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Summary
Summary
In this sequel to Card's bestselling novel Empire , Averell Torrent has become President of the United States, with enormous political and popular support and, if people only realized it, a tight grip on the reins of both political parties. He has launched America into a get-tough, this-world-is-our-empire foreign policy stance. But Captain Bartholomew Coleman, known as Cole to his friends and enemies alike, sees the danger Torrent poses to American democracy and the potential disasters involved in his foreign military adventures. Cole quickly runs afoul of Torrent; on the run, he and a few friends and allies seek proof of how Torrent orchestrated the political takeover that included assassinating a President and nearly starting a civil war.
Author Notes
Orson Scott Byron Walley Card, was born in 1951 and studied theater at Brigham Young University. He received his B.A. in 1975 and his M.A. in English in 1981. He wrote plays during that time, including Stone Tables (1973) and the musical, Father, Mother, Mother and Mom (1974).
A Mormon, Scott served a two-year mission in Brazil before starting work as a journalist in Utah. He also designed games at Lucas Film Games, 1989-92. He is best known for his science fiction novels, including the popular Ender series. Well known titles include A Planet Called Treason (1979), Treasure Box (1996), and Heartfire (1998). He has also written the guide called How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990).
His novel Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead, both won Hugo and Nebula awards, making Card the only author to win both prizes in consecutive years. His titles Shadows in Flight, Ruins and Ender's Game made The New York Times Best Seller List. He is also the author of The First Formic War Series, which includes the titles Earth Unaware, Earth Afire, and Earth Awakens.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Card combines flag-waving, political diatribe and Christian fervor in this bombastic sequel to 2007's Empire. The young American Empire is confronted with its first major crisis since the Progressive War: the appearance in Africa of a highly communicable and lethal disease. America quarantines the entire continent, while pompous President Torrent dispatches an elite team of supersoldiers to help slow the disease's spread. Young Mark Malich is compelled by his Christian principles to volunteer to help the benighted African natives, but he winds up in a Nigerian hospital targeted for destruction by malevolent Sudanese soldiers, leading to questions about Torrent's true goals. An evil dictator is named Idi De Gaulle, the bad guys machine-gun live babies, and FOX News gets prominent placement, but the only people likely to pick this up are those who share Card's politics, rendering subtlety less necessary. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
In order to save the United States from a plague decimating Nigeria, President Averell Torrent orders a quarantine of all Africa. Pilloried as racist and inhumane, he switches tactics and sends his political advisor Cecily Malich, along with a team that includes the boy who unknowingly unleashed "the monkey sickness" on the world, to provide medical help. Plague turns out to be only part of Africa's problem. Sudanese soldiers are on a rampage, and EMP devices undercut the electronically enhanced exoskeletons and weaponry of the Special Ops team headed by Captain Bartholomew Coleman sent in to restore order. Is it possible that President Torrent, on a massive empire-building mission, has set in motion plans to realign Africa, making the new nations dependent on him for support? Did he also engineer a tiny civil war in the United States that caused the death of Cecily's husband Reuben and the imprisonment of Aldo Verus (Empire, 2006)? The Special Ops team concludes that assassinating Torrent is the only way to stop him. Coleman and Cecily must decide who can bring the greater global goodTorrent, Verus or the Ops boysand act accordingly. A morality lesson for the video-arcade generation from Hugo and Nebula Awardwinner Card (A War of Gifts, 2007, etc.). Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Card picks up the near-future launched in Empire (2006) a few years later, at first in Nigeria, where a 12-year-old monkey-catcher becomes the second victim and first survivor of a new, hypervirulent epidemic. Back in the post-second civil war U.S., President Torrent decides to quarantine all Africa and to send Empire's surviving hero's special-ops team to Nigeria to stop its government's genocidal operation against its non-Muslim population, among whom the epidemic started. Before long, and at the conscience-prodding of her 13-year-old son, Empire's nonsurviving hero's widow, a top presidential advisor, is spearheading a voluntary effort to nurse the sick and train caregivers, starting at the plague's ground zero. Such is the setup for an even more potent blend of high-tech military action, imperial politics, conspiracy, and practical philosophizing than Card whipped up in Empire. While the dialogue is often as cornball and Hollywoodish as before (particularly among the soldiers), the adult principals are sturdy, and in the African boy, Chinma, Card gives us a kid hero to rank with his sf immortals, Ender and Bean.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2009 Booklist
Library Journal Review
In the near future, political scientist Averell Torrent has become President of the United States following a devastating civil war prompted by runaway technology and a polarization of conservatives and liberals. Only one man, Capt. Bartholomew Coleman, knows Torrent's true agenda and must find a way to prove it to the public before his enemies silence him. The award-winning author of Ender's Game and its sequels excels at cautionary fiction. VERDICT Card folds his empathic and compassionate views on politics and the human condition into compelling storytelling and believable characters, and this results in a fast-paced, well-crafted sf thriller-the sequel to Card's best-selling Empire. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.