Earth Awakens

April 7, 2014
Philosophical inquiry and harshly realistic descriptions of war reverberate throughout Card and Johnston’s third Formic Wars novel (after Earth Afire), a pulp-inspired alien invasion scenario that continues the prequel series to Card’s bestselling Ender’s Game. Shortly after Maori spaceship pilot Mazer Rackham’s bold attack against Formic invaders, engineer Victor Delgado and bureaucrat Imala Bootstamp camouflage a shuttle to allow them to investigate a Formic ship, backed by enigmatic industrialist Lem Jukes, while war heroes Mazer and Capt. Wit O’Toole are enlisted in the Chinese army. As industrial greed and cultural misunderstanding spread, Lem tries to stop his father’s deadly vanguard drones from attacking the ship where Victor is about to find a revelation—or death. Will Earth finally fight back, and at what cost? Card and Johnston intensify their complex intergalactic mythos with emotional intensity and widening thematic scope. Everyday desires are as deadly as the Formics’ flesh-eating acid in this collision of space opera and big-bug epic. This breakneck thriller is a dark and lively addition to the Enderverse.

May 1, 2014
Third in the Ender's Game prequel series (Earth Afire, 2013, etc.) featuring the invasion of a wholly unprepared Earth by alien Formics.Former space miner Victor Delgado, assisted by pilot Imala Bootstamp and Lem Jukes (son of the powerful, capable and utterly ruthless industrialist Ukko Jukes), plans to penetrate the orbiting Formic ship and learn, if possible, how to defeat it. In China, meanwhile, heroics by members of Wit O'Toole's Mobile Operations Police team, Mazer Rackham of New Zealand's Special Air Services and Lt. Shenzu of the Chinese army, have dealt a setback to the Formic landers-but unless they can find a way to neutralize the Formics' deadly flesh-dissolving spray, China, and perhaps the world, is doomed. Since there is still little or no cooperation between the various national militaries, such an outcome seems likely. Victor's ship, disguised as wandering space garbage, stealthily engages with the Formic ship, allowing Victor to slip unnoticed inside. Unknown to Lem, Ukko launches a fleet of drones equipped with gravity lasers at the Formic ship, heedless of the fact that Victor is still inside. Large slabs of narrative detail the rancorous rivalry between Ukko and Lem. The previous book's most interesting character, 8-year-old Chinese genius Bingwen, who worked with O'Toole and Rackham, finds a new job as a medic but otherwise features far too little. The Formics are big, buglike, ferocious, possibly telepathic among themselves and otherwise uninteresting, with technology that involves the manual rotating of huge wheels to turn things on and off. Still to come is a huge, thrilling and altogether improbable battle. The evidence, then, suggests Johnson did most of the writing, with minimal contributions from Card.The weakest installment so far; still, fans will devour it.

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May 15, 2014
In volume three of the the First Formic War seriesa prequel series set a century before Card's classic Ender's Gamethe alien invaders have landed on Earth. Mazer Rackham and his Mobile Operations Police comrades pull off a high-risk mission to stop the mass slaughter in China. Meanwhile, in space, Victor Delgado, who risked his young life in the first novel in the series (Earth Unaware, 2012) to warn Earth of the impending invasion, is risking it again, this time by infiltrating a Formic vessel and trying to find a way to neutralize the alien creatures. But has he been set up by Lem Jukes, the conniving son of a mining-company president who's feeling mistreated by his powerful father? With a nice balance of violence and political machination, the novel will definitely please readers of the first two books in the seriesa series that, it should be pointed out, isn't merely a spin-off of Ender's Game and its numerous sequels. Even if there had been no Ender's Game, the First Formic Wars novels would still pack the same considerable wallop. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Card remains among the biggest names in contemporary science fiction, and his latest will be published to a legion of eager fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)