I have been consuming an unhealthy amount of Gundam recently.

By which I mean I've been watching Gundam OO with a sort of vague malaise-- I find the characters incredibly boring, but I suspect the issues it's socraticly exploring (the formation/aggregation of world government and 'we' not 'me' psychologies) will end up Remarkable.

Sci-fi talks a lot about world government, either taking place in utopian futures where it exists, or dealing with the nitty-gritty about why it cannot exist without an external 'other' to break down internal definitions of us/them. (I.e. Aliens unite the human race by being weirder than Muslims.)
But for all the near-obsession world government in sci-fi... I think I've seen its formation tackled head-on only once outside of a military-conquest-under-one-leader scenario; namely in Orson Scott Card's Shadow of the Hegemon.

Now, OSC's later additions to the Ender Mythos are variably disposable side-stories, utter trash that demolishes much of that the original quartet stood for, and damn good fiction. Shadow of the Hegemon is the latter-- it's the story of the Battle School graduates from Ender's circle of friends returning to Earth, and every country suddenly having a napoleon-level general they can use to carve out territory. SotH is a fucking awesome book. Unfortunately it's preceded by Ender's Shadow and cliffhangs into Shadow of the Giant, which are pretty awful.

OSC has a new collection of short Enderverse tales out. Pretty Boy is not good, Cheater is fun, and Mazer in Prison is damn fine, in the Asimov 'two guys in a room talking about things' tradition. This '1 for 3' is pretty typical of his short collections.

It kinda saddens me to see Card exploiting the Enderverse (which, lets be frank, ought to have remained closed, dangling plots and all) like this; it smacks of 'they'll pay better for Enderverse than they will my other stuff.' This is probably true- Ender's Game hits a chord in people if they discover it at the right age that (like Evangelion IMO) makes them hungry for more story- any story- set in this essentially closed system.

Plus, Card is kinda a hack. His writing has gone downhill, and I think the fact his work hit a lot of prematurely-mature-injured-boys themes that caused pedophiles to swoon in frabjous joy creeped him the fuck out and swept him on his merry way to religious crankism- he rewrote the entire backstory of every character int eh Enderverse to make them deeply religiously motivated, despite there being no hint of this in the original book. Obnoxious, but you can see the outside forces that probably ran him off the rails which makes it more understandable. (Like Rosie O'Donnel going nuts after having the governor of Florida personally exert himself to stop the adoption of her kids. Sad, but you can see what caused it.)

Anyway, even Card hacking away is better than 95% of other writers going full-blast. To his credit he refuses to tell empty stories, he still has a deeper understanding of what the universe and its characters are about and continues to explore those ideas from new angles. This makes his drek far preferable to some ghost writer he might hire to just tell more stories of 'stuff that happened in the Enderverse' like so many writers do. The result is hes' never gone back to Battle School or picked up 60 years later where 'it happens again' to re-tread the same themes (hey look, I brought this back around to Gundam again!) without covering any new ground.

So... yeah. Expanded Enderverse stuff; sometimes pretty bad, but never worthless. That you've got to admire.

I don't require you admire Card though. Man's Ton Cruise Crazy.