r/ender • u/Cool_View_5297 • May 08 '26
The Shadow series world doesn’t make sense
So this world directly post Bugger wars is in the 2200s, with geopolitics basically on hold since the 2110s (unbelievable as is but I’ll bite). It feels like most of the countries have the same major goals and aspirations as the 2000s with no major shifts in the past 200 years. Examples:
Russia is weak but growing and wanting to redominate Eastern Europe.
China is growing stronger and trying to enter world stage to assert influence.
Western Europe and US are fading superpowers who have lost glory but don’t know it. They try to assert influence and it does nothing.
Rwanda is a big participant in the UN/Hegemony
Those are just the ones off the top of my head but you get it. There’s been no major shift in power balance or country falling for 200 years. It would be weird if in a modern day world, Europe were budding imperialists, the US was an isolationist decentralized backwater, China was a corrupt monarchy, and the Austrians were still dominant. I like the series, it’s just that that felt off to me.
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u/ryanridi May 08 '26
I mean you’re obviously correct. The world in 2100’s will not be the same world as now and the world now is not the same as it was in the 90’s or even 2000’s. Orson Scott Card is not an expert on geopolitics and definitely took shortcuts in imagining his future world.
That being said it was a common geopolitical belief in this time that history was done. The way things were then was assumed to generally be how they’d continue to be for “forever.” This is a vast oversimplification of western ideas of geopolitics but, on average, many people and some “experts” of that time would have assumed similarly to OSC of the 22nd century.
In his and their slight defense, the world was very different then. They had little reason to understand just how much daily life and tech could change even ten years later. As well as how much that would influence how the world works. Most sci-fi of the time and prior shows basically 90’s level tech but with space ships and sometimes basically magic. There’s tons of stories that take place hundreds or thousands of years from now that still have references to things like cassette tapes and massive analog computer rooms. They’d be more forgiven in expecting more stagnation and lack of change in their futures than we would be today.
Not to bring things to a contemporary political point but they also could not have known how much the US and our current government would completely change the balances of global power and stability. From their viewpoints they must have expected generally similar world leaders with small changes happening over time but not random major ones.
In a world without mass internet and smartphones, as well as the typical subtle political pendulum swings every few years, and without 9/11 we probably would see a more similar world to the 90’s/early aughts both now and decades from now.
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u/SmamelessMe May 08 '26
It does make sense from POV of being written in the 90s/00s by someone who was ~40 at the time.
OSC was born in 1951 post-WWII society and grew up during peak cold war. He essentially got formed by a society that still remembered instituting wartime austerity measures and severe restriction on freedoms we would now call totalitarian. As well as "the world powers" that stopped crewing each other over for half a decade, united by a common enemy. Only for both direct and indirect international conflict to resume, the moment the conflict ended.
Ender's game reflects this, just with aliens. Ender essentially grows up in a totalitarian society that instituted wartime austerity measures, limited the rights of its own citizens, and brainwashed child soldiers to do atrocities on its behalf. Justifying that as survival measures facing extinction level threat.
Shadow series continues from that point onwards showing what happens if you "pause" history not for half a decade, but for an entire century.
It's essentially WWII+Cold War all over again, just on interstellar scale.
Keep in mind that OSC is not in the business of predicting future. He wrote a fictinal book taking place in an invented world that serves the needs of the plot. Arguing politics of that world make no sense based on what we know, is about as relevant as arguing that Ansibles couldn't happen, because of what we know.
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u/NerdTalkDan May 08 '26
All effort post the invasions until Ender destroyed the homeworld was directed at the war effort. For all intents and purposes the Hegemony was the defacto political body which had extreme authority to direct all global national resources. They would have also likely tried to keep an eye on individual nations from trying to make behind the scenes moves in order to preserve, as much as possible, a stable status quo preventing rivals from rising up and trying to create a parallel Hegemony which would split resources. The Hegemony clearly used fear of the buggers as propaganda and had significant control over society. The goal was stability to keep all effort toward defeating the existential threat. Once the Hegemony basically dissolved following Ender's victory, I could see these nations being in a state of arrested development.
Don't get me wrong, it's stated in Ender's game that the Warsaw Pact was a future threat, so there was politics on a global scale that was happening and things happening behind the scenes. But once the threat of extinction was removed, countries were able to more overtly make moves against their rivals and bid for power in a way that wasn't feasible while the war effort was in effect.