Earth Unaware - in which we meet the Formics

Earth Unaware
(The First Formic War - Vol 1 of 3)
Orson Scott Card & Aaron Johnston

Macmillan Audio Book from TOR
(unabridged 14 hours)

Read by Stefan Rudnicki & Cast

In Earth Unaware, a ship of free miners are attacked by a greedy clan, then spot their first alien vessel - and it's headed to Earth!

Victor Delgado must lose his best friend at the outset because his family suspects they have feelings for each other. In this closed community, marriages are made with other clans on other ships, presumably to prevent inbreeding. She is shipped off to marry into an Italian clan. Victor decides to jump ship and head for Earth as he realizes that the family was right and that his memories are too strong there.

Victor and his family suffer one loss after another in their fight with first the powerful family that bumps the asteroid they are mining away from them and then with the aliens they try to stop from reaching the Earth.I suppose there are a number of spoilers in this short paragraph, but this is all back story for the Ender Saga which most of us are already familiar with.

It's rather hard to tell who the protagonist is because several others get almost equal air time. Victor is the only sympathetic character, however.

I appreciated that life in the frontier of space is painted as tragic. Sacrifices are made, people are lost, life is hard. How could it be otherwise? I also appreciated the fact that this mining in the Keiper belt is happening while things on Earth remain much the same. Not because I think things are peachy and should stay the same, but because it suggests the possibility of routine space travel in a not-too-distant future.

I have a soft spot for first contact and this one met most of my expectations in that regard.

The voices of the readers held my attention and changed their tone and inflection with each character just enough to make it easy to follow and easy on the ears. I have to say that I recently tried to listen to an audio book for review and had to stop just a quarter of the way in. I couldn't take the whiny tone that the narrator used for the female characters a second longer.

A lot of the story threads thrown in to this volume don't go much of anywhere, which I found a little annoying. I'm sure the authors were establishing them for future adventures in the succeeding two volumes, but the fact that their paths didn't cross much or at all in this volume made it seem like quite a detour at times.

I loved that the TOR included an interview at the end of the book. However, I could have done a much better job. Perhaps it wasn't done in real time, but there are still ways to avoid this unfortunate situation. When you interview someone you have a list of questions handy. If they answer question number two while they are answering the first question, you don't proceed to ask it, unless you acknowledge their statement and ask them to elaborate instead. In addition, that first question was: "Who are your favorite authors?" I wish they could have come up with a more original question that Card hasn't already answered a million times before. By the way, there are only two questions.

I still recommend the book for readers who never tire of the Ender universe.

Shadows in Flight delivers a unique family struggle

Shadows in Flight
Orson Scott Card
2012 Macmillan Audio

Reviewed by Ann Wilkes

I still remember the original trilogy in Orson Scott Card’s Ender Wiggin series (Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide) fondly, decades later. I haven’t read any of the others in that universe, which includes the Shadow series of which Shadows in Flight is book five.

This fifth book follows Shadow of the Giant. The Giant is Bean, who, as a boy, fought in the wars of Earth and was friends with Ender Wiggin. Bean and three of his children are both blessed and cursed. They are the result of an experiment which gave them super intelligence, but also gave them giantism (a real human disease in which the body never stops growing until the heart gives out in very early adulthood). Bean separated from his wife and other children to take their affected children to safety. He and the children are antonines (the genetic mutation is called Anton’s Key) and are feared by humans both because of their intelligence and the possibility of the spread of the mutation. They are aboard a starship heading away from the human worlds, but still linked to them through the ansible (although they never use their real identities when communicating over it).

Bean has grown so large (four and half meters tall) that he only fits in the cargo hold, and only on his back. The children each have special areas of talent. Ender continually searches for a cure for the giantism that will spare their hyper-intelligence. He has a temperament very similar to his namesake. Carlotta makes it her business to know everything there is to know about the operation of the ship and its maintenance. She also keeps the gravity low in the cargo bay to make it easier on the Giant's heart. Their brother, "Sergeant", concerns himself with weapons and war. Sergeant often gets Carlotta to side with him against Ender. Faced with this new possible threat, they must put aside their differences. These six-year-old children are smarter than any adult, but still, at times, have impulses and reactions, which makes for a very interesting dynamic.

Just when their life support is dwindling along with their father's life, they come across another ship near a habitable world. The ship seems empty, yet is piloted. Ender suspects it is a Formic ship. But how can any of the Formic have survived the “xenocide”? The answer to that question and much more awaits the children aboard that ship. They have no choice but to risk taking a closer look - and boarding it.

The thing I liked most about this story was the interplay within this unique family. They are more than just a family. They are the only surviving antonines – or leguminotes, as they prefer to call themselves in honor of their father – and the only living beings they may ever know; the only community they will ever be physically a part of. Even when Ender discusses genetics with scientists back home over the ansible, he cannot form friendships because he can’t even let on who or what he is.

The action in this audio book is fast-paced and the emotions palpable. I never found my mind wandering while I listened. The narrators did an excellent job holding my attention with this riveting yarn. With a novella length, it was a quick “listen”. At the end of the book, Orson Scott Card talks about how he came up with the idea for the book and what it means to him. That’s worth a listen as well.

Cinder - a delightful mix of familiar and new

Cinder: Book One of the Lunar Chronicles
Marissa Meyer
Audiobook read by Rebecca Soler
Macmillan (January 2012)

Review by Lyda Morehouse

Cinder is a retelling of the classic fairy tale of Cinderella set in a future China (which, of course, is a nice homage as the story supposedly originated there.) Our heroine, Cinder Lin, has been recast as a cyborg scraping out a living as a mechanic in the markets of New Beijing. A plague ravages the Commonwealth and war with the Lunar Queen brews on the horizon. The world is rich with such science fictional details as those while still remaining true to the pastoral, fairy tale feel of the original. As you might expect, all the players are there: the evil stepmother, the charming prince, the fairy godmother, the pumpkin-colored chariot…. There are, of course, many new events and surprises, which is the fun of stories like these. Will Cinder lose a shoe at the ball or a cybernetic foot?

I enjoyed the story immensely. Even though, at times, foreknowledge of the fairy tale caused me to yell out, “Get to the ball, already!” There were still plenty of new plot/character twists to keep me guessing. The ending, in fact, is not at all what I would have expected.

The audio addition came with a few technical difficulties. The files I received were labeled like this: 1-01 CD 1a.mp3, 1-02 CD 1b.mp3, etc., which meant that, thanks to that extra space (not marked with a _), my mp3 player organized all the files by the last designation, so I had a jumble of 1a, 2a, 3a, etc. I ended up having to jump around a lot to get the story in order. This was made more complicated by the fact that my mp3 player just wanted to continue on to the next one, so I’d have to guess when a section was over. I’m not sure that would be a problem with all players, however.

Regardless, I found the story worth the hassle. Rebecca Soler does an excellent job reading. I was never thrown out of the story, even though she attempts several accents, including Australian and British, and lowers her voice when reading male lines.

As someone who is a slow reader, I tend to really enjoy the occasional audio book or story podcast. I would definitely recommend this Young Adult novel on audio for those who still enjoy the pleasure of being read to, as is, perhaps, fitting with a fairy tale like this one.