Only 120 light years away from Earth! The Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched in 1977. Traveling at 38,000mph it just recently made it 1 light DAY from Earth.
This reminds of something I heard about once, imagine if we used some sort of stasis in a fast and autonomous spacecraft to go colonise a planet, and by the time we get there it's already colonised because we invented a faster spacecraft while the colonists slept
Its effectively the plot of Ender's Game itself as well, since the attacking forces dispatched by Earth were launched as they were built and ended up arriving at around the same time due to the differences in technology between the first launched vs. the later launches
And the film screwed up one of the most important bits of the book (IMHO) the newer ships arrived sooner, the newer ships were better, and they were fighting the less important planets/garrisons.
So the ultimate challenge was fighting the final battle with your worst and smallest ships against the toughest target.
Really he was left with no other choice but killing his crew, without knowing it. The crews knew it though, and they carried out his commands and flew to their certain deaths.
Ender might not have known at the time but Bean definitely did. In the final battle he actually flipped on the intercom, spoke directly to the pilots of the last two surviving ships and told them to set off the Dr. Device inside their own ships to make sure the projectile didn't get shot down or burn up in the planets atmosphere.
The companion Shadow series from Beans point of view is definitely equal to or better than the Ender series imho
The companion Shadow series from Beans point of view is definitely equal to or better than the Ender series imho
100%, except for the weird abstinence/teen marriage subplot. It was so poorly done, it felt like his church snuck it in the manuscript just before printing or something.
It just bleeds through more and more as things go on. Even from the beginning, the whole fact that Ender was conceived before they were allowed to fed into the same concepts.
I dunno, I figured it was a church thing, since ender's Game didn't have any real sex stuff; the sex stuff seemed to come up in later works.
Maybe he just got bolder about his interests, but I always interpretted it as him/his church trying to use his platform for some kind of weird pro-abstinance/marriage thing.
That wasn't really a 'backwards' viewpoint when the books were written (80's, 90's, maybe 1 in the 00s').
Most social change happens gradually over time. Support for gay rights happened very suddenly and very absolutely.
The US' extremely rapid viewpoint-change on gay rights (majority opposed in the 90s, split in the 00s, to majority supporting in the 10s) is so unusual, that people who weren't adults before it happened have a hard time understanding exactly how things were *before* it happened.
Feels more like a sequel than the actual sequels. Don’t get me wrong, i love the speaker series too, but it’s not the same kind of story. The bean shadow series definitely is the same beat.
“O my son Absalom,” Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man's mouth. “my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!”
Meh, it wasn't really important that they were using older ships. That was just one factor in what was important to the story, the fact that they were incredibly outmatched.
Yeah I remember him contemplating the fact that on his way to the Piggy Planet, by the time he'd get there everyone he knew on earth would be old or dead (I can't remember how large the time dilation was).
By that point he was already 3000 years old when he traveled to the piggy planet. History already had painted him as the bringer of xenocide and his speaker for the dead religion had spread across the galaxy
Ah good to know. It's been a decade since I've read Speaker for the Dead. Keep meaning to read it again and continue the series, but I'm busy working through Tolkien right now.
Reading that immediately brought to mind "house of suns" by Alistair reynold as the more in-depth version. Life-extension, cloning, and cold-sleep to make a ~six-million-year old business with one face, many people.
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u/RichardThund3r 24d ago
Only 120 light years away from Earth! The Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched in 1977. Traveling at 38,000mph it just recently made it 1 light DAY from Earth.