I think Xenocide and Children of the Mind are pretty awful so maybe good taste inspired your decision.

The Shadow series runs parallel to Enders Game and after (on Peter Wiggins' earth). A cool concept with horrific execution especially later in the series. And though I didn't hate Ender's Shadow, it felt like a different author. Much less thoughtful and more generic. Like the Foundation novels that weren't written by Asimov. Or the sixth Hitchhiker book that recently came out. Or a good but not mindblowing fan fiction.

They are not to me canon. But then, neither are Xenocide, or Children, or the Star Wars prequels.

I half-liked Xenocide, if I recall; there was enough good stuff for me to feel vaguely positive about it despite the stuff that I didn't like. But Children of the Mind was awful.

Agreed on Children of the Mind.

Ouch. That sucks, Consuela, to feel duped by trusting people, and did out they weren't who you thought. Are you still friends with any of them?

Swear to god I'd deleted that: it was supposed to be in Natter.

I'm still online friends with most of them, although I haven't seen any of them in some time; most of them live in the midwest.

I half-liked Xenocide, if I recall; there was enough good stuff for me to feel vaguely positive about it despite the stuff that I didn't like. But Children of the Mind was awful.

It's been a while since I've read them, but this sounds like my reaction as well.

The problem with Xenocide is it was half interesting (the "Chinese" planet was pretty neat, and an sad-but-possible take on how we would self-segregate even with we spread through the galaxy) with a pretty crazy-but-fascinating premise, but the other half was insane-balls. And Children only took on the insane-balls stuff.

And, again, I felt that it was so much less consequential than Ender's Game and Speaker. It felt much more like science fiction for the sake of science fiction, rather than science fiction for the sake of telling a good story with interesting takes on society. The main plot of Children is "people learn to jump through space using the power of their mind, isn't that cool!" as opposed to "There's this boy who can save the world and he is brutally mistreated in many ways but manages to remain good throughout it and by the way there are aliens" or "After destroying a civilization by accident the boy from that other book was so distraught that he devoted his life to saving the species he almost wiped out then was able to stop some murders in the process and also fall in love. Again, there are aliens."

STOP READING!!

just for a minute.

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I finished Allegiant. Man. Not at all how I expected the series to end. I actually feel like the final book is pretty problematic. The end of the book could have been more or less achieved through other means. The mechanisms by which certain things happened seemed to contradict explanation, and the overall social/societal commentary was confusing.

This is all before I get to the really big problems with character development.