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I am also aware that at some point they turned really bad. I've only read the first book, and that back in middle school, so I don't know exactly what was bad about them.
That is, I didn't until last night! Because last night, in a dream, I read the final book in the series. I offer you this synopsis. Warning: spoilers!
It turns out that this book is set on an evil repressive steampunk colony planet, and that the protagonist is a student at Ms. [Something]'s School of Construction of Chicken Automatons For Young Ladies. It's a finishing school where the girls learn how to make chicken automatons? I don't know if you caught that. Geez, Orson Scott Card, what the heck.
On this planet, upper-class ladies demonstrate their refinement by way of the construction of attractive bejeweled robot chickens, which do various tasks like walk around, cluck, and dispense beverages from their beaks. Married ladies may make more advanced birds - swans, pelicans, etc. - but though the girls at the school have the knowledge to do so, to publicly display such a robot bird would be the height of vulgarity. They make the same round little chicken robot over and over, varying its waddle-speed and beakjewels only slightly.
The heroine is bullied by the others for her surly demeanor and inability to make even one working chicken. Secretly, she is a brilliant roboticist, but none of her chickens please her, so she is constantly in the process of breaking them down and rebuilding them. She wants to make a better robot. She wants to make... a robot goose.
The evil repressive planet is evil, it turns out, because it's kind of the world from the "sex-teen" book, and these girls are actually being prepared to be put to work in a brothel on the top floor of the school. The heroine discovers this when she wanders into it while exploring a vent that turns out to be the throat of what's kind of a massive erotic robot swan, around which the brothel is built.
(Hey, don't ask me. This Orson Scott Card's book, people.)
There are two fat kids, who are evil because they're fat, and vice-versa. One, a girl, is the heroine's primary tormentor. The other, a boy, has a portal gun? Except it's a magic book, not a gun. I don't know. He intends to use it to take over their world and force them into an eternal war with another one, believing that this is the only way to keep their decadent, jaded people united.
He tricks the heroine into using her knowledge of robotic birds to help him, but when she discovers his true plans, she wrenches the book out his hands and accidentally sends them into space without a return portal. To their amazement, they discover that they can breathe, and that just outside of their world's atmosphere, they are drifting slowly towards a massive flat "ceiling" just above it, invisible from the ground below. It is a screen showing a starry sky, and they're close enough to see the pixels. The singularity has occurred, and they're inside a simulation!
(Please do not comment to tell me how the singularity would "really" work. Tell Orson Scott Card! It's his book!)
Neither the girl's robotics abilities nor the boy's book offer them any way to get back. So all of a sudden Ender shows up, pulls some kind of deus ex machina crap, and brings them home from space. He and the girl fall in love and run away together? "This... doesn't really resolve anything," I observed in the dream. There's a scene where the portal kid and the mean girl are holding hands. "What do they even have in common aside from being fat!?"
There are also some spies from a semi-evil government organization running around throughout the book, but they never actually do anything. One of them is an invisible vampire? The vampire sadly observes portal boy's machinations, sadly shakes his head, reports passively back to his evil government masters, and never shows up again or has any effect on the plot. My dream-self went, "So, wait. Is this guy from a previous book in the series that I didn't read? Or does he get, like, a spin-off series? There's got to be some reason I'm supposed to care that he's here..." Maybe I shouldn't have read these books out of order.
Anyway, there you have it. That's how the Ender series ended - robot chickens, portal gun, singularity, invisible vampire spy left over from an early draft. No wonder people are always complaining about it!
That is, I didn't until last night! Because last night, in a dream, I read the final book in the series. I offer you this synopsis. Warning: spoilers!
It turns out that this book is set on an evil repressive steampunk colony planet, and that the protagonist is a student at Ms. [Something]'s School of Construction of Chicken Automatons For Young Ladies. It's a finishing school where the girls learn how to make chicken automatons? I don't know if you caught that. Geez, Orson Scott Card, what the heck.
On this planet, upper-class ladies demonstrate their refinement by way of the construction of attractive bejeweled robot chickens, which do various tasks like walk around, cluck, and dispense beverages from their beaks. Married ladies may make more advanced birds - swans, pelicans, etc. - but though the girls at the school have the knowledge to do so, to publicly display such a robot bird would be the height of vulgarity. They make the same round little chicken robot over and over, varying its waddle-speed and beakjewels only slightly.
The heroine is bullied by the others for her surly demeanor and inability to make even one working chicken. Secretly, she is a brilliant roboticist, but none of her chickens please her, so she is constantly in the process of breaking them down and rebuilding them. She wants to make a better robot. She wants to make... a robot goose.
The evil repressive planet is evil, it turns out, because it's kind of the world from the "sex-teen" book, and these girls are actually being prepared to be put to work in a brothel on the top floor of the school. The heroine discovers this when she wanders into it while exploring a vent that turns out to be the throat of what's kind of a massive erotic robot swan, around which the brothel is built.
(Hey, don't ask me. This Orson Scott Card's book, people.)
There are two fat kids, who are evil because they're fat, and vice-versa. One, a girl, is the heroine's primary tormentor. The other, a boy, has a portal gun? Except it's a magic book, not a gun. I don't know. He intends to use it to take over their world and force them into an eternal war with another one, believing that this is the only way to keep their decadent, jaded people united.
He tricks the heroine into using her knowledge of robotic birds to help him, but when she discovers his true plans, she wrenches the book out his hands and accidentally sends them into space without a return portal. To their amazement, they discover that they can breathe, and that just outside of their world's atmosphere, they are drifting slowly towards a massive flat "ceiling" just above it, invisible from the ground below. It is a screen showing a starry sky, and they're close enough to see the pixels. The singularity has occurred, and they're inside a simulation!
(Please do not comment to tell me how the singularity would "really" work. Tell Orson Scott Card! It's his book!)
Neither the girl's robotics abilities nor the boy's book offer them any way to get back. So all of a sudden Ender shows up, pulls some kind of deus ex machina crap, and brings them home from space. He and the girl fall in love and run away together? "This... doesn't really resolve anything," I observed in the dream. There's a scene where the portal kid and the mean girl are holding hands. "What do they even have in common aside from being fat!?"
There are also some spies from a semi-evil government organization running around throughout the book, but they never actually do anything. One of them is an invisible vampire? The vampire sadly observes portal boy's machinations, sadly shakes his head, reports passively back to his evil government masters, and never shows up again or has any effect on the plot. My dream-self went, "So, wait. Is this guy from a previous book in the series that I didn't read? Or does he get, like, a spin-off series? There's got to be some reason I'm supposed to care that he's here..." Maybe I shouldn't have read these books out of order.
Anyway, there you have it. That's how the Ender series ended - robot chickens, portal gun, singularity, invisible vampire spy left over from an early draft. No wonder people are always complaining about it!
