On one of these worlds, Harmony, in the city of Basilica, the series begins as the oversoul of the world, after millions of years, begins to break down to such an extent that people are starting to overcome its desires, thus making war on a large scale and taking the first steps along the path to weapons of mass destruction. The series follows a group of humans selected by the oversoul to help it overcome its problems, perhaps by establishing communications with the master computer, the "Keeper of Earth".
As usual, Card has come up with a variety of very interesting ethical dilemmas, rather than your simple, everyday good vs evil story. While there is a focus on a central "good" character, Nafai, who brings back strong memories of Ender Wiggin, there are several good subplots and lots of space given to the development of other characters. The books are fairly fast-paced, and I found myself flying through the middle books of the series (whereas I've found with other long series, I tend to bog down near the middle).
The only weakness from my perspective is in the establishment of motivation for some characters. For example, a very important character in the first four books acts in an increasingly brutal and immoral fashion. This fact in and of itself doesn't bother me. Every series needs a good villain or two, but I had two problems. First, I didn't find the motivation for this character (essentially, jealousy and immaturity) to be very convincing over time. Second, I couldn't believe how much of his behavior was tolerated. I couldn't believe it was that important to everyone that this character remain as part of the group, given his potential to ruin everything.
Another minor problem with the series was the sheer number of characters. This wasn't a problem at the beginning, even though there were a lot of names to digest from the very first page. But as the series went on and new generations of characters were introduced, I found them melting together. Very few of the second-and-beyond generation characters were established well enough for their names to be memorable. This was especially a problem for all but 2-3 characters in the final book, which takes place long after the continuous events of the first four books. I would almost recommend reading only the first four books of this series, which make a great self-contained set and leave few plot threads hanging.
In any case, I liked this series too much to end a review with two paragraphs of criticism, so I'd like to reiterate the strengths that I've come to expect from Card. First were the excellent ethical dilemmas presented (even though I may not agree with how they were dealt with). Second was the fast-paced plot. There is an interesting religious subtext throughout the series as well, which wasn't surprising for Card. This added a lot to the richness of the characters, but to say more would be to bias the reader to watch for certain things. I think that's best left to be discovered.
Return to the Welcome Page of Doug's Library.