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A review by yhtgrace
Earth Unaware by Orson Scott Card
2.0
It's been a long time since I (re-)read Ender's Game/Ender's Shadow, but there's something weirdly un-Card-like in the writing style for Earth Unaware that makes me wonder if a) someone else wrote this book, b) this is just a shallow novelization of a comic book (which ok, it is), c) this is just a shallow novelization of a movie-to-be.
There are a thousand fears I have for the upcoming Ender's Game movie, chief amongst which is how they are going to pull off Ender's inner monologue. Ender's thoughts and emotions form the real heart of Ender's Game, not the flash-suits or the guns or the aliens or the spaceships but the growing up, because Ender's Game is firmly in the genre of the bildungsroman- it's a tearing down of childhood innocence that culminates, dramatically, with Ender's realization in the final scenes of the book. This, unfortunately, is a lot harder to translate onto screen, which makes me worry that the movie is going to be all flash-bang-sci-fi-alien-fighting-action-scenes.*
Earth Unaware, if made into a movie, would have no such problems. The characters are just interesting enough to be interesting, and unlike Ender or Bean or the hundreds of other characters that populate the Speaker/Shadow universes, we have no real insight into them, just sort of hand-wavey-motions so that we see vague outlines of the characters but not the characters themselves. They're ghosts in a plot that is otherwise action-packed and fast-moving, and this would probably work on screen, or in a graphic novel, but certainly not in a three-hundred page book.
*(That said, I've only been peripherally aware of what's going on for the movie, and everything that's come out so far looks promising, and so I await the movie with equal parts excitement (Ender's Game having left such a huge impression on my eleven-year-old psyche and all that) and trepidation.)
There are a thousand fears I have for the upcoming Ender's Game movie, chief amongst which is how they are going to pull off Ender's inner monologue. Ender's thoughts and emotions form the real heart of Ender's Game, not the flash-suits or the guns or the aliens or the spaceships but the growing up, because Ender's Game is firmly in the genre of the bildungsroman- it's a tearing down of childhood innocence that culminates, dramatically, with Ender's realization in the final scenes of the book. This, unfortunately, is a lot harder to translate onto screen, which makes me worry that the movie is going to be all flash-bang-sci-fi-alien-fighting-action-scenes.*
Earth Unaware, if made into a movie, would have no such problems. The characters are just interesting enough to be interesting, and unlike Ender or Bean or the hundreds of other characters that populate the Speaker/Shadow universes, we have no real insight into them, just sort of hand-wavey-motions so that we see vague outlines of the characters but not the characters themselves. They're ghosts in a plot that is otherwise action-packed and fast-moving, and this would probably work on screen, or in a graphic novel, but certainly not in a three-hundred page book.
*(That said, I've only been peripherally aware of what's going on for the movie, and everything that's come out so far looks promising, and so I await the movie with equal parts excitement (Ender's Game having left such a huge impression on my eleven-year-old psyche and all that) and trepidation.)