- I really am okay with Card having his opinions. I can roll my eyes at his political positions, I can accept that he thinks the world be a better place if it was different than the way that I think it should be. He is welcome to have his opinions, and he’s welcome to try to convince people that his ideas are right. What I cannot quite wrap my mind around is how the mind which wrote such a beautiful meditation on empathy can be the same one that argues for the violent overthrow of the American government because of its failure to ban gay marriage and to outlaw homosexuality generally.
Your comments on reddit and this article (and some background Wikipedia) spurred me to reread Ender's Game in a free moment last night ... and it's complete tripe. Not even primarily for the reasons you mentioned (in my opinion). The simple fucking fact is that the man can't write children (very few can), and writing children is the basis of the novel. Does everyone who fell over themselves praising the book when it was adapted miss the fact that no child has ever acted like that or talked like that ever, including the extremely smart ones? Man, it was a rough read. And I even managed to enjoy the sequels (the ones about adults) for the scifi, Card's politics not withstanding. You know who could write children? I may lose you here, but CS Lewis could write children. So could Lloyd Alexander, to a lesser extent and within context. I find Philip Pullman's children bearable. But Orson Scott Card just misses by a damn mile. Rant over.
I haven't read it since I was fifteen, I think. I had read the short story in this amazing tome when I was in 5th grade and found it amazing; I read the novel and was annoyed that the basic "here is a troubled kid that is getting the shit kicked out of him who retaliates by flipping over the card table" motif had been replaced by this messianic diversion involving brothers and eugenics and world politics and proteges and other off-the-spine bullshit that didn't serve much purpose. I then read Speaker for the Dead (because that's what you do) and found it to be a good, if forgettable read. I plowed through Xenocide and could not give a shit about the teddy bear trees, particularly as they're flagrant rip-offs of H Beam Piper's Fuzzies twisted through an OSC-colored lens. Ewoks, at least, are endearing. You might enjoy this link. it was, in my opinion, the highlight of that entire OSC discussion. It appears no one else has the patience for it; I found that although I haven't read Ender's Game in 20 years, I found myself saying "Oh yeah!" a lot. Friend of mine turned down storyboarding the Ender's Game movie (he went with Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion instead). He hadn't read the book. It was pitched to the crew as "Harry Potter in Space."
Will read that article. It was pitched to the crew as "Harry Potter in Space." Awful, awful, he made the right -- the only -- decision. Awful.Friend of mine turned down storyboarding the Ender's Game movie (he went with Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion instead). He hadn't read the book.
The book that got me off Card was Lost Boys. Incredibly gripping and moving while I read it; for a while I had it on my top 10 favorite books ever. It took me a while (days? weeks?) to realize that I'd been manipulated into sympathy for a repugnant worldview. I don't remember the details. I think my brain has blocked it out.
I devoured lots of Card's books and always had to remind myself that some strange notions in these books were the by-products of his mormonism and his (I asume) many hours spend on computer games. SF-writer David Brin recently stated that some comfort could be had from the fact that his protagonists always felt bad while being superhumans.
Only point I disagree with in this article: "The problem is that there is no separation of the artist from the art. And when that art in question is a figure of the cultural significance of Superman, the choice of who gets to put words in that mouth is about more than a literal reading of whatever script he turned in." I personally believe that as soon as a work has left the mind of the artist for the physical world, it becomes an entity in and of itself, independent of the artist's intent. In this or really any regard, to reject a body of work due to the personal flaws of the artist is an incredibly close-minded way to go about appreciating art. There's good evidence that Charles Dickens was rabidly anti-Semitic, at least early in his career. Does this mean we have to reject his work? Ezra Pound was a Fascist and by many accounts a total bastard. Does this preclude us from appreciating his poetry? And not to tread too closely to relativism, which I don't really like as a philosophy, but there's a lot of speculation pointing towards Walt Whitman being gay. Does that mean that somebody who's really homophobic is justified in rejecting Leaves of Grass? I haven't read much from Orson Scott Card after Ender's Game, mainly because I felt like the writing just fell to shit pretty quickly following that one. As Kleinbl00 points out, there are hints of Card's political POV even in that, as in all of his works. But I don't think that disqualifies something like Ender's Game from being good work. By all technical and stylistic accounts, a strong case can be and has been made for some of his stuff. His social/political views are unfortunate, and it sucks that he might inject such notions into his books. But just like every other idea that's folded into a piece of art, those ideas are subject to distortion as soon as the words leave his fingers. A work takes on a life of its own, and it may not end up where the author intended or wanted it to end up. If a work is fundamentally strong, then that kind of supersedes any philosophical flaws the artist may have suffered.
That is the interesting part of the argument and the one that "TrueReddit" hasn't gotten into, which is a shame in my opinion. You're right - Dickens hated jews. Lewis Caroll was pretty clearly a pedophile. That was a hundred years ago, though. Here's where I think things get interesting: When every author has a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a LiveJournal and a fan page, it becomes impossible to ignore the author. Who knows what Shakespeare thought of Queen Elizabeth? We'll never know; there were no 140-character verbal diarrhea droplets to tell us. Hilary Mantel, on the other hand, is known more to the British for what she said about Kate Middleton than Wolf Hall. And I don't see that changing. Despite the fact that books are not living documents (unless you're Orson Scott Card, who has no problem completely rewriting Planet Called Treason so that Greedo shoots first again and again and again), our regard for them has become a lot more dynamic simply because the author's intent is now effortlessly discernable. Now if you'll excuse me, I have another part to upload.I personally believe that as soon as a work has left the mind of the artist for the physical world, it becomes an entity in and of itself, independent of the artist's intent.
I agree with all of this, but I really don't want to. Makes me really pessimistic about our dwindling abilities to view things in their own context rather than through a series of imperfect filters. It was bad enough when the input chain went: artwork -> cultural context -> eyeball/earhole/mouth -> subjective interpretation of input -> "here's what I experienced and here's what I think." (Pretty sure I left out a few steps, but the general idea stands). I mean, it was hard enough for the world to come to terms with Moby Dick or "Rite of Spring," right? With today's information blitz, we've added a hell of a lot of layers of subjective gauze to that chain. Makes it that much harder to get to the core of the thing, actually identify the good. Speaking of, only read the first four installments so far, but damn, I like that story. But how much of that enjoyment is colored by interaction with the author, huh? This is going to start driving me crazy.
Oh, yeah, I completely disagree with that statement. No idea why the guy who wrote this article felt the need to insert his own meaningless opinions into what should have been a factual piece. I happen to think Ender's Game is mostly trash. I don't care about the politics; I care about the ridiculous premise we're supposed to accept and the fact that he had one good idea and tried to do more than a short story with it.