Bean Continued

I should have been prepared for the agony of Shadow of the Giant. But, stupid me, I forgot how I felt after I finished Ender's Game. Both times. This, if possible, is even worse. I'm so upset I can't really even write about it coherently, so I'm going to take a break and finish this post later. Or not at all.

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That was a few hours ago, and I might be sufficiently collected by now. We'll see.

First of all, the whole series has thematic unity I really admire. The way the characters and situations shape themselves is so interesting.

Let's break this down. You start with a toddler whose intelligence is unlimited. He's so smart he broke the test, and he's going to keep getting smarter until he dies. Scary, a little? Well, nature intervened and also handicapped him. Just as there is no limit to his intellectual growth, there is no limit to his physical growth. You know from book one that his days are numbered. He'll die of giantism before he's 20 years old.

Not surprising that he ends up being instrumental in saving the world when he's only, what, five? But what happens next? A psycho maniac wants him dead, of course. All the psycho maniacs are after him in one way or another, but the one with the most charisma has the power, and he uses it. Bean spends a few years of his life on the run, but also figuring out how to rescue Petra, who happens to be the smartest and most aggressive girl on earth and is being held against her will by the same psycho that wants to kill Bean.

Bean, of course, succeeds in rescuing Petra, and then the inevitable happens. They fall in love. This is where the books take a serious departure from traditional sci-fi. You, as a reader, see the impossibility of this scenario, but you don't care. You want Petra to get what she wants—which is to marry Bean and have as many of his babies as possible.

Why? Because he's the smartest person who ever was, or ever will be, born. Who else's babies would she want to have?

But it's more than that. By this time, Bean has transformed out of his cold, calculating, I'm-even-smarter-and-more-ruthless-than-a-computer person and become someone startling. Oh, Bean. Oh, Julian Delphiki. We love you, and it only has a little bit to do with the fact that your days are numbered and you know it. And we weren't supposed to love you. We were supposed to fear you. But we realized that fearing you would make us enemies, so we trusted you instead—and the ultimate trust is love.

And he never asked for any of it. He was completely indifferent the entire time who loved him, who hated him, who thought they could one-up him, and who thought they could flatter themselves into his good books. Because Bean has no good books.

Meanwhile, the rest of the kids who saved the world with Ender and Bean are playing out a sick and twisted game for world dominance, against Peter Wiggin, a young man so full of his own snot that he thinks he can take over the world in spite of the fact that he was judged unfit for the battle school that made the others what they were. Or identified them for what they already were—walking weapons.

This is where it gets really complicated. Virlomi, the only woman in this whole game besides Petra, whose involvement becomes secondary after she gets pregnant with one of her and Bean's nine embryos, is abandoned in the south of India after Petra's rescue. Vir's goal? Save India from China, from Russia, and from the new united nation of Islam.

But who is in charge of these superpowers? Friends from Battle School. Vlad is in Russia, designing battle plans he's sure the Russian military will never use. Han Tsu gets himself declared emperor of China. And the Muslim nations have all united under their new Caliph Alai.

Vir's first victory is in successfully uniting India. She starts small, by piling stones in the roads and suggesting to the locals that everyone does it, has always done it, and that it is some mystical force that keeps India whole. The Wall of India. They come together as they never have before in all the history of the world, and as the unity spreads, so does her legend. She becomes a goddess, living with and for the people, and designing videos specifically meant to rip to pieces the public image of both the Chinese and the Muslims as benevolent conquerors.

But her game begins in earnest when Han Tsu tries to marry her and she realizes her value as a political piece. She topples Han Tsu's pieces, opting instead to go for Peter Wiggin, who is making great headway in creating a state known as the Free People of Earth. Peter sees that his goal isn't a merger between India and the Rest of the World, so that rejection sends her to the next person she thinks she can sway—Alai.

Vir plays dirty, and Alai falls for it both because he wants to and because he has to. Marriage between a Hindu and a Muslim throws everything off balance. It's the beginning of the end. All the other Battle School kids, one by one, realize that staying on earth will only cost millions of lives, and they leave as part of a space colonization project.

That part was particularly sad, because I really liked Vir. I especially liked the tragic twist that was created out of her own humility. She was really good at what she did—she was so good she couldn't believe her own success, and eventually ended up attributing it to powers beyond her own control, so she became a slave to fate, megalomania, and chance all at the same time. It broke her much worse than it broke any of the others.

Except Alai, maybe, because he was the one who seemed to be the most sincere in his desire to be a servant of God. He took his position believing that somehow he could lead the believers in a conquest to bring peace to the entire world through the acceptance of Islam, and he found himself betrayed by everyone—the people he led, the people who placed him in power, and worst of all, the wife that he loved. Alai's departure from earth was the one that, to me, reeked most of defeat.

In the end? What everyone knew would happen from the very beginning. Julian Delphiki's death is successfully faked, and he embarks on a relativistic voyage meant to prolong his life long enough for a mad scientist (the same one who "created" him) to come up with a cure for him and his three "handicapped" babies, leaving Petra with the five "normal" ones to live out a "normal" life. And ... Peter Wiggin wins everything. But you're happy about it, because he somehow grows on you, and you realize that he has something more important than charisma. He has an honest heart.

I understand that it's weird to review a book in this style. I've basically just given a summary with my own commentary. But that's what I do best.

My next question is, how does he come up with this stuff? I wonder if that would annoy him to know that I'm asking. But it's a valid question. I read somewhere that C.S. Lewis said that writing The Screwtape Letters was a rather torturous experience, because he had to put himself in an uncomfortable frame of mind, and in essence, be the devil. Being a writer is a thousand times more complex than being an actor, because you have to be your characters, while at the same time pulling dozens of invisible strings. How does one person handle all the emotions necessary to be all those people, when I can barely handle the emotion I feel from just reading about them?

I don't have the guts to read Ender in Exile yet. I need some recovery time first. Unfortunately, I thought I had outgrown whatever it is about me that leaves me feeling like I've been run through a blender after reading books of this type. Maybe it's something you never outgrow. It's probably a good thing for me that Shadows in Flight isn't going to be accessible for a while.