Shadow Puppets
Shadow Puppets is the third book in the Shadow Saga (see thoughts on the second book), the spinoff from Orson Scott Card’s brilliant Ender’s Game, centred around Bean.
Some of “>OSC’s writings make him appear intensely nationalistic. This attitude seems to have been toned down in this book, and we see the trilogy get wrapped up on more or less a happy note. My comments about the book moving away from sci-fi still stand, it’s a more a politically oriented book, which because it happens to be set in the future, has elements of sci-fi. It raises some intriguing propositions about how different countries may view nationhood differently, and what galvanises feelings of independence within a country. Card also describes a world where the Arabs have accepted the Israeli “incursion” onto their soil and dispensed with their calls of Jihad – an idealistic, almost impossible to imagine as occurring in our lifetime, but nonetheless attractively optimistic, antipode to today’s bloodshed (Card wrote this book during the invasion of Afghanistan).
This book is weaker than the other two. Shadow Puppets was not as skilfully written as the previous two books, lacking unpredictability and pace in many places. There are various points in the book where the super-human genius characters make implausible blunders. It’s still a solid book, albeit a short one, and quite entertaining.
12:22pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
