In reply to Jamie Wakeham:
Thanks, all.
Will certainly give Hyperion a go. So many books, so little time...
With Dune, the first three felt like a nicely contained history of Paul himself. Whilst trying very hard to avoid spoilers, where it went from there with so many reincarnated gholas and the arc that Leto II follows just felt very very silly to me.
I felt that the first book of Ender's Game was a lovely bit of light sci-fi; the major plot twist was maybe rather predictable, but the handling of Ender and how he reacts to the situations he's put into felt very well realised. As someone who was identified as 'gifted' at a young age and endlessly carted off out of mainstream school for various dubious enrichment courses, there were some odd echoes for me. At least they never had me kill anyone...
Speaker is much darker and, I think, potentially much richer, but I'm not sure if he's handling it as deftly. I might have a look at the Shadow series before I go much deeper into Ender's own story.