Dave's Reviews > Children of the Mind

The End

Children of the Mind is the end of the Ender Quartet and the story of the passing of the torch to the next generation of Ender’s “Children.” His children include memory creations of his siblings, his adopted family, and the connected one, Jane. It’s a fitting conclusion to a series filled with wonder, with magic, with spectacle.

It has thus far met with rather mixed reviews, but if you’ve been following these characters, it’s like revisiting old friends when you open up the next book. You want to know if the fleet ever reaches Lusitania. You want to know if Jane survives when the Ansible system is shut down. You want to know if somehow someone figures out how to persuade the Starways Congress. But you never imagined this ragtag band on this backward planet would survive. It is recommended that the reader start the series at the beginning or else you could find yourself lost and drifting in the cosmos.

The story is now a mix of science fiction and metaphysics and Eastern philosophy is explored. Instant space travel exists, changing everything. And, spirits can jump from one container to another. A bold satisfying read.

Card continues presenting his themes of ethical quandary such as how do we know if an alien species is intelligent and how do we know if they threaten our existence. As we travel through space and encounter aliens 👽, the question becomes whether we can understand them and vice versa and should we strike first.

The science 🧬 part of the book gets a little crazy. First, we have traveling at lightspeed where we age a few months while the rest of the world lives out thirty years of real time. Then, because that doesn’t move the story along fast enough, we get instant space travel where the Jane entity moves ships outside of reality and then brings them back wherever she wants. Of course, that’s far more easy to understand than the sound of people or souls of networks in the case of Jane flirting around through psychic Webs of connection. Kind of a New Age crystals and mind reading thing, but Card makes all this stuff work well in the context of the story.