I was less enthusiastic about The First Formic War. (It's followed by Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: A Secret History at #105 and Naomi Novik's Uprooted at #106.)
#Orson pott card deskgram series
This series I also ranked as a group, coming out at #99 through #104. I learned a little about world geography which was neat. I found a lot of war-focused stuff in the middle a little too focused on action, although the battle tactics and war strategies were fascinating in their own right. My favorites from The Shadow Series were the first and last volumes: Ender's Shadow and Shadows in Flight. In a way, I feel like Ender and Bean came together into one person in Alvin, although Orson decided to make Alvin a little less brilliant at such a young age and focus more on his innate sense of good morality. I ended up liking Bean as a character more than Ender. Seeing Bean's role in how the events played out in Ender's Game was exhilarating. I work in psychology and trauma healing and I can testify that Orson is brilliant.Īfter reading Ender's Saga, I read the six books in The Shadow Series, beginning, of course, with Ender's Shadow. I don't even think the average reader can appreciate how profound his understanding is. While Jo Graham has deep, nuanced characters, the different ways in which they are wise feels limited in comparison to Orson's characters. But Naomi is actually new to this level of depth with her characters – her former works don't display as much depth, whereas Orson shows this level of depth in book after book. When I think of other authors who approach such levels of character building, I think of my all-time favorite book (rank #1), Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, and Jo Graham's Numinous World series (#9, #28, #63, etc). The character building that Orson Scott Card does, however, is first-class. Orson Scott Card's taboo-confrontation is excellent, but Heinlein takes on taboos at least equally well in Stranger in a Strange Land (ranked #18) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (ranked #81). The plot lines are always filled with interesting twists, but many authors who focus on fascinating plots do that better the Lighthouse Duet by Carol Berg (ranked #89 and #90) has fascinating interwoven plots – perhaps the best I've ever encountered. Yes the world-building is good, but Brandon Sanderson is usually better at that (although there is an exception which I'll get to in a moment). Personally, what impresses me most about Orson is the meaning he puts into his books. (Followed by Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha at #47 and Brandon Sanderson's The Well of Ascension at #48.) As a series, they landed as #40 through #46. Are insects disgusting and scary, or are we just being bigots? Is it gruesome and gory and wrong to cut someone apart, or could it be a ritual of rebirth with real meaning in an alien culture? What does it mean to be sentient? On my spreadsheet I lumped the seven main books of Ender's story into one row on my spreadsheet as I read them back-to-back and didn't want to try to analyze them individually. Orson really pushes your buttons and tests your taboos. But I moved on to the rest of the original Ender series and found them highly engrossing. I was surprised by how dark the story was it was good writing and addictive, but it felt heavy. Then I moved on to the ever-famous Ender's Game. ( Alvin Journeyman was my favorite and Heartfire was my second-favorite, ranking #10 and #14 on my spreadsheet respectively.) Four of the Alvin books made it into my top twenty books of all time, so that got me curious about his other works. I keep a spreadsheet of every book I've ever read and rank each book across many different axes including depth of characters, writing quality, and general reading enjoyment (among many others). It also looked like Extinct was supposed to be a trilogy, but now it doesn't seem to be listed anywhere as actually being published, so I'm pretty confused on that one. It was co-written with Kathryn Kidd, who died in 2015. First and only book of the planned trilogy published in 1994. The Flood and The Garden fo Eden are listed as planned. Last one was Christopher Columbus, in 1996. Women of Genesis has two sequels listed, The Wives of Israel and The Sons of Rachel.
Master Alvin, the final book of The Tales of Alvin Maker. Presumably this depends in part on Aaron Johnston. The previous book in the Second Formic Wars trilogy was The Hive in 2019. There's The Queens, presumably the last Endervwrse book, outside of hopefully a collection of all the short stories. I recognize that Wikipedia might not have follow up comments on whether he's still planning to do them, so I thought I'd ask. Per Wikipedia, there's a ton of unfinished sequels that have been planned, sometimes for decades.