Xenocide

Volume Three of the Ender Saga

By: Orson Scott Card

Narrated by: Scott Brick, Gabrielle de Cuir, Amanda Karr, John Rubinstein, Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 20 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

Xenocide is the third installment of the Ender series. On Lusitania, Ender found a world where humans and pequeninos and the Hive Queen could all live together; where three very different intelligent species could find common ground at last. Or so he thought. But Lusitania also harbors the descolada, a virus which kills all humans it infects, but which the pequeninos require in order to transform into adults. The Starways Congress so fears the effect of the descolada, should it escape from Lusitania, that they have ordered the destruction of the entire planet and all who live there. The Fleet is on its way and a second Xenocide seems inevitable, until the Fleet vanishes.

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©1991 Orson Scott Card (P)2000 Audio Renaissance

Critic reviews

"Thought-provoking, insightful, and powerfully written." (School Library Journal)
"As a storyteller, Card excels in portraying the quiet drama of wars fought not on battlefields but in the hearts and minds of his characters." (Library Journal)

full of passion

Xenocide is perhaps the most overtly philosophical of the Ender Wiggin series so far. But the philosophy in the book serves a purpose to move the story forward and develop characters more.

In addition to making you think, it also makes you feel. Xenocide is told with the same passion as Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, and it is filled with just as much emotion and understanding. Yet it is also very much its own new and wonderful story, and not at all just a revisit to the same old themes of the first two books.

Note, however, that, as the author himself mentions in a short commentary at the end, this book is actually the first of a two part series (the next book is "Children of the Mind"). The ending of this book ties up some threads of the story, but not all of them. If you think of it as a stand-alone book, you may be disappointed. But if you think of it as the first in a two-part novel, then you'll likely be dying to get your hands on the next part of the story when you finish.

good book, asian 'accents' almost ruined it

What didn’t you like about the narrators’s performance?

i'm logging in to write this review solely to complain about the narrators' asian accents. it's not a PC thing - they were just horrible. especially the woman who (mostly) did wang mu's voice. i don't know who gave that narrator positive feedback when she was developing that accent, but it's just awful.

i'm actually a fan of ethnic accents in audiobooks, when they're done well. it adds texture to the reading. that didn't happen here. the use of an overblown poorly-wrought caricature to emote and speak seriously...or for any reason, really, was a major detractor to this audio book. i actually thought the story was awesome, and i really appreciated the deep ontological thinking that card clearly invested in this series. but i really cringed every time that woman started talking again in that chinese accent.

i guess i'd still have to say it's worth buying this, just for the actual writing, but if you can read it instead, do so!

Worth the wait

I downloaded the abridged version 2 years ago. At only 3 hours (instead of nearly 20), it carried the basic "yarn" forward from Speaker for the Dead, but that was about all. This has been well worth the wait, because what was missing was the philosophy, the discussion, the arguments that underly the complex moral dilemmas that inhabit this part of the Enderverse. I look forward to the same treatment for Children of the Mind.

I had a much tougher time with this book

I thought this book really slowed the story down and added quite a great deal around characters that should have been short side plots. I thought it was really annoying how the voice actors played the characters from Path. Ok, so they were of Chinese decent, but did the voice actors really have to speak as if they were Chinese immigrants in the United States????????? Totally idiotic.

most of the time rather boring

this book is often very boring, and it features two storylines instead of one, however you cannot complete your ender series without it so it's worth the buy in that one reason, however as a lone book, not really worth it

Xenocide

Readings were great. The story was dissociated. Card should have made 2 books out of the material.

Many thoughts, many voices

I enjoyed the sci-fi themes and some of the philosophy in this book. It was also nice at times to have a variety of voices for characters on different worlds. However, there were times where voices would change in the middle of a scene in a chapter, as if a new voice recorded a short clip as a re-recording of one of the original voices. Maybe it was intentional and I simply didn’t understand that it was intended to be yet another voice, but either way, it made listening a bit weird sometimes.

Amazing!

Another awesome book by card. I love Enders universe! There were some very cool surprises in this book. If you love Enders universe as much as I do then this is a must read.

The narrators were amazing as well. I love the way it switches from person to person. I especially like the female voices.

Well done overall but...

the story is well written and generally well performed but there is one female voice actress that still makes everything seem SOOO dramatic, like every single sentence is the climax of the story. I'm not sure if it is the same actress or a different one (this book has many), as well as one actor, both do ridiculous Chinese accents for the characters on Path that I could not take seriously and were so stereotypical it was borderline offensive. It caught me off guard, but overall the group did a great job adapting for different gender characters, sometimes having one actor doing all dialogue sometimes up to three for a single conversation, it generally works very well. Given the number of actors and actresses I would not have minded seeing how it would have worked to have the same actor/actress voice the same character throughout, but that would have also limited the range we get to see from the performers so it's not a complaint so much as a thought.

not a real Ender book

I thought this was about Ender and all but with all the science and Path it was not. interesting and as also good from Scott but not what I was looking for.