O is For Orson Scott Card

A little note for everyone stopping by for the A to Z challenge:

First off, hi! Welcome! Look around, have fun. My posts will be short this month, but they'll be following a theme: Books and Authors. I'll be showcasing some of my favorites within those categories. But I'll also be having some special posts regarding the release of my debut novel, Elemental, from time to time.  

Bio (taken from his official website):


Orson Scott Card is the author of the novels Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, and Speaker for the Dead, which are widely read by adults and younger readers, and are increasingly used in schools.

Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy (Magic Street, Enchantment, Lost Boys), biblical novels (Stone Tables, Rachel and Leah), the American frontier fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker (beginning with Seventh Son), poetry (An Open Book), and many plays and scripts.

Card was born in Washington and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. He served a mission for the LDS Church in Brazil in the early 1970s. Besides his writing, he teaches occasional classes and workshops and directs plays. He recently began a longterm position as a professor of writing and literature at Southern Virginia University.

Card currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, and their youngest child, Zina Margaret.

Card is one of the greats. I think it's kind of a requirement to like him if you're going to call yourself a sci-fi writer. ;) 

If you've never read anything of his, check him out!

Ender Series

Well I'll admit it--I've been putting this one off. This is why: the guy (Orson Scott Card) won a Hugo Award for these books, and there was just a lot that I didn't like about them. And who am I to question his skill? Well, to be honest, I'm not really questioning his skill as much as I'm rebelling against the content of his books. Let me break this down into what I did like and what I didn't.

What I liked:

The first book (Ender's Game) was absolutely amazing. I love books about child prodigies and this one was both exciting and complex.

His intriguing writing style continued throughout all four books, creating a fascinating glimpse of the future.

All of his characters, not just the protagonist, were well-developed and kept me interested.

What I didn't like:

The subject matter changed from a child trying to fight through trial after trial in book one to a "this is why you should convert to humanism" in the remaining books in the series. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind discussions of faith (from atheism to polytheism) in a book, but this was horribly blatant and it was painfully clear that the only "intelligent" characters could possibly grasp the fact that the notion of a living god was just plain silly. Those who did express any faith in anything were plain psycho at worst and childishly naive at best.

The inconsistencies became worse with each book. Little facts didn't blend from one book to another and even by the last book, the inconsistencies started popping up just pages later. It was horribly annoying and it felt like Card expected me to either not have a good enough memory or just to enjoy the ride without thinking about what I was reading. This always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The protagonist, Ender, started out as this lovable, honorable kid who you just couldn't help but fall in love with. He did some things by the end of book One that would probably destroy just about anybody. The result was that the character was different and at times, pretty pathetic. It seemed that even Card couldn't stand him and found no way to help him move on from what he'd done, so he devised a way to (spoiler alert!!!) split him into three different people, kill off the original Ender along with one of the copies, and be left with the Ender he had always wanted. And once this was finally accomplished, the series ends abruptly with two happy marriages.

So I read them, and enjoyed them at times, but I'd be cautious about recommending them. The first book shouldn't even be included in the rest of the series, it's so completely different. So let me revise what I said: I would definitely recommend Ender's Game, but any recommendation I might give for the rest would come with a warning.

~Emily White

Contradictions

One of the reasons my postings have been so sporadic lately is because when I start reading a book, I tend to do nothing else until I'm done. I've got this crazy notion in my head that I have to hurry up and finish it so that I can get on with my life, but what ends up happening is I ignore everything else while I'm trying to finish the book. Crazy, huh? And to add to that, the book I first started reading was the beginning of a series, so of course I have to finish the series first before anything else gets done! The good news is that I'm almost done. Only one and a half books to go.

But while reading these books, I've made a few observations. One of them is that whether on purpose or on accident, even the best authors have contradictions in their works. The books I'm reading happen to be a part of Orson Scott Card's Ender series, and the relay of information between one book and another is wrong! Just plain wrong! The particular contradiction I am thinking of concerns a character named Plikt. In book two, she was introduced to us as a rather stubborn student of Ender's who would not stop until she discovered everything about him. Well, after much research, she was able to discern half of who he was, but was completely wrong about the other half. At which point she was practically given a verbal beat-down by Ender's sister. This was a rather funny and exciting part because you spent the entirety of the book up until this point waiting for just this thing to happen. Well, when we get to book three where Card is reintroducing Plikt to anyone who may not have read any of the previous books, he describes her as having discovered (quite on her own) both mysterious parts of Ender Wiggin! Wrong!

As this series happens to be a reprint where Card was able to make any changes he feel needed to be made, I can only assume that 1. he didn't care about the contradiction and wanted it in there or 2. he just plain missed it, again. While option number one just plain irks me (I hate contradictions), option number two kind of worries me. It would imply that Card (and his editor) read these books thousands of times and never picked up on it. Never. And here I am, reading it for the first time and it becomes a glaring problem for me, not because Card isn't a good writer (he did win the Hugo Award), but because he took back a pivotal moment from one book and weakened the intensity of the relationship between Plikt and Ender's sister in another. And also, he turned Plikt into a different person through this one contradiction.

Again, my point is not to dis Card (in fact, I'll give a more detailed review when I finish the series), but to show my concern for my own work. Will I make such an innocent mistake in Aurumenas, thereby ruining a character for one of my readers? This is a concern. I can only hope that should my book be published someday, the collective minds of myself, my agent, and my editor will be able to find and snuff out any such irregularities.

How about you, readers? Anything in particular that you worry about with your own work? Or are there any things like contradictions that really irk you when you read a book?

~Emily White