The Last Shadow
Review of novel by Orson Scott Card
I’m a born-again Orson Scott Card fan.
In the Acknowledgments at the end, Orson Scortt Card says, “The goal of writing fiction is to put a story into your readers’ memory.” He’s a master at that.
Before this book, there were ten books in the ender Saga and the Ender’s Shadow Series. I had read five of them, the last nearly 20 years ago. But I was able to get into the flow of this story and imagine its world 3000 years in the future and get involved in the concerns and emotions of a variety of not-quite-human and totally non-human sentient species. In other words, the author did an amazing job of world building.
I now look forward to reading the five that I missed, and to reading the next and the next, finding out what happens in the next thousand or ten thousand years.
As the character Sprout thinks in the concluding words of the book, “Then he thought of all the amazing things that were bound to happen in the future and he felt a stab of regret that even if he lived to be old, he would only see a tiny portion of the future and would die before anything ended. Because it would never end.”
