@Panda:
I hate to burst your bubble, Robby, but that was a bot.
It was less obviously a bot earlier. Then it added a signature.
@Jabberwok:
Bean's "Shadow" series is really good! It follows everyone else on Earth as things devolve into a giant game of Risk with the various members of Ender's jeesh acting as the main chess pieces for either their own interests or their respective governments. Plus, Peter actually becomes a pretty good character.
I actually prefer Ender's Shadow to Ender's Game because it has a more satisfactory ending, and the morality stuff OSC gets into sometimes is a lot less obnoxious.
For me, the Bean books absolutely ruined the original series for me.
! Bean's origin was insipid, the behind the scenes of "what else was going on during Ender's Book" greatly devalues a lot of what that book was really about, and then once it gets out of that territory and into the aftermath the villain is super cartoonish and literally every single development in the series hinges on literal super geniuses seeing an abstract piece of information and putting together clues from things that only potentially mean anything to them, on such a regular basis that it defies all belief.
! And that's nothing compared to what happened to Petra, who went from badass tomboy to… "womb for making many many children."
! Instead of just being a competant kid like all the others, Bean is a super science test tube baby who was miraculously saved and raised by a nun. And instead of being a total unknown, everyone in the school except Ender knows him. And rather than outthinking the enemy teams, they actually just crawl around the rafters naked and peak on their plans and cheat. It took everything that was great about the original, the whole premise of "the best and brightest we can raise" to just... insane crazy science fiction.
! And of course Xenocide and Children of the mind introduced reality hopping technology that granted wishes while completely pissing on any religion that wasn't mormon. Those silly Japanese and their false religions. All the religious tolerance and acceptance seen in Ender's Game was shoved under a rug as Card became more and more religious.
After reading Ender's Game I thought for years, "Man, I wish I could see how Peter got to where he did." Turns out, no, no I didn't.
Ender's Shadow ruined Ender's Game for me by it being something Card came back to 20 years later and filling in gaps that reeeeally didn't need filling in. I've only read it once. (Wheras Ender's Game I probably read 9 or 10 times since ~1992.)
The plot for the third book being "the hunt for Bean's sperm" was pretty much the nail in the coffin for me reading Card's work, since it was at about that point he started going publicly insane and his religion started overshadowing everything and his female characters greatly diminished into nothing but baby-makers.
And I'm someone that read literally every book Card had ever written up through whenever I stopped. 2005?
Also, he still hasn't finished the Alvin Maker series, and its been 13 years since the last one, and 18 since the one before that that was the not-end for a long time.