This is going to be disgustingly spoiler laden, you've been warned.

Okay, so with the movie I finally got around to catching up on the newest novel, borderline novella, Shadows in Flight and rereading the others. And here's the problem, the original 2 books, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, are great books with only a few 'whoops' well in side the acceptable envelope for SF, which they all have. The glaring ones to me were:

1. The whole genius kids / eugenics / people get dumber or slower as they age thing, justified because the whole plot revolves around this, making essentially no different then something like a lightsaber, a stupid weapon but cool anyway.

2. Bugger Homeworld being their most distant world, when common sense says that it would be right in the middle of their empire, and them having all their queens there (except an infant) rather than most.

3. The actually really dumb concept that the Buggers never realized humans - even though they had spaceships - weren't a sentient species. This gets waved off by saying the Buggers, as Hive critters, didn't think individual humans were sentient or important. Now that's an important point we'll get back to, because the newest retcons installments dump it in the garbage, but it was also dumb because even if the Bugger Queens believed individual humans weren't sentient they'd have to be beyond dumb to assume a solar system with spacecraft wasn't the home to a sentient speciesyet they went ahead and tried to colonize it anyway, and before even bothering to determine who the sentient species was and how they worked, that's an intentional attempt at genocide. A person could be forgiven for walking through an alien forest where the trees have weather monitors and thermometers hanging off them and not realizing thetreeshad built them and are the sentient critter, but not for not realizing some sentient critters calls this place home. Setting up a campfire and clearing some brush and trees to hang out hoping to meet these folk, not realizing you're killing them, is not the same as saying 'huh, clear signs of technology, by definition the product of sentience, well that's neat, let's bulldoze the planet and setup our own.' That's no longer a tragic misunderstanding, the point of the book.

But again that's all forgivable because it's the norm in SF, contrived plot points spawn such on review, Dune is a wonderful book based off a moronic concept, a high-tech culture suffering a 'water shortage', but it's a contrived dilemma for the plot to function. Asimov's Foundation revolves around Psychohistory, something the author himself acknowledges is basically absurd. Ender's Game, Dune, and Foundation are pretty much always share the Top 3 SF book/series slots and deserve to be there, but they've got their flaws.

So, other EG installments fairly weak, lots of retconning, not even gonna get into OSC's extreme obsession with breeding or screwed up families. Here's the one that finally pissed me off as a bridge too far:

In Shadows in Flight, one of the big points raised (and hinted at in one of the more recent novels) is that the Bugger's individual workers and drones were actually individually sentient, and not just the queens. In SiF he outright has the queens stated as routinely killing any worker who didn't instantly obey even if that obedience was to make a better suggestion. That they've always been sentient and that they could only have larger hives per queen by actually intentionally creating (via knowledge and science) a disease which caused any of their workers to die minutes after having their link broken. Hence why all the buggers died when the queens did, the male drones lived but were always physically with the queens so died with them, but the workers all had a kill switch built into them because they were sentient and the queens feared rebellion. Add to that, OSC's has also gone out of his way to make it clear that Ender would have done the same thing if he hadn't thought it was a game but the real thing.

So retcon complete, its not that the plot of EG rested on a few Houses of Cards, but rather that Card's entire premise is complete BS. We're suppose dot sympathize with the bugger queens for making a tragic mistake because they couldn't have known and by the time they figured it out, and with language being incomprehensible to them, humans were understandably set on destroying them. Post-retcon's they are the Hive Tyrants who murder their own children for - literally, this is the exact point made - daring so much as an independent thought, even if its a suggested improvement or thought of self-survival. Rendering the entire series not 'a tragic failure of communication leading to a war exterminating a species who learned to communicate with the unwitting architect of their destruction who in guilt seeks to undo his error.

Instead it becomes the story of a race of brutal genocidal monsters spreading their uber-1984 version of civilization across the stars and seeking to wipe out other sentient species intentionally, and as a last gasp at salvation brain raping their adversary through the ansible link to set him off on a 4000 year insane, guilt-ridden quest to respawn the menace he rightfully wiped out, pausing only long enough to brainwash him into writing a pair of novels glorify them and his psychopath older brother which also paint he himself as Hitler on crack.

This is why authors who write good series shouldn't be encouraged to keep at it, either the book was so good partial out of luck and accident and they can't live up to it or they decay with future installments.

Still a good series, but if someone asked me which to read I'd say EG, Speaker, and maybe Ender's Shadow and then not to read any others at all, as they simply detract form the series, rather than simply adding not very much.