RE: Eagle Time Reading List
11-21-2015, 04:36 PM
The Song of Ice and Fire series is too mainstream and disappointing(as it never comes out), so I'm introducing another very famous series that was really fun for me.
Enter..... the Ender's Game series!
The setting: alien species have invaded the Earth, but was repelled miraculously by a brilliant tactician, who is known to have died in a resultant crash after killing the bugs' invading queen. A space station has been established to train genius minds of Earth, in order to prepare against an upcoming invasion that's expected to be imminent. The training is done primarily by a series of simulated battles in which one child commands a battalion of others. Enter the main protagonist..... Ender, whose genius is unheard of, who quickly adapts to any form of a game in seconds and leaves his mark as THE best kid in school.... literally.
What I like about the plot is that while it's the good ole' humanity-defends-against-aliens kind of book, the way it's told is amazing, and the subsequent plot twist that comes at the end. There's this something about the author and the way he writes, that draws in the reader. Like a good book should.
There are sequels, I found. Too many. The plot branches off into the perspective of Ender, another kid, and yet another kid in the school (3 series!), each branch consisting of about 5 books. It's a long read, but I quite enjoyed it.
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Another book I'd recommend is 'Heaven's Devils'. It's a story of 'Jim Raynor', a young man living in a planet under the protection of the Confederacy. These nations are the products of a colonization program from Earth, in which a fanatical group that took hold of the entire Earth's power shipped off tens of thousands of criminals and cybernetic part users into four huge battlecruisers, headed into a planet deemed as suitable for life for colonization. But the supercomputer maintaining the flight malfunctioned, sending the inhabitants into a decades old trip into a system 60 light years away, known as the Kopfu-Rulu sector. One of the battlecruisers perished during landing, while each of the other three landed on separate planets. The one with the supercomputer Atlas progressed the fastest, forming the Confederacy and becoming a superpower in the space sector. It expanded quickly, forming hundreds of colony worlds in imminent planets, which, after some decades, secedes away from the Confederacy to form the Kel-Morian Combine, a faction formed by miners and companies of resource-rich planets that wants to take control of the minerals by itself (eliminating huge taxes toward the Confederacy). The Confederacy, in order to defend their worlds against the threats, orders a recruitment on the largest scale ever seen, which our protagonist James Raynor gets dragged into, unwitting.
That's the setting, and the plot revolves around the main character James Raynor, who is recruited into the space marines program in order to battle the Kel-Morian Combine, but uncovers the nasty corruption behind the brains of the Confederacy, while making his place in a battalion that becomes legendary, known as the "Heaven's Devils". That's kinda the main plot, there are a lot of twists and flavors in the actual story, which I'd hate to spoil for anyone actually wanting to read the novel.
DISCLAIMER: the novel itself is the officially recognized and licensed book of a game called Starcraft, and is probably more enjoyable to die-hard fans (or nolife fans like me) of the game. Still, it's quite enjoyable in its own right, as it doesn't actually make references toward the game or any of the other settings.
Enter..... the Ender's Game series!
The setting: alien species have invaded the Earth, but was repelled miraculously by a brilliant tactician, who is known to have died in a resultant crash after killing the bugs' invading queen. A space station has been established to train genius minds of Earth, in order to prepare against an upcoming invasion that's expected to be imminent. The training is done primarily by a series of simulated battles in which one child commands a battalion of others. Enter the main protagonist..... Ender, whose genius is unheard of, who quickly adapts to any form of a game in seconds and leaves his mark as THE best kid in school.... literally.
What I like about the plot is that while it's the good ole' humanity-defends-against-aliens kind of book, the way it's told is amazing, and the subsequent plot twist that comes at the end. There's this something about the author and the way he writes, that draws in the reader. Like a good book should.
There are sequels, I found. Too many. The plot branches off into the perspective of Ender, another kid, and yet another kid in the school (3 series!), each branch consisting of about 5 books. It's a long read, but I quite enjoyed it.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Another book I'd recommend is 'Heaven's Devils'. It's a story of 'Jim Raynor', a young man living in a planet under the protection of the Confederacy. These nations are the products of a colonization program from Earth, in which a fanatical group that took hold of the entire Earth's power shipped off tens of thousands of criminals and cybernetic part users into four huge battlecruisers, headed into a planet deemed as suitable for life for colonization. But the supercomputer maintaining the flight malfunctioned, sending the inhabitants into a decades old trip into a system 60 light years away, known as the Kopfu-Rulu sector. One of the battlecruisers perished during landing, while each of the other three landed on separate planets. The one with the supercomputer Atlas progressed the fastest, forming the Confederacy and becoming a superpower in the space sector. It expanded quickly, forming hundreds of colony worlds in imminent planets, which, after some decades, secedes away from the Confederacy to form the Kel-Morian Combine, a faction formed by miners and companies of resource-rich planets that wants to take control of the minerals by itself (eliminating huge taxes toward the Confederacy). The Confederacy, in order to defend their worlds against the threats, orders a recruitment on the largest scale ever seen, which our protagonist James Raynor gets dragged into, unwitting.
That's the setting, and the plot revolves around the main character James Raynor, who is recruited into the space marines program in order to battle the Kel-Morian Combine, but uncovers the nasty corruption behind the brains of the Confederacy, while making his place in a battalion that becomes legendary, known as the "Heaven's Devils". That's kinda the main plot, there are a lot of twists and flavors in the actual story, which I'd hate to spoil for anyone actually wanting to read the novel.
DISCLAIMER: the novel itself is the officially recognized and licensed book of a game called Starcraft, and is probably more enjoyable to die-hard fans (or nolife fans like me) of the game. Still, it's quite enjoyable in its own right, as it doesn't actually make references toward the game or any of the other settings.
No matter what happens today, you can laugh about it tomorrow