As with Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon is an easy-to-read yarn that quickly lost my interest. The problems here are too plentiful for me to elaborate on, but here's a quick list. With few exceptions, the characters all talk the same way and think the same way; any differences don't emerge from what the characters do but instead are told to us--explicitly--by Card in excruciating internal monologues. Unlike in Ender's Game, where the Battle School children were still unmistakably children, here the fact that most of the chief players are under 20 hardly plays a role in the story. Achilles is a terrible villain; neither terrifying nor sympathetic, he spends the book as a plot device, raising problems that Bean (and his friends) can go in and fix. The character of Peter Wiggin is massacred--massacred!--compared to his depiction in Ender's Game. The second chapter of Ender's Game alone, when Peter nearly kills Ender and then cries by Ender's side afterward, still sends chills down my back; no scene with Peter in Shadow of the Hegemon made him out to be anything other than another plot device.

But the biggest problem with Shadow of the Hegemon is that it is essentially a political thriller, with none of the imaginative elements that made Ender's Game (and Speaker of the Dead) so wonderful. Card is a mediocre political novelist (despite the laurels he heaps on himself in his bizarre afterward), and the machinations that occur in Shadow of the Hegemon feel simplistic, almost naive. It's also a problem that the political turmoil of this novel takes place in a world very different from ours. When the China in the book is not the China of our world, then the only way to make a political situation matter is to tie it in to the interests of the book's characters; unfortunately, the fact that none of the characters were compelling makes Card's political discussions boring.

According to Card's self-righteous and self-congratulatory afterward, two more books will come out in the Bean saga. I'll probably read them, but only because they require no thought and no emotional involvement to finish.

Copyright © 2001 Steven Wu