The First Formic War

Having set aside my higher expectations after Earth Unaware , I was anticipating pretty much a simple adventure story this time around. That’s pretty much what I got with Earth Afire. Unexpectedly, though, we were introduced to Mazer Rackham in this book, and he was unfortunately less than impressive as a character. In Ender’s Game, Card writes Ender as a character who is convincingly super-intelligent yet childish. Mazer is supposed to be cut from similar if not quite identical cloth, but he doesn’t carry it convincingly.

I ended up reading Orson Scott Card’s First Formic War series because of a discussion I had with a friend of mine about the central moral question of Ender’s Game: was Ender’s action to end his war moral or not? It would be a spoiler to describe exactly what he did; suffice it to say that it’s a close call based on the available information, and our opinions differed based primarily on whether the books in this series were considered canon or not. She had read them, I had not; but I had read the sequels to Ender’s Game and she had not. She thought the Formics had attacked first and Ender’s actions were ultimately justified; I thought the question of Ender’s Game hinged on the crucial first contact question of “What did the Formics know and when did they know it?”