Book Review: Earth Afire

Earth Afire, by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston

Science Fiction, prequel to Ender's Game

4 out of 5 stars

http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Afire-The-First-Formic/dp/0765367378

Coming hot on the heels of one of the best books I'd read in a long time, Earth Afire had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, it's not quite as good as Earth Unaware, but that's not to say it's bad. Far from it.

Compared to Earth Unaware, Earth Afire storms out of the gates. Action, horror, suspense, a little bit of everything pulling you along. The pacing is good, but while I was reading this book, I understood why I liked the first one so much: because I really, really like Ender's Game, and there's a lot of cool and novel stuff that expands my understanding of Ender's world.

A lot of the novelty in Earth Unaware is not present in Earth Afire, and it suffers a little because of this. There are plenty of amazingly cool scenes, including a literal stomach turner that I found very creative and innovative. Where the first book was filled with wonder and uncertainty, Earth Afire is full of desperation and dread. It really brings home the gruesome realities of war, obliterating not only physical things like buildings and people, but also turning ethics and morals on their heads, a clever foreshadowing of societal issues presented in Ender's Game.

In the movie Twister, there's a scene where Jo tries to convince Bill to commit his brand new truck to the tornado-chasing cause. He flatly declines the invitation. In the next scene, we see that Jo was victorious. It's a nice comic device. The first time. A few scenes down the road, however, the entire tornado chasing crew tries to convince Jo to go and visit Aunt Meg. Jo flatly refuses. In the next scene, we see everyone pulling up to Aunt Meg's. At this point, it's annoying because the writing and acting between the two scenes is almost exactly the same. Earth Afire feels this way more than a few times towards the end of the book, with characters being almost entirely too much on the same wavelength even though they are many thousands of miles apart.

Some of my other quibbles with the book include some technology I didn't quite buy into, but when you read books, especially sci-fi/fantasy, sometimes you just have to suspend your disbelief.

Earth Afire sets the stage for an interesting conclusion to the First Formic War and I rate it a solid 4 out of 5 stars. Earth Awakes, the final book in The First Formic War trilogy, is sitting on my nightstand. My bookmark is already inside, waiting to be advanced.