics, and functional and dysfunctional family relationships and dynamics.
Some of the science of the Formic ship doesn’t make sense, and I’m hoping Card and Johnston will address that in the next series, especially after what is revealed at the end of the novel. Selflessness and heroism are side by side with arrogance and selfishness, intelligence and wisdom next to outrageous stupidity, and hope and frustration are all in the mix as well. I am looking forward to the next Formic Wars series, as well as Card’s final entry in the “Pathfinder” series, due this month.
The pacing is excellent, rarely letting you slow down and making the story eminently readable. As always, they carry the novel beyond its action elements, giving you much to think about.
