Mass Market Paperback, 464 pages
English language
Published Dec. 8, 2001 by Tor Books.
This is a duplicate. Please update your lists. See openlibrary.org/works/OL49564W.
You won me over making Bean the smartest person in the world and Greek but then lost me with Achilles being so much better at manipulating the world than (almost) every Battle School graduate.
The weakest of the original quartet and this series so far, hoping it picks up in the next one.
It doesn't have the same EEEE awesome factor that both Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow had. It's still really good though and I like the way it carries the story forward. Saw some of the plot twists coming, or had an idea about them. Be interesting to see where it goes from here, if the series keeps being very political. One of the things missing from this one, I thought, was that social engineering factor, as I mentioned this book is more just straight up politics.
Hegemon leaves the confines of Battle School to enter a world of international politics, and as much as I love international politics, I was glad Card didn't abandon the characters and character-level plot. Bean grows, Petra grows, Peter grows (though he's relatively ancillary--he's neither protagonist nor antagonist), Achilles...doesn't really grow. In Ender's Shadow, for a few paragraphs, we actually saw into Achilles' mind. In this book, we see him act and others' evaluations of his behavior, but they add nothing new to his personality--in fact they fail to draw on the peak we got in the previous book.
Over all, this book is similar in style to the previous two and added an aspect I very much enjoy (high-level politics, not just individuals bickering and seeking power), but I didn't enjoy it quite as much. Achilles did not interest me, and the genius of Bean, Peter, etc. occasionally felt …
Hegemon leaves the confines of Battle School to enter a world of international politics, and as much as I love international politics, I was glad Card didn't abandon the characters and character-level plot. Bean grows, Petra grows, Peter grows (though he's relatively ancillary--he's neither protagonist nor antagonist), Achilles...doesn't really grow. In Ender's Shadow, for a few paragraphs, we actually saw into Achilles' mind. In this book, we see him act and others' evaluations of his behavior, but they add nothing new to his personality--in fact they fail to draw on the peak we got in the previous book.
Over all, this book is similar in style to the previous two and added an aspect I very much enjoy (high-level politics, not just individuals bickering and seeking power), but I didn't enjoy it quite as much. Achilles did not interest me, and the genius of Bean, Peter, etc. occasionally felt unbelievable to me when applied to human behavior rather than strategy. There's a point where Bean insists Achilles would have at least three back-ups--why at least three? I don't care how smart Achilles is or how well Bean knows him. Humans make decisions far too arbitrarily and options are far too varied to be predicted with that degree of specificity. Attempts to display the intelligence of the characters ranged from really good to kind of terrible.
Though not as good as Ender's Game or Ender's Shadow, this is definitely worth reading if you loved the previous two in this thread.
