The Last Shadow (2021)
The Last Shadow is a 2021 book written by Orson Scott Card.
Orson Scott Card closes the long arc of the Ender saga on the colony world of Lusitania, where humans share the planet with the pequeninos and a reborn Hive Queen. Peace is fragile. The descolada virus that once shaped every living thing here could still spread beyond the world and endanger the wider galaxy, and the ships of the Hundred Worlds have not forgotten that danger. Descendants of the Wiggin and Delphiki families, along with the sentient presence known as Jane, carry the weight of what three species owe one another. Card writes it as a reckoning about survival, kinship, and the cost of coexistence.
Quick answers
What is The Last Shadow about?
Orson Scott Card closes the long arc of the Ender saga on the colony world of Lusitania, where humans share the planet with the pequeninos and a reborn Hive Queen. Peace is fragile. The descolada virus that once shaped every living thing here could still spread beyond the world and endanger the wider galaxy, and the ships of the Hundred Worlds have not forgotten that danger. Descendants of the Wiggin and Delphiki families, along with the sentient presence known as Jane, carry the weight of what three species owe one another. Card writes it as a reckoning about survival, kinship, and the cost of coexistence.
When was The Last Shadow published?
The Last Shadow was published in 2021.
Who made The Last Shadow?
The Last Shadow was written by Orson Scott Card.
The Last Shadow in our writing
A few thoughts on The Last Shadow
Fans drawn to first-contact ethics and the strain of sharing a world with the alien should watch Arrival, which treats communication as the hard, humane work it is. For the same questions inside a sprawling space opera you can steer, play Mass Effect, where every species you meet carries its own history and its own grievance.
First-contact stories about learning to trust a species you once feared
The Last Shadow closes the Ender saga with humans, pequeninos and a reborn Hive Queen learning to trust each other. These share that same hard-won trust: a game built on multi-species diplomacy, a station where former enemies share one roof, a linguist decoding a species everyone assumed hostile, and posthuman factions deciding what they owe each other.
The wider Ender and Shadow saga this reckoning grows out of
This book is the final reckoning of a saga that started with Bean on the streets of Rotterdam and Ender leaving Earth behind. Read the Shadow books to see how Bean's family reaches this point, follow Ender's own path into exile, and go back to the Second Formic War that first forced humans and an alien Hive to collide.