Shadow Puppets - Orson Scott Card

A Surprise! I picked this book to read next (thinking it was another re-read) because the cover touted it as "A sequel to [...] Ender's Shadow." I was surprised when major plot points were summarized in the first chapter. I thought, maybe, the story was told with flash backs. By chapter three, I was certain I hadn't read this book, but knew enough of what was going on to be very puzzled. I finally notice the blurb on the back: "Praise for Shadow of the Hegemon." Ahh.. Shadow Puppets is the third book in this series, as opposed to the immediate sequel to Ender's Shadow. It suddenly all made sense.

A good book, very much in the same vein as the previous two. We see some really nice character development in Bean (Julian Delphiki) and Peter Wiggins (the Hegemon). In particular, I was pleased to see the developments between Peter Wiggins and his parents. Their relationship had been painfully strained for a long time; and it was good to see some of that blockage cleared and to see Peter grow out of himself enough to recognize his parents as people.. and useful, smart people!

In the Acknowledgements, Orson Scott Card comments:

The second problem posed by this novel was that I wrote it during the war in Afghanistan between the U.S. and its allies and the Taliban and Al Qaeda Forces. Since in Shadow Puppets I had to show the future state of relations between the Muslim and Western worlds, and between Israel and its Muslim neighbors, I had to make a prediction about how the current hate-filled situation might someday be resolved.

And Card does resolve them rather nicely. In fact, the summary of what happened (in this fiction) was what I had chosen for a quote before I read Card's Acknowledgements at the end of the book. [Spoiler ahead:]

"We [Muslims} once ruled the known world, from Spain to India. Muslims ruled in Moscow, and our soldiers reached into France, and to the gates of Vienna. Our dogs were better educated that the scholars of the West. Then one day we woke up and we were poor and ignorant, and somebody else had all the guns. We knew this could not be the will of Allah, so we fought."
"And discovered that the will of Allah was ...?"
"The will of Allah was for many of our people to die, and for the West to occupy our countries again and again until we stopped fighting. We learned our lesson. We are very well behaved now. We abide by all the treaty terms, We have freedom of the press, freedom of religion, liberated women and democratic elections. [...] For a long time we thought of Israel as the enemy's toehold in our holy land. Then one day we remembered that Israel was a member of our family who had gone away into exile, learned everything our enemies knew, and then came home again. We stopped fighting our brother, and our brother gave us all the gifts of the West, but without destroying our souls. How said it would have been if we had killed all the Jews and driven them out. Who would have taught us then?"

This is one of the best logical, hopeful, peaceful, futures I seen envisioned for the Middle East. I would that we could accomplish this without many people dieing, and countries being occupied.. so long as we could come to that peace and be as one family.

And of course, the topic of children and who is real continues on with:

"The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've fogotten their own childhood."