Perhaps it’s fate that the Ender/Ender related books were brought to my attention by a friend this summer, and no other summer, or any other time at all. It fits that I’m reading these now, thinking about the future of my own world, but perhaps more so, the future of me and those immediately around me.

And of course, leave it up to me to realize only that somehow these books are important to my life at this point, but be so bogged down by the junk running through my mind that I can’t sort out any coherent thoughts as to why. If nothing else I suppose, Shadow of the Hegemon made me think of my own ambitions, their worth, their likelihoods, and their motivators. And of course the ultimate questions surrounding love, the perfect love, the motherly (fatherly) love, the companion love, the love love, and ultimately I suppose, hope.

Reading these books makes me almost proud that we still have living among us people like Orson Scott Card. It makes me want to meet him, talk to him over dinner, pick his mind. But for what purpose? Only to stupidly say “gosh, love the ideas you got across in those books”? I would have nothing of value to contribute to him, nothing to throw across his path that will stop to make him think. All I can offer him is the undying respect and awe that no doubt countless other mindless readers, overwhelmed by the feelings conjured by his words, have already offered.

I’ve never read the forewords, afterwords, prefaces of any book as carefully, if at all, as I’ve read the ones accompanied by Card’s works. Likewise, I’ve never been motivated to read any, let alone several, non-fiction works until now. Perhaps I’m jumping on to the elusive bandwagon that I’m constantly trying to avoid, jumping on to fit in, to declare that yes! I’m a true Orson Scott Card fan! But I can only hope that I know myself well enough to truly believe that I’m doing it to edify, and to achieve some of my own ambitions for the right reasons.