Earth Unaware

Earth Unaware by Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) and Aaron Johnston (producer, collaborator).These guys put together one heck of a story. The book starts out a bit slow and seemed to be a prelude to a soap opera. The asteroid miners are working the asteroid belt and fire back to Luna Station minerals for sale which they use to support their families. Victor is a part of said family, making a living in outer space, which some bigoted people call “space borns” and look down on them.Card creates a world with new rules of society levels that is clearly a condemnation of the current social strata of rich/poor, have/have not.Victor and Janda are cousins and yet they’re falling for each other. To handle this, the families separate them, sending Janda on a trip with the Italian fleet.At this point I thought there was going to be a soap opera plot. Janda though is never developed as a character. Instead, the main character is Victor, who has a talent for machines and space mechanics and lacks a lot of social skills which is at times humorous.Fathers and Fathers:Victor respects his father (“father” is always initial caps when spoken by a son, interestingly) and Father has taught him everything he knows. When an alien spacecraft is discovered, Victor and Father go into action to find out what it is and what to do about it, at times to deadly result!Lem is the son of the manufacturing conglomerate Jukes Enterprises and runs a ship that is testing a “glaser”, a machine that destroys matter with an energy field.Lem is also a result of a fatherly upbringing. Unlike Victor, Lem feels controlled and manipulated by his father and wants to prove the father wrong by making a show of himself and how he operates his ship. Turns out that his father has manipulated the ship and crew to Lem’s shock and dismay.Themes of family, fathers and sons, and ultimate sacrifice for the good of the group (and certain characters who say heck with the group, look out for yourself) are in constant conflict, which makes the book interesting, thought-provoking and intelligent.Lastly we have the military MOPs, (Mobile Operations Police), an elite corps of soldiers, and in the training cycle we meet Mazer Rackham, who you might remember as the guy who beat the Formics in the Ender’s Game trilogy of books. Here he is new and he is trying to get into this elite corps. I won’t spoil it, but let’s say he has less than great luck to make this happen.We meet Wit O’Toole, the commander of this unit who acts as a “father” of sorts to his crew but puts up with nothing and expects all to meet a set standard. Similar to Victor’s father and Lem’s sire, Wit takes on the role of forcing standards, demanding obedience and getting it or else.Conclusion:Great start to hopefully a good series of books on the Formics and how the invasion started and what happens when people who are in the know and want to warn Earth are scoffed at and invalidated while the Formic threat draws closer.I would have liked more characterization with some people in the book as I did not feel a lot of love for them: “Imala” the accountant who hates her job, Janda, the girl who dies early in the book (and who also has father issues, it turns out) and her sister, the astronomer who discovered the alien craft.The “tech” of the story is realistic and could happen as we continue to struggle with machines and computerized gadgets, as well as the money-grabbing corporations that Card clearly is gunning for.Recommended.

Earth Unaware, by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston, is the first volume of the First Formic War series. It's a prequel to Card's Ender's Game, which won the Nebula Award in 1985 and the Hugo Award in 1986. The current epic tale begins about one-hundred years before Ender's Game begins. Victor Delgado, a young mechanic, lives and works on El Cavador, an old and rickety asteroid-mining space ship. Most of the asteroid miners and their families were born in space and live their entire lives on ships like El Cavador, where all on board are considered one big family. The El Cavador family is mining valuable materials from an asteroid in the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto. These asteroid-mining ships are held together and maintained through the ingenuity and determination of their family members with whatever supplies and equipment they can salvage and adapt. Although Victor and his family don't know it, even deeper in the Kuiper Belt, a technologically superior corporate mining ship commanded by Lem Jukes is testing a new piece of mining equipment that can blast asteroids to dust and then gather the valuable materials from the floating debris. These corporate mining ships are state-of-the-art vessels and the materials they retrieve bring unimaginable profits to their stockholders. Meanwhile, one of the family members on El Cavador sights a strange rapidly moving object far on the edge of deep space. They determine that its movement and course make it highly probable that the object is an alien ship headed toward Earth. They cannot determine whether aliens are on board or whether it is a drone. They also cannot determine the intent of the unexpected visitor. However, the miners realize that they must warn all Earthlings about the potentially dangerous craft. On the corporate ship, Lem Jukes and his crew know nothing of the approaching alien ship. Commander Jukes decides to test their asteroid blaster on the asteroid that the El Cavador miners are working. He surreptitiously approaches El Cavador and "bumps" it away from the asteroid, damaging El Cavador and making it impossible for the family to communicate their fear of the approaching alien vessel to anyone. Eventually, the El Cavador family realizes they must work together with the crew of the corporate ship to warn humanity of the approaching alien vessel. However, something about the alien ship blocks all long-range communication with Earth or any other human outposts. There is no way to warn Earth of the approaching alien vessel. The desperate people on both ships decide they must join forces to intercept the alien ship and try to destroy it if necessary. That meeting is the frightful beginning of a deadly struggle. Card and Johnston have created a fascinating environment where humans live and work in space. They also provide a ruthless enemy and heroic efforts by the corporate and family miners to try to warn and protect humanity from an approaching catastrophe. This book provides much suspense and violence for the reader. In addition, I found the characters to be richly portrayed, including some who are heroic and others who are ethically challenged. Although the alien invasion premise is nothing new, Card and Johnston add some unique twists that I enjoyed. This is the beginning of the expected First Formic War trilogy, and the authors used it to introduce the readers to the environment, the society, the technology, the villains, and many characters, including some that I expect will play important roles in future volumes. It's not easy to do that, while including gripping suspense and action to keep the reader entertained. However, I believe they did an excellent job and I look forward to future volumes in this series.

I don't know, definitely different from all previous books (except the fact that the main character is a small genius boy) .It seems a very boyish book. you have astronauts, aliens, marines, prince (sry, the son of the biggest corp) , a tough hot chick, a sensible (probably hot) girl. What it doesn't have from previous books are: politics, evil genius and a not-that-complex grand plan.

Enjoyable reading, but was let down by some clumsy errors in the technology and science - gave the impression a few times of using "impressive sciency words" instead of actual science, which I found broke the flow of the story.

I liked the story and I would probably read any prequel/sequel to Enders Game even though this lacks the refined plot of the shadow saga. What ruined it for me was the technical stuff. OSCs strong suit has never been technology or the science part of SF but doesn't he have a staff that reads through books published in his name? A staff including just one person with knowledge of space science or physics at 10ht grade level? Appearently not. Sad.

Enjoyed this series. Puts a 'face' on Ender's Game's baddies.

Orson Scott Card one of the best