OKOKOKOKOK. I promise to stop posting pictures of my cat in cardboard boxes. For a while.
Life is good. Alex and I are recovering from the holidays, and nothing much else is going on. I am always surprised at how many really wonderful gifts I get every year. This year, the top of the list are:
Movies & DVDs! (from Alex). Among other lovely and thoughtful gifts, she got me Simpsons season 5, Kate Bush’s new album Aerial (I’m very excited to listen to it), and both seasons of The Adventures of Pete & Pete! Woo hoo!
Lots of yummy junk food (mostly via Alex)
Hockey skates! This was a gift from Amanda (I’m not sure why she loves me so much… but so be it). Alex helped out, too. I got a pair that seemed good (what do I know?). Alex helped, because she’s more hockey-savvy than I am. Now I just need to get to some ice!
Now for today’s rant: Orson Scott Card. Like many people, I was introduced to OSC through Ender’s Game, which is (IMHO) one of the best sci-fi novels ever written. Ever. You may not understand that I have probably read several hundred sci-fi novels, so I think I’m entitled to that opinion (not that I remember all those books…).
EG got me looking for anything OSC that I could find. The rest of the EGÂ series was not too bad. I remember liking Speaker for the Dead a lot, and enjoying Xenocide, as well. I went looking for other OSC fare after being completely underwhelmed by the last bok in the EG series, though.
I was fairly impressed (but disturbed) by Songmaster, and I really liked The Worthing Saga (a collection of loosely-connected short stories). I loved Seventh Son and Red Prophet, but the series faded into confused, boring junk after that. The new series, Ender’s Shadow, etc., is well worth reading, but it still can’t top the glory of EG. The nature of sequels, I suppose. The world-altering elements are a given, rather than a surprise. OSC’s Book of Mormon retelling series, Memory of Earth, etc. was pretty so-so, as well. I read it because I was reading. Of the stand-alone books, Lost Boys is the best, although also the most disconcerting. Enchantment is a bit of a yawner, but not all bad (mental note: do not attempt quirky retelling of fairy tale; it rarely works). Saints was an OK book, but more interesting for the delving into controversial Mormon history than anything else.
I didn’t bother reading the one about Moses. I’m assuming OSC followed form: Moses was brilliant, tormented, maligned, and ultimately redeemed; his wife was intelligent, wenchy, and gender-role-bound in predictably interesting ways. I’m sure they had witty, erudite dialogue, phrased in the language of the common man.
These words will definitely come back to bite me in the a** someday, when I write something. However, I’m not saying I’m better than OSC as a writer (or even any good at all, for that matter); I’m just sayin’.
Nothing OSC has written–and I mean nothing–has equaled Ender’s Game. Rereading it with Alex lately, I’m struck by how not-so-great the writing style is, sometimes. Huge expository dumps. Beat-us-over-the-head explanations through dialog. Wrap-up sections where everything seems fake, because it’s all described in rapid-fire summaries (did he just get tired of writing? Was this on purpose?).
As David Brin has pointed out, all of OSC’s protagonists (and their brothers and sisters) are tortured demigods. With Ender, however, that is not a bad thing. Ender is among the best tortured demigods in sci-fi. Ender is the reason EG is so great, for me. The characters of Ender, Colonel Graff, Valentine, and even Peter (although he got some much-needed filling-out in the later trilogy) are well done, but Ender is the best. The characters and the plot make a good book great.
OSC got inside Ender’s head (although, even there, I have issues). He painted a picture of a kid whose brilliance leads him to be used and twisted by others. He has a million paths hypothetically open to him because of his intelligence, but in reality his paths are reduced to a very small number, because of other people. This last read-through, I focused on the ably-written theme of personal freedom. Ender struggles for independence in even the smallest of ways, despite the fact that his abilities would seem to give him freedom galore. In the end, his only freedom is to leave, and in some sense his freedom is already partially gone, because of what he has been turned into by Graff and the others.
I love that book. Perhaps, in the final analysis, the answer to my question (”why the @#$* hasn’t OSC been able to write anything as good since then) is best answered by statistics.
Regression to the mean. EG was not representative of OSC’s general abilities; it was a stroke of genius in an otherwise good but not terribly amazing author. He has been unable to recreate whatever factors led to the aberration. So, I’ve stopped hoping to see anything great.
But OSC’s other work isn’t so terrible (with some exceptions). The recent Shadow series is definitely more readable than 90% of the sci-fi out there. For what it’s worth. Didn’t mean to say OSC sucks (he doesn’t); just that he’s never been able to create anything like Ender’s Game.
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