Earth Unaware (The First Formic War Book 1)

Haven't started reading yet, bought Ender In Exile also, its first. Read the less than glowing reviews but I read a lot and figure I'll enjoy it enough. Ordered with another Item and they took a little long to get here (weather may have been a factor) Will likely order Earth Afire also regardless of the reviews; the saga is great, not every book can be a masterpiece and I'll keep reading

One of the hallmarks of the world's best storytellers is the sense of loss and removal one feels when extracted from their worlds. Every time I complete one of these stories, I regret my absence and their disappearance. Please, Mr Card and Mr Johnston...write faster! Your mix of strategy and story, of human weakness and brilliance, of innovation and counter-development, occupies my thoughts for days on end, and each time I recommend an Ender book, as I do with increasing frequency, I feel like I'm bestowing a gift.

I didn't have high expectations going into Earth Unaware. It's a collaboration, and even though Orson Scott Card's name is plastered on the front it's a good bet that Aaron Johnston did most of the writing. I wasn't particularly fond of their last collaboration, Invasive Procedures, where it felt (to me) like someone else writing a book based on an Orson Scott Card idea. For that matter, I haven't been overwhelmed by the recent Enderverse books such as Shadows in Flight and Ender in Exile.

Well, I'm pleased to say that Earth Unaware does feel like an Orson Scott Card book. But more importantly, it's a really good story. As a prequel, it begins to explain some of the technology and backstory that leads into Ender's Game, but it isn't a slave to those things. There's a whole new cast of characters to love (or love to hate!) and we're immersed in the frontier-like setting of the Kuiper belt on the outer rim of the solar system, where mining families scrape a living by harvesting metal from asteroids. Even before the Buggers (sorry, Formics) show up, there's plenty of conflict and difficult choices to make. And once they realize an alien ship is heading towards Earth, everything in their already complicated life is thrown into chaos. In other words, this isn't just filling a gap in the Enderverse backstory; this is good sci fi and a story that can stand on its own legs.

Well, it stands on its own relative to Ender's Game and the subsequent books. As far as the story of the Formic Wars, this is just the beginning. There is a bit of resolution, but Earth Unaware ends with the promise of all the biggest events still to come.

This is where the beginning of the war between humans and Formics first started. I could not put this book down. I liked the characters and the writing style. The story line was clear and well developed.

The book seems to live in large part through nostalgia for Ender's Game, but it's not strong enough to stand on its own. The plot has a few neat elements like the conflict between rough and tumble free miner cultures and well-equipped but motivated by bottom line only corporates, or Victor's long solitary flight to Luna, that have great potential but are not explored in depth. Not much SF is set in the early period when humans are just starting to settle and explore the solar system, and it would have been nice to explore the science, engineering, and economics of such a period in a plausible and somewhat realistic way.

Instead, major portions of the story rely on elements that will drive anyone with a basic knowledge of physics nuts. The book consistently misconstrues speed as an impediment for things like space walks. The stop and go tactic that is a major device early on is similarly ill-conceived, if nothing else through little things like the idea that turning the lights off will make a spaceship that must be powered by a fission or fusion reactor, with the attendant heat generation, harder to detect. This should turn off any fan of hard Sci fi who has taken a basic physics and astronomy course, or otherwise has a basic understanding of these subjects.

Of course Card is no Stephen Baxter and the original Ender's Game was driven by a strong plot and deep characterization to the extent that the occasional glimpses of scientific implausibility were easy to gloss over. But Earth Unaware has neither the science nor the characterization or plot to make a great book. The character's actions feel contrived at times, and inconsistent with superficial stereotype they often represent--father's stooge, sent to protect the son, who agrees to an all out attack on an alien spaceship, but then overrules flying by it?; the corporate IT technician whose two mercenary guards are inexplicably overwhelmed by a bunch of back woods free miner gangsters, after having killed several of them earlier? Aside from hiccups like these, one of the story arcs, as another reviewer mentioned, is completely disconnected from the book and presumably only makes sense as part of the larger trilogy.

I really wanted to like this book, for its setting and as a prequel for the events in Ender's Game, but in the end it is the first SF book that I considered not reading through to the end.

This young adult novel began as a graphic novel in the increasingly bloated and now franchised series that began with _Ender's Game_, and it has all the strengths and weaknesses of a graphic novel: a page-turning plot and incredibly shallow characters and setting.

Though billed as the work of Orson Scott Card, the book is in fact a collaboration with Aaron Johnston, and the writing is consequently spotty. There are passages that sound like Scott Card, with his characteristic tense dialogue and sense of character, but there are other parts where the writing is embarrassingly simplistic and the editing shoddy. It is heavily reminiscent of other science fiction. The simple setting and action remind me of early sci-fi potboilers like the _Venus Equilateral_ or _Skylark of Valeron_, while the depiction of the free miner ship borrows heavily from Robert Heinlein's depiction of the free traders in _Citizen of the Galaxy_.

Overall, the story will appeal to the inner twelve-year-old boy (thus, I read avidly to the end). Don't expect it to match up to the first books of the _Ender's Game_ series, and you won't be disappointed.

A good read.

Unfortunately all of the books in this series are marred by small errors in the physics. I'm still trying to forgive Orson Scott Card for his awful "speaker for the dead" series of books. Glad to see this was nothing like it :)

Lots of people have bashed the ending, I thought it wasn't so bad. I'm a huge fan of the ender/bean saga, so if anyone would like this book I would. I had only one problem with it - the trip from the keiper belt included some needless acceleration/deceleration that was kind of painful to read. If the character really had a rough time with microgravity effects vice the power of the engines, he should have just done one smooth acceleration and deceleration, instead of "resting" with the craft "stopped," I mean, it seemed like he had an infinite amount of fuel available.. The idea of anything being "stopped" in outerspace is cringeworthy, but there was plenty of good explanation available for whenever this happened in a way crucial to the plot, so I can forgive most of it. -1 star.

The bits about the first contact with the formics and the suspense created by who would know what, and when, was really awesome. Character development and motivation were all there. I just hope there's a sequel that gets more into Rackham's contributions in the 2nd invasion.

Nice setup series for Enders Game. This gives the details on the initial contact with the Formics leading up to the Formic Wars. Note that this occurs some 100 years before the timeframe of Enders Game.

Excellent! Card has been improving at each novel, this formic wars series are amazing, you cannot stop reading, loving the characters and suffering how our stupid society confronts an alien invasion in a convincing political scenario.

This book captured my attention from the very beginning, and right through to the end. It was so good that as soon as I finished it, I immediately purchased Earth Afire, the next book in the series, as well as reserved Earth Awakens, which is book 3.

Prequels are difficult to do but in Earth Unaware Orson Scott Card begins to take us back to the time before Ender, before... the need for an Ender. This book provides Orson Scott Card's fans with another example of his terrific story telling. All-in-all, Earth Unaware is a promise of more to come and, given Card's fine body of works, a promise he will come through on with the follow-on books in this prequel to the Ender series. When I finished this book I immediately went looking for the next in the series and I was a little disappointed that he has not finished these books. I can wait but, to paraphrase, lord, give me patience but, Scott, please hurry it up and finish the next book!

This book does a good job beginning to explain the Bugger War's beginning but is not written with Card's eloquent style. Lots of scientific inaccuracies and anachronisms. It does not visualize well what tech and people will be like in the distant future. It is a good read if you can get by those issues.

So often prequels simply seem forced and inferior. The characterizations in Earth Unaware greatly enhances the Ender universe. This latest Ender novel matched and exceeded my expectations and provides a great addition to this unique and compelling series.

I had high expectations and was sorely disappointed. I felt like the author(s) had a very poor understanding of space, physics, and computers. I also thought the writing wasn't particularly good. I'm afraid I'll have to remove Orson Scott Card from my list of trusted authors.

Ships have a maximum speed and can "come to a full stop" using their "retros" (apparently they have front and back thrusters for some reason).

The author makes a big deal about how cold space is. They are in the Kuiper belt, so it is true that they would probably radiate heat faster than they received solar energy, but the book makes freezing out to be a terrible, immediate danger.

One scene where they want to land on a hostile space craft is written like a car chase. They "wait for it to pass", and then "pull up alongside it". After they land on it, they try to cut a grappling arm with shears, but the metal is "impermeable" until they use a "heat extractor" to freeze it.

Hacking is easy for anyone to do--one mining ship downloaded "everything" from a secret research vessel. It took one person less than half an hour to bypass the research vessel's security.

Doing anything on a computer requires programming--they "tinkered with the programming" to filter scanner results.

One final thing that bothered me personally was the scrupulous use of "whom", even in dialogue. I applaud the grammatical mastery, but I found it distracting. I think dialogue and internal monologues should help establish the voice of the characters. Apparently all of these characters are prescriptivist grammarians.

Interesting question that I hadn't though about, "How is the story narrated". I think it was mostly second person, "Victor did this...", "Lem did that..." didn't really pay attention, sorry.

Yes, really there was a lot of violence in the book I guess, but given the theme (Earth gets toasted by aliens) what would you expect. It was definitely not gratuitous violence and was handled well.

Great series, interesting plot twists, a few huge technical flaws that are pretty glaring (if you are a physicist or a rocket scientist and are obsessive compulsive about technical details you may want to skip it, drifting up to the alien ship in a cloud of debris while in orbit? Not sure I buy that but it makes for a good story), A lot of the routine technical stuff is detailed in creative ways that I found interesting and probably somewhat prophetic (which I like about SciFi). I really, really liked the character development (again not perfect but creatively done and very interesting). The political, cultural and human commentary I found extremely interesting (which I like about SciFi). Card is really interesting about the human factor and human interaction.

Very interesting story. Good series. I would definitely recommend reading these in order (I didn't and so read the third book again which I thought was the best of the three books).

I started reading these because one of my kids was reading Ender's Game and recommended it to me. He told me that I would really like it and I did. The book (Ender's Game) was much better than the movie, they had to leave way too much out of the movie robbing it of the character development which was unfortunate.

Yes, some of the stuff in his book is a stretch but so what, its fiction remember? The stories and character development and situations are really interesting. One of my favorite authors.

Mark

Very recognizeable in many regards, the this is definite Scott Card. With international languages and sensibilities and the emotional upheaval of the protagonists this fits right in with Enders. He's always a good read!

Just wanted something by a decent author who I used to enjoy but wow its a great read and I want more Mr Card. at this point I am concerned that there are too many new story-lines that the Formic wars will get left behind.
If your like me and enjoy books by giants like Ben Bova, Larry Niven, Jack McDavitt to name a few, you will love this. Mr Card is a fantastic writer who draws you in from the start, each movement of the story reads like a song gently enticing you on until you get to the end and leaves you stated and wanting to know when you can hear this song again.

Ok a little colorful but seriously, this is some damn fine work.