An anthology of 8 stories taken from Conde Nast's science fiction magazine Analog.

Xenocide is Card's best-selling sequel to the Hugo Award-winning Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead.

Orson Scott Card's SF career began with Ender's Game, a 1977 story expanded into an acclaimed 1985 novel. Unwittingly responsible for xenocide—destruction of an alien species—while still a boy, Ender expiates his guilt on another world in Speaker for the Dead. This confronts humanity with a deadly alien-built virus whose elimination seems to demand another xenocide. The tense continuing story takes an extraordinary leap into magical metaphysics at the climax of Xenocide, of which Children of the Mind is in effect the second half. Though that virus is now defeated, this isn't believed: the planet-eating doomsday weapon still approaches. Ender's AI friend Jane, who inhabits the galactic net and is the only agency that can move spacecraft faster than light, is being killed by dismantling the net. Ender himself is fading, passing responsibility to strange young avatars of his dead brother and aging sister created from his memories in Xenocide. Even in the shadow of death there are grippingly argued political, philosophical and moral debates—plus bitter family quarrels. A master storyteller with a knack for showing painful human relationships, Card achieves almost unbearable suspense before resolving his complex tangle and finishing Ender's 3000-year story with a touching elegy. One dangling plot line suggests that Card may return again to this universe. Solid, high-quality SF despite some implausible science. —David Langford

Orson Scott Card's SF career began with Ender's Game, a 1977 story expanded into an acclaimed 1985 novel. Unwittingly responsible for xenocide—destruction of an alien species—while still a boy, Ender expiates his guilt on another world in Speaker for the Dead. This confronts humanity with a deadly alien-built virus whose elimination seems to demand another xenocide. The tense continuing story takes an extraordinary leap into magical metaphysics at the climax of Xenocide, of which Children of the Mind is in effect the second half. Though that virus is now defeated, this isn't believed: the planet-eating doomsday weapon still approaches. Ender's AI friend Jane, who inhabits the galactic net and is the only agency that can move spacecraft faster than light, is being killed by dismantling the net. Ender himself is fading, passing responsibility to strange young avatars of his dead brother and aging sister created from his memories in Xenocide. Even in the shadow of death there are grippingly argued political, philosophical and moral debates—plus bitter family quarrels. A master storyteller with a knack for showing painful human relationships, Card achieves almost unbearable suspense before resolving his complex tangle and finishing Ender's 3000-year story with a touching elegy. One dangling plot line suggests that Card may return again to this universe. Solid, high-quality SF despite some implausible science. —David Langford

Orson Scott Card keeps returning to his first published story "Ender's Game" (1977). He expanded it into the acclaimed 1985 novel Ender's Game, winning Hugo and Nebula awards and spawning several sequels. More recently, Ender's Shadow reworked the original tale of precocious boy soldier Ender saving the world from alien hordes at terrible personal cost, as told from the different, colder viewpoint of his even younger lieutenant Bean.

Now Ender has been sent to the stars as too dangerously charismatic a military leader to keep on Earth. Without the common alien threat, our global alliance is disintegrating. Ender's top strategists like Bean are in demand by would-be conquering countries. Kidnappings rapidly follow.

Four strange, tortured teenagers dominate the book. Ender's brilliant but twisted brother Peter is already manipulating international politics as respected political pundit "Locke", hoping to become world ruler or Hegemon. He needs the genetically enhanced abilities of Bean, who's mainly concerned with the fate of kidnapped Petra—the only girl to reach the top rank at Ender's Battle School. Meanwhile boy serial killer Achille, the villain of Ender's Shadow, has sold his strategic talents to more than one nation, and has scores to settle ...

Shadow of the Hegemon lacks glittering SF hardware and seems almost old-fashioned after the planet-busting supertechnology of Ender's Game. What makes it compulsive reading is Card's uncannily sure handling of character, especially flawed characters and their painful moral choices. Minor figures like Ender's parents acquire new depth, and we care when people die. Recommended—but do read the books in sequence. A third "Shadow" novel follows. —David Langford

Ace "Double" format with the author's contribution bound opposite each other. The Carr section contains six stories and articles, while the Shaw section includes nine articles. Dustjacket art by Bob Eggleton.

The easy way to describe Jonathan Carroll's novels is to call them indescribable. Since his strange debut The Land of Laughs (1980), he's developed his own special flavour of fantastic or magic-realist unease. The protagonists have wonderful and successful lives, glowingly described—this latest book stars a popular, high-living and attractive woman who loves her lucrative career as a rare book dealer. As always in Carroll, though, the glittering surface of Miranda's good life conceals a certain hollowness. Shocking booby-traps await her, stabs of horror and loss from unexpected directions. Small indicators of wrongness accumulate: a wheelchair-bound woman glimpsed in an impossible place on a Los Angeles superhighway, a dog set on fire, a hospice named Fieberglas misheard as "Fever Glass". Dead men and unborn children seem to stalk Miranda. At one point she notices a scene from her tragically interrupted love affair showing on the giant screen of a deserted drive-in movie theatre. Neither Miranda nor the world are quite as she believes: but when she's been openly, nightmarishly condemned for being what she is, there is for once a slender chance of renunciation and redemption. The finale is enigmatic but oddly satisfying. You don't easily forget a Carroll book. —David Langford