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SF-LIT  March 2012

SF-LIT March 2012

Subject:

Orson Scott Card

From:

Dennis Fischer <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Science Fiction and Fantasy Listserv <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Fri, 2 Mar 2012 13:18:03 -0800

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

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Orson Scott Card  
by Kevin McFarland March 1, 2012 
 
Pop culture can be as forbidding as it is inviting, particularly in areas that 
invite geeky obsession: The more devotion a genre or series or subculture 
inspires, the easier it is for the uninitiated to feel like they’re on the 
outside looking in. But geeks aren’t born; they’re made. And sometimes it only 
takes the right starting point to bring newbies into various intimidatingly vast 
obsessions. Gateways To Geekeryis our regular attempt to help those who want to 
be enthralled, but aren’t sure where to start. Want advice? Suggest future 
Gateways To Geekery topics by emailing [log in to unmask]
Geek obsession: Orson Scott Card
Why it’s daunting: Orson Scott Card is the kind of author who always has several 
plates spinning at a time. He writes several ongoing series and currently has 
six forthcoming novels in progress, with a few others proposed or otherwise 
planned. Since he began writing in the late 1970s, Card has published more than 
50 novels, and just as many short stories, from fantasy, science fiction, and 
speculative fiction to novels with a more religious focus, and even a 
considerable amount of non-fiction. Card’s work is also inconsistently aimed at 
different audiences, sometimes even within the same series. His two most notable 
series went through a progression from young-adult science fiction to more 
mature philosophical and morality tales, then back around to more truncated 
young-adult literature focused on filling in previous narrative gaps.
Card often tells stories about young people forced to take on great 
responsibility due to a lack of capable adults. He’s repeatedly returned to the 
theme, in a wide array of genres, over the course of his career. Its roots can 
be traced to his Mormon faith, which emphasizes missionary work for its male 
members at a young age, and has an average first-marriage age well below the 
national average. Though most of his work isn’t overtly religious in nature, 
elements of his personal beliefs seep into almost every one of his books, which 
has given him a reputation as a bigot, or at the least as preachy—elements that 
have kept some prospective readers at a distance.
Possible gateway: Ender’s Game 
The 1985 Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel Ender’s Game is unquestionably the 
best place to start reading Card. The novel synthesizes the themes Card 
developed in numerous later novels into a fast-paced, thrilling science-fiction 
story of mankind’s sacrifices to ensure its own survival. The novel begins on 
Earth with a focus on the three monstrously gifted children of the Wiggin 
family: Peter, a violent psychopath who tortures small animals, Valentine, the 
fiercely empathic peacekeeper, and Ender, the youngest, a military genius with 
an almost crippling conscience.In Card’s future, humans are engaged in a war 
with an insectoid alien race called Formics. Each third child of Earth families 
belongs to the state, and Ender moves to the space station Battle School at a 
young age, where he joins the ranks of children bred to potentially lead the 
armies of Earth against the alien threat. The novel weaves together a 
geopolitical power struggle, the influence of political columnists, military 
justice, and the emotional cost of war into a science-fiction backdrop with 
notable action setpieces keeping the pace. Card has spent nearly the past 30 
years expanding and refocusing the thematic Rubik’s cube of Ender’s Game in 
subsequent entries in the series, but he never distilled the dread of children 
presiding over a war while hanging from adults’ puppet strings in the same way 
he did here.
Ender’s Game contains Card’s single greatest creation: a simulated war game in 
zero-gravity, pitting teams of young cadets against each other with guns that 
freeze opponents. The novel’s Battle Room ties directly into the students’ 
overly militaristic education, and is a key component in Ender’s begrudging 
transformation from a promising child into humanity’s great hope. It also 
underscores the corruption within the administration, always out to manipulate 
Ender and accelerate his progression.
As Ender crushes his fellow schoolmates, heightening their jealousy, the 
overseers ratchet up the difficulty, stacking the odds against Ender in 
increasingly impossible examinations in the hopes that it will better mimic 
unfair war conditions. This progression is so compelling, it threatens to 
overshadow the later stages of the novel, which find Ender accelerated through 
to Command School on an asteroid, and training to control the human assault 
against the Formics via detailed simulations.With young characters thrust into 
harm’s way, forced to be obsessively competitive, and turned into battle 
leaders, Ender’s Game doubles as a vibrant precursor to more contemporary series 
like The Hunger Games.
Next steps: Ender’s Shadow follows Ender’s protégé, Julian “Bean” Delphiki, from 
childhood through Battle School and his relationship with Ender Wiggin, up to 
the end of the Formic War. It’s the only other book in Card’s two major 
tetralogies—the Enderverse and the Bean Quartet—to utilize the Battle Room as 
skillfully as Ender’s Game.  Bean escapes from an experimental genetics lab and 
joins a massive gang of street children. A benevolent nun intervenes to make him 
a Battle School recruit, but also discovers that he has a genetic defect, the 
result of an experiment that gave him prodigious intellect and perhaps saved his 
life in the streets, but condemns him to gigantism and a short life.Ender’s 
Shadow, and the subsequent Shadow Of The Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, and Shadow Of 
The Giant, detail the geopolitical fallout on Earth of the military genius of 
Ender’s young commanders as they scatter to their home countries and seize 
power. The novels alternate between children committing violent acts upon each 
other and political posturing that resembles an unusually speedy game of Risk, 
but the Shadow saga keeps the pulsing action beats intact.
In contrast to the Earth-centric Shadowverse, the next Nebula and Hugo 
award-winning installment of Ender’s story, Speaker For The Dead, doesn’t 
contain nearly as many thrilling action sequences. Set 3,000 years in the 
future, as Ender travels at light speed and ages comparatively slower than his 
fellow humans, Speaker is slower, more deliberate and philosophical. Ender 
meditates on the ethics of war and colonization, and questions whether the 
Formics are actually an enemy, as he was told at an impressionable age. At the 
conclusion of Ender’s Game, Ender writes an anonymous elegy to the Formic Queen 
he destroyed, and by the time he appears on a distant Brazilian Catholic colony 
researching a newly discovered alien species, the book becomes a widespread 
religion, used at funerals to remember the dead. The human race sympathizes with 
the Formics, using Ender’s name synonymously with genocide. Over the course of 
the final two volumes in the original tetralogy, Xenocide and Children Of The 
Mind, Ender’s story gets increasingly metaphysical, dealing with complex 
theoretical physical concepts, foreign diseases, alien species, and material 
heavily influenced by Arthur C. Clarke and the Star Child sequence from 2001: A 
Space Odyessey.
Outside of the Ender and Shadow series, Card has written a handful of other 
novels that merit sampling. Treason, the 1988 revision of Card’s 1979 novel A 
Planet Called Treason, takes place in a distant future on a vast continent of 
warring humanoid tribes, where there are no naturally occurring hard metals to 
make advanced weaponry. The Mueller tribe achieves the ability to heal rapidly 
and generate body parts through generations of eugenics. As Lanik, yet another 
young male narrator, approaches the end of puberty, it’s discovered that he is a 
“radical regenerative” who’s grown female reproductive organs and full breasts, 
costing him his rightful inheritance and causing his royal family to shun him as 
an outcast. Though it refers to humans in a distant past, it’s a more foreign 
brand of science fiction, even more violent and overtly sexual than Card’s later 
writings. However, as one of his earliest novels, it contains some early traces 
of questionable dealings with race. The first tribe Lanik encounters outside his 
own is a tree-dwelling people with dark skin, who are derogatorily referred to 
as apes and monkeys. This is presented as a matter-of-fact state of the world, 
but it’s a hard detail to look past without acknowledging the discomfort.
The Alvin Maker series is a good example of Card’s speculative fiction work, 
using an alternate history of 19th-century North America where people are born 
with specific mystical talents. The title character is a seventh son of a 
seventh son, a Maker, who can alter matter at will. Like Treason, the 
distinctions of abilities between the races border on racism: “Reds” perform 
blood magic and “Blacks” perform something akin to voodoo. There may be no 
intent to offend, but some of Card’s novels take a simplistic view of race 
that’s difficult to defend.
Where not to start: Other series by Card are inessential to anyone other than 
readers of religious literature in the Left Behind vein. The lengthy Homecoming 
novels reimagine the story of the Book Of Mormon, and the Women Of Genesis 
series expands the stories of Biblical women, adding fictional material. 
Aside from being a prolific science-fiction writer, Card also has vocal personal 
opinions on current events. He’s been an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, and 
basically any rights for gays, a position that gets more and more curious with 
every novel Card writes with homoerotic-tension elements, like the naked shower 
fight between children in Ender’s Game, the confused transsexual narrator of 
Treason, or the overarching metaphor of the dangers of succumbing to sins of the 
flesh in Wyrms. The more progressive fans separate the extremely socially 
conservative man behind the work, the more likely they are to continue 
appreciating his entertaining novels. 

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