Orson Scott Card wrote Ender in Exile eleventh out of the twelve books in the Enderverse (so far), but it actually falls between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, and runs alongside the events of most of the Shadow Series. Card says he wrote it to fill in the gaps between the war ending on Eros, and Ender becoming the Speaker that we see in Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind. However, it seemed more to me like Card had a list of all the endings he needed to wrap up, so he addressed them all here. It makes for a rather disjointed novel, even though we do get a lot of plotlines resolved.
“And what? What’s the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: “Tut-tut, what at botch that was”? Don’t we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don’t we try to frame it so they’ll chose as we think they should?”
And the plotlines resolved include: filling in a bit more about Peter/Petra post-Bean, what happens to the final Bean/Petra baby (this having been dragged out across….3 books?), what happens to Graff, how does Ender do on Shakespeare, what leads him to the hivequeen, how does he end up traveling the universe with Valentine and whatever happens to Virlomi. There’s also two new plotlines. One, an Italian girl and her awful, awful (AWFUL) mother, who they encounter on the voyage. Two, a bloodworm on Shakepeare that’s killing colonists, and the xenobiologist in charge of killing it (I loved this xenobiologist, and would have delightfully read a whole book devoted to him and his young assistant).
Card seems to have written down each of these, then devoted several chapters to each. And even the plotlines that I wanted to see resolved seemed stale here. There’s a lot of “whatever could Ender be thinking?” as various schemes occur. We don’t get inside his head much, which made me crazy. We end up on the sidelines with Valentine, tearing out hair out (even though we all know that Ender will prevail — he is Ender, plus he has three more books to appear in). Overall, a disappointing and frustrating end(?) to the series — although I did like that xenobiologist.