Children of the Mind

Children of the Mind (1996) is a novel by American author Orson Scott Card, the fourth in his successful Ender's Game series of science fiction novels that focus on the character Ender Wiggin. This book was originally the second half of Xenocide, before it was split into two novels.[1][2]

Children of the Mind
AuthorOrson Scott Card
Cover artistJohn Harris
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SeriesEnder's Game series
GenreScience fiction
PublisherTor Books
Publication date
August 1996
Media typePrint (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages349
ISBN0-312-85395-5
OCLC33971186
813/.54 20
LC ClassPS3553.A655 C48 1996
Preceded byXenocide 
Followed byA War of Gifts 

Plot summary
Ender's Game series
Chronology

At the start of Children of the Mind, Jane, the evolved computer intelligence, is using her newly discovered abilities to take the races of buggers, humans and pequeninos outside the universe and back instantaneously. She uses these powers to move them to distant habitable planets for colonization. She is losing her memory and concentration as the vast computer network connected to the ansible is being shut down. If she is to survive, she must find a way to transfer her aiúa (or soul) to a human body.

Peter Wiggin and Si Wang-Mu travel to the worlds of Divine Wind and Pacifica to convince the Japanese-led swing group of the Starways Congress to revoke their order to destroy Lusitania. By tracing the decision-making trail backwards, they are able to show a philosopher his influence on the Starways Congress. After several complications, the philosopher convinces the Tsutsumi clan to exert their influence with the Necessarian faction in the Starways Congress to stop the Lusitania fleet. The admiral at the head of the Lusitania fleet, however, disobeys the Congress's order and does what he believes Ender Wiggin, the perpetrator of the first Xenocide, would have done and fires the Molecular Disruption Device (MDD).

Upon Ender Wiggin's death, Jane guides his aiúa to Peter's body, while she is granted possession of Young Val's body, and thus is not destroyed when the ansible shuts down. She is then able to continue transporting starships instantaneously by borrowing the vast mental capacity of the simple-minded Pequenino mother-trees. She transports a ship with Peter and Wang-Mu around the missile, then transports the missile and them to inside of the Lusitania fleet, where it is then disarmed and disabled. Peter and Wang-Mu's efforts finally come to fruition, and the destruction of Lusitania is averted.

Jane falls in love with Miro, and Peter with Wang-mu. Both couples are married under one of the mother-trees of the pequeninos on the same day as Ender's funeral.

gollark: If you're deserializing into a defined data structure instead of something more like a syntax tree, it can just reject those.
gollark: No idea. I don't think I've ever needed or seen that honestly?
gollark: If you use DD/MM/YYYY AutoBotRobot queues your reminder at midnight UTC then, if you use YYYY-MM-DD it uses the current time but the provided date.
gollark: But you do need dates fairly often, and this makes it *consistent* between implementations.
gollark: For example, as well as the time-duration-type thing ("5y2mo3w" etc) it actually supports DD/MM/YYYY as well as some weird backward thing because it uses an external library for it too.

See also

References
  1. "Review: XENOCIDE & CHILDREN OF THE MIND, by Orson Scott Card - Laura Fissel". www.laurafissel.com.
  2. "SF REVIEWS.NET: Children of the Mind / Orson Scott Card ★★½". www.sfreviews.net.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.