Ok, I normally grasp the writtings of Card. I dug the theory of Phylotes, all until the very end of Children of the Mind, when you find out its Shinto. Anyway, so I normally don't have any trouble with the Ender Series, but I don't seem to understand all of the politics of the Shadow Saga. Can anyone just explain the concept of: "The Polemarch" "The Warsaw Pact" and "Hegemony," I was always under the impression that Peter was the only Hegemon, or the first I mean. But in Shadow of the Hegemon, it mentions a Hegemon, that Peter has to deal with.....I just figured someone could clear up all of the History of Earth up until the 8th chapter of Shadow of the Hegemon.
Posted by kojabu (Member # 8042) on :
I think that's refering to the Hegemon before Peter came out as being Locke and Demosthenes, the Hegemon who Peter followed.
Posted by Antony (Member # 7947) on :
Please put a *Spoiler Warning* in the subject of threads with statements like "the very end of Children of the Mind, when you find out its Shinto" in them!
Posted by Wesley (Member # 7963) on :
I'm sorry, that slipped my mind for 30 seconds....won't happen again.
Posted by Orson Scott Card (Member # 209) on :
The Hegemon was an office created when the world established a unified authority for raising funds and organizing industry to tool up to create the I.F. It had enormous power then. But when the war ended, the power collapsed. The office existed ... but then, so did Gorbachev's office as head of the Soviet Union, until it was officially dissolved - even though he had no effective power for the last while of his time in that office.
Offices that once had great power can lose it, yet still exist. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury was once the most powerful office in the cabinet - when Alexander Hamilton held it. He virtually created the U.S. economy. But now, while the office still exists, it is far less powerful than the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
So Peter got the office of Hegemon AFTER it had ceased to mean anything much. It still existed as kind of a useful fiction, and by sheer force of his brilliance, he endeavored to make it mean something, to keep the prestige of the office alive. But where once the Hegemon had the power to stop nations from making any kind of war, Peter could field only a tiny force and even that had to act semi-secretly.
Shinto? What Shinto? There's no Shinto in Children of the Mind. I don't even know what Shinto is apart from a name for the Japanese tradition of ancestor worship, which plays only a pro forma role in C of the M. I show a lot closer ties between Samoan folk beliefs and the cosmology of CotM than any link with Shinto. At least as far as I can remember ...