Orson Scott Card’s The Last Shadow is the long-awaited conclusion to both the original Ender series and the Ender’s Shadow series, as the children of Ender and Bean solve the great problem of the Ender Universe—the deadly virus they call the descolada, which is incurable and will kill all of humanity if it is allowed to escape from Lusitania.
This book ties Shadows in Flight and Children of the Mind together into a final story that resolves those divergent story arcs. At the end of Shadows in Flight, Bean’s three children are left on the Herodotus ship in orbit around a new planet. At the end of Children of the Mind, Jane has mastered instantaneous travel and they have discovered a planet that they think might be the origin of the terrible descolada virus, which they have dubbed Descoladora.
This book is good, if something of a let down story-wise (at least for me). At the end of the book, Card explains his rationale and difficulty in bringing the two stories together to reach a conclusion. I suppose I can understand that. Descoladora turns out to be more like the Island of Dr. Moreau and less of the source of diabolical new alien species (not to say there are not new alien species and they aren’t diabolical). It takes some weird turns. That being said it is still well written and does provide closure to the main characters of the Enderverse and the Shadowverse.
I do think that the cover art is bizarre. I don’t remember anytime in the book there were two aircraft (or spaceships) that had landed on some kind of zig-zag aircraft carrier floating in the sky.
Previous Ender Posts:
Guide to either loving or hating Ender’s Game (film)
The First Formic War (Ender’s Game Prequel Trilogy)
The Second Formic War & Fleet School
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