The Swarm by Aaron Johnston and Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston return to their Ender's Game prequel series with this first volume of an all-new trilogy about the Second Formic War in The Swarm. The first invasion of Earth was beaten back by a coalition of corporate and international military forces, and the Chinese army. China has been devastated by the Formic's initial efforts to eradicate Earth life forms and prepare the ground for their own settlement. The Scouring of China struck fear into the other nations of the planet; that fear blossomed into drastic action when scientists determined that the single ship that wreaked such damage was merely a scout ship. There is a mothership out beyond the Solar System's Kuiper Belt, and it's heading into the system, unstoppable by any weapons that Earth can muster. Earth has been reorganized for defense. There is now a Hegemon, a planetary official responsible for keeping all the formerly warring nations in line. There's a Polemarch, responsible for organizing all the military forces of the planet into the new International Fleet. But there is an enemy within, an enemy as old as human warfare: ambition and politics. Greed and self-interest. Will Bingwen, Mazer Rackam, Victor Delgado and Lem Juke be able to divert those very human enemies in time to create a weapon that can effectively defend humanity in the inexorable Second Formic War?

When reading this book, don't look too closely at the science. Like many science fiction authors, “nano-technology” is used as a magic wand to violate many physical rules. I was intrigued by the timing of space travel. The long travel times in cramped quarters are hard to imagine.

Summary: Prequel series that goes back before the start of Ender's Game.

I am in a data entry season at work, and these are the times when I look for fiction to listen to. Orson Scott Card's books are produced by Stefan Rudnicki and have a full cast, including Stefan Rudnicki. In the Acknowledgments to Card's most recent book, he thanks Rucknicki and says that the series has become an audiobook series primarily. The voices and high-quality production are consistently among the best audiobooks I listen to, even if the actual writing is not always up to the same quality.

A decade ago, Aaron Johnson started on these two prequel trilogies (a trilogy for each of the first two Formic Wars). And although I am a huge fan of Orson Scott Card generally, I was getting tired of Card's politically orientated fiction (Empire and Hidden Empire) and how some of the Ender series felt like it was just recycling old storylines. And a number of the reviews from Ender fans were not favorable. So I never picked them up. I eventually picked up The Swarm when it was in a sale but did not listen to it for months after I purchased it.

I should have realized that these are interconnected trilogies, but I did not. The Swarm is the first of a second trilogy, but primarily the characters were introduced in the first trilogy. So I was getting dropped into the middle of the story. This is a prequel series, so as Aaron Johnston says in the afterward, the reader knows where the story ends, just not how it gets there. Mazer Rackam, the mentor to Ender in Ender's Game, was the hero of the first and second Formic Wars. But he was relatively unknown at the time of the two wars because his work was classified. Again, as Aaron Johnston talks about in the Afterward, primarily what we know of Mazer Rackam's background was in a single sentence of Ender's game. That meant that Johnston, with consultation from Card, had to pay attention to that canon content (because super fans will) and yet still make the story engaging and coherent.

One of the problems with prequels is that they are written afterward, sometimes long afterward, and the tech sometimes seems more advanced. This is a common sci-fi problem because sci-fi can only write what can be conceived. And while Card has updated Ender's Game multiple times to take account of the fall of the Soviet Union and edit the story to make sense of later books, there still has been a lot of advancement in technology since the late 1970s when the story was originally being conceived. For example, there is a lot of reliance on nano-technology in The Swarm. And while Richard Feynman theorized the idea in a 1959 speech, it was not named until 1974, and there was little research until the mid-1980s, without many real advances until the last decade. (At least as I understand from a very layman's perspective.)

There are four interacting storylines. I think three of which are continuations of the previous trilogy (at least that is what it seems to me.) The characters are people that are engaging and not too perfect. Card always seems to write about extraordinarily gifted people, primarily young people. There is only one pre-teen in the story, but many of the main characters are young adults who are also extraordinarily gifted.

I believe that Johnston wrote this book with some consultation on the plot and likely editing by Card. They are both Mormon church members, and Card's frequent emphasis on child-rearing and perpetuating the species as the main role in life is still very present. Some of Card's books are more philosophical than others. This is more of an action book. I like philosophical sci-fi, but there must be enough story to make it interesting. And frankly, as Card has become more comfortable discussing his Mormon theology and libertarian political ideals, I have become less interested. This is a story not as much about conflict with the Formics as it is about conflict within humanity as it seeks to come together to defend itself against a Formic invasion. Reinhold Niebuhr is not named, but his Moral Man and Immoral Society feels like an underlying theme.

I am not sure whether to finish this trilogy or go back and read the first trilogy before I move on. One of the issues is that the final book of the second trilogy has not been published and does not have a publication date that I could find.