Xenocide

Orson Scott Card: Xenocide
Xenocide picks up right where Speaker for the Dead left off. The story telling is improved, and the content goes heavily in to science, religion and personal relationships.

Its interesting that this world, 3000 years after the first book is still substantially recognizable to people that were around thousand of years before. Catholicism still seems the same. Government has been similar for the past few thousand years. Even technology has not been significantly changed. Now imagine if we went back just a 1000 years. We would hardly recognize it. Go back 2000 years, and two of the largest religions do not even exist. How could these last for so many thousand years?

Though perhaps the stability of instantaneous communications along with the relative difficulty of long distance travel can serve to stabilize. The "life extended" power of near light-speed travel is known to everyone. However, nobody thinks that Ender would really be the same person from 3000 years previous. I wonder what would happen to ship captains and traders? They would travel a lot, and could easily come home to see their great great grandchildren. Were these so rare that they were not readily considered?

Though perhaps they can serve as a stability factor. A ship of people coming from another planet would have their time period in mind. They could help mix the past and the present together. The Beatles could go on a "worlds tour". However, while they might do home in 60s, they wouldn't get abroad until the 2010s. This could help reinvigorate the future and tie it more closely to the past.

The instantaneous worldwide communications could have a similar stabilizing impact. This could help keep a stability across all worlds. Since travel is difficult and time consuming, there would be a strong incentive to keep plugged in to the world and thus cultural evolution would be slowed.

These travel themes are in both this and the previous books. This book, however, goes in more detail to the binding of people, things and world. Different views of the creation and evolution of life are explored along with cultural tricks to encourage subservience. Ethics of species annihilation (xenocide) are explored. Is it ok to wwipe out an intelligent virus?

The end of the novel fairly nicely wraps most points up. It would almost seem to be a nice self-contained work if it weren't for a few key strands that were left open. These strands provide some of the greatest "weirdness" of the book, and also set it up for its second part. (The next book in the series, which was created by "chopping" what was a 300,000 word novel in to two.