When Orson Scott Card wrote 'Ender's Game', he already knew that he would follow it up with 'Speaker for the Dead'. He even looked at 'Ender's Game', a book that won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, as a book he needed to write to provide context to 'Speaker for the Dead'. I don't know how much more of his ensuing career he also imagined at that point, because 'Ender's Game' was also a debut novel, but Ender's legacy has taken up a decent chunk of his life. This novel is theoretically where he finally wraps up the core narrative of it, though strands within it, such as the 'Fleet School' series, are likely to continue.

I came into 'The Last Shadow' with trepidation, not because that's a lot of ground to wrap up but because I haven't read most of it. Beyond those first two Hugo Award winners, I've read 'Xenocide', so long ago that I don't remember much about it beyond the OCD-ridden godspoken of Path, who enthralled me; and 'Children of the Fleet', the sixteenth novel, a beginning to that 'Fleet School' YA spin-off series.

What shocked me here is that only 'Speaker for the Dead' would seem to be a must for an impetuous reader leaping in this late to the series. I didn't need detailed knowledge of a long series or even a passing familiarity with it to help me out. I just needed to know that one book, so that I had the requisite grounding in the world that is Lusitania, the unique home of a trio of species: humans, who established a Portuguese colony there; formics, a buglike race destroyed by Ender in war except for the single hive queen he found a home for there; and the pequeninos, who are the sole local species, courtesy of the Descolada virus which messed up the entire planet.

Maybe it would have helped to have read 'Children of the Mind', because the "aiúa" is an important component here and I had no idea what that is, especially given that the aiúa is an intelligent philote, linked to other aiúas by philotic threads, and those links are the way by which the ability to effectively teleport anywhere via travelling Outside works. I'd no idea what philotes or Outside are either and teleportation seemed a lot like a literary cheat, but I grasped the ramifications quickly enough. It seems that Jane, the deus in this machina, almost literally, is an aiúa, though I never quite grasped that.

Maybe it would have helped to have read the Shadow Saga, a parallel to the Ender series told from the perspective of Bean, his backup at Battle School, the patriarch of what are called leguminids, who move much of this novel forward. Bean was another brilliant child who helped Ender in the first book but a crucial detail not covered there is that he has an affliction called Anton's Key, a genetic modification that causes high intelligence but also gigantism, so they die young. This was fixed by his kids and it's their kids who Jane brings to Lusitania in this book, from their spaceship that's been travelling at relativistic speeds and so feels like another literary cheat.

The task she gives them seems to be to figure out how the Descolada virus arrived on the planet Lusitania, which is a pretty important plot strand left unaddressed from book two onwards that has apparently sparked a vast amount of potential answers from fans over the thirty-five years since the publication of 'Speaker of the Dead'. Unfortunately, in yet another literary cheat, Card doesn't entirely provide his own answer, perhaps because he realised that doing so would only elongate this series exponentially.

After all, the suggestion all along has been that it was created not evolved, probably on a planet that has become known as Descoladora, for obvious reasons, so that's the primary focus of the leguminids who are actually focused enough to function effectively, which for our purposes means Thulium Delphiki, an impulsive young genius, and her more patient brother Sprout. They, along with Peter Wiggin, Ender's brother whose body, in back story I haven't read, now contains Ender's aiúa, and his wife, Si Wang-Mu, who hails from Path, they teleport down to Descoladora and investigate.

Which is a heck of a long way to get started, but then this is book seventeen in a series. I'd say that's a pretty compressed backdrop. What I didn't like were all those literary cheats, which have added up across the series and probably feel fine to people who read through the entire thing but which become quite the hurdle to someone joining late. In particular, I didn't like the way that this was proclaimed to be a grand ending but is really just a step forward. By the end of this novel, we learn how the Descolada virus came to be and that's important, but we still don't know whodunit. That remains a complete mystery.

What I liked was a good deal of the rest. I liked Thulium, even if she's often unlikeable, as I got where she was coming from. Life on the Herodotus with her fellow leguminids can't have been pleasant but she and Sprout emerged from it stronger for their torments and troubles. I liked that, at least on Lusitania, the various species are able to coexist, even if their various unique natures—hello, superpowered hive queen—can sometimes feel like yet more literary cheats.

I especially liked the story of first contact between our intrepid four adventurers and the occupants of the planet Descoladora they discover first, who call it Nest, because they're intelligent birds. As with 'Speaker for the Dead', Card demonstrates his ability to create a believable and yet thoroughly unique ecosystem populated with fascinating characters. It seems pretty clear that he reads a lot, is grabbed by certain wild details and then figures out how to fit those into a story, often an existing one with a lot of people invested in it.

Something else I liked was how Card was able to deliver this novel, with so many needs, in just over three hundred pages. It would be a very easy book to bloat and I'm appreciative that he kept it from doing so. It would seem to be an easy read for fans of the series, but not a particularly difficult one for anyone skipping much of it. For full immersion, read it all in whatever order seems to make most sense, all two million words of it, spread across seventeen novels, two novellas and one collection. The abbreviated approach would be to read the first two books, 'Ender's Game' and 'Speaker for the Dead', and whichever other entries you get through before wanting to jump all the way to the answers.

Which, as I mentioned, aren't all here. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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