Shadow of the Hegemon

By: Orson Scott Card

Narrated by: David Birney, Scott Brick, Gabrielle de Cuir

Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

Ender's Game told the story of the boy "Ender" Wiggin and his hard-won victory over an alien race that would have destroyed the Earth and all of humanity. But Ender was not the only child in the Battle School. He was just the best of the best. In Ender's Shadow, Orson Scott Card told the story of another of those precocious generals, the one they called Bean - the one who became Ender's right hand, his strategist, and his friend.

And now Card continues Bean's story, and finally tells a tale long awaited by millions of fans. At last we learn what happened on Earth after the destruction of the Hive Queen's worlds, after humanity no longer had a single enemy to unify the warring nations. This is the story of how Bean turned away from his first friend, Ender, and became the tactical genius who won the Earth for Ender's brother, Peter, who became the Hegemon.

Please note: This 2001 recording represents the technology of the time when it was produced. This is currently the best available source audio from the publisher.

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©2000 Orson Scott Card

Odd dubbing

The book was fine but some of the audio was overdubbed because the cast was not pronouncing hegemon correctly. I would have preferred they kept the mispronunciation instead of the disruptive overdub.

Very good

First off the voice acting was as good as ever. In this audible they included some pretty corny musical interludes between chapters that wasn’t fitting with the mood of the book and was pretty distracting. Also this story was a little hard for me to relate with relative to his others. Something about every world power being entirely controlled by children with no real world battle experience didn’t sit right with me. Still a great book overall!

Five Stars

In a brilliant move, customers are now forced to write reviews if they want to rate books. This is a waste of time both for me and for whoever reads this.

Music is wack as hell

Who pressed record while the cat jumped on midi keyboard? Great performances. The music is wack as hell.

Still great book

I have listened to this book when it was on cd I love that they fixed the words that were pronounced wrong

Love the Ender series, but this has a few problems

I loved Ender's Game - I read it first many years ago and recently got the audiobook to re-read. Then I decided to re-read the whole series while I was at it. Overall this is a great addition to the Enderverse and I liked hearing about what happened with all the characters I'd grown to love from Battle School, but I have two complaints:

First, as many others have noted, the production of this audiobook is really poor. It is riddled with pronunciation problems, even with the word "hegemon" (which is in the title) and with the name of one of the main characters, "Achilles" (how it's pronounced - English or French - is an important plot point to show if a character actually knows Achilles and it's often done wrong in this book). In some spots a different person has dubbed the correct pronunciation of hegemon into the audio, which is possibly more annoying than just dealing with the wrong pronunciation. The audio quality is overall bad - differences in volume and some garbled speech, etc. The voice actor casting are also not great. In particular, whoever reads for Peter's POV sounds about 70 years old, even though Peter is supposed to be quite young. This is a relatively expensive audiobook given that it was released more than a decade ago and I expected better.

Second, there were a few problems in the story itself. For instance, there's a lengthy portion of the book where they talk about Ender's childhood home, but they're in the wrong city - Ender's family moved from the home he grew up in and this was discussed at length in earlier Ender books. I do believe this was caught and remedied in a later version of the book (which just underscores the need for a newer audio version). I also thought that there were portions of the book that were a bit too long or too preachy, etc., and were both unnecessary and out of character in the story. This is is a problem I've often noticed in subsequent books from a highly successful author - it's like editors no longer take the red pen to texts in the same way they would with new authors.

Despite the problems noted above, if you liked Ender's Game (and other books in the series), this is a worthwhile read. I'd recommend you skip this audiobook, though, and read the newest paper version, which wouldn't suffer from the poor audio production and would also have corrections of some errors that made it into the first edition of this book.

Great Story, poor audio production

I liked the story and the complexities of the political parts of the book. I'd give the book 5 stars, but this was one of the poorer audio productions I've heard on audible. Improper leveling of music, words that were spliced into the audio with a different voice, tone, and volume; all of these things distracted from the story and are things that are easily edited by 12 year olds on youtube. Maybe OSC should have taken a page from his own book, and had kids do the audio production.

Great story, horrible reading

The audio quality of Card's earlier works on Audible are much better than this. It seems that one of the readers got the pronunciation of "hegemon" wrong for all of his bits, so anytime that word is used it cuts to a completely different person reading for about 4 words. It's very distracting from the story.

If there was another version of this book on Audible I'd recommend it over this one, but alas there is not.

WONDERFUL BOOK!!!

Orson Scott Card is firmly one of the 10 greatest Sci-FI authors that has ever lived and everyone of the Ender series books are just masterpieces worth being read and in this case listened too repeatedly.

If you are looking for a great audio books to listen too this should be in your top 15 for Sci-Fi. If you have never had the pleasure of experiencing Ender's universe you have my sympathies for your loss and jealously as you get to experience it unfold for the first time. ENJOY!!!!

narration

interjections of the from another narrator of the word "hegemon" were annoying and a bit destructive to my listening experience.