Orson Scott Card
Critique
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Card, 2007
About the author
Born
Richland, Washington, United States, 1951
Places lived
United States: San Mateo, California; Mesa, Arizona; Orem, Utah; Greensboro, North Carolina
Nationality
American
Forms of writing
Novels, novellas, plays, stories, essays
Genres
Science fiction
Writing language
English
Literature
• Ender's Game (1985–1986)
Novels
• Ender's Game (1985–1986)
American Literature
• Ender's Game (1985)
• Speaker for the Dead (1985–1986)
Science Fiction
• Ender's Game (1985)
• Speaker for the Dead (1985–1986)
Lots to like, in the end
What I don't like about Orson Scott Card:
• He's very religious—a devoted Mormon whose religious views and understanding of church history have informed much of his science fiction writing.
• He's very conservative, at least socially, judging by the underlying themes in his works and by his political commentaries on the internet.
What I do like about Orson Scott Card:
• His treatment of religion in his mainstream science fiction is intelligent and interesting.
• He's a prolific, versatile writer who has handled a wide-range of styles and topics. In some ways a writer's writer, though also definitely a reader's writer—writing to communicate with a reader, not to impress or intimidate.
• His books have plots!
• He has a lot of practical knowledge about writing and is willing to share it widely—for free—on the Internet. Would-be writers, take notes.
• He wrote Speaker for the Dead, one of the best science fiction novels I've read.
The writer's game
Card was born in Richland, Washington and raised in California, in Arizona and in Utah, where he got degrees from Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. He spent two years as a Mormon missionary in Brazil.
He wrote religious plays and fiction for awhile but won his first major acclaim in 1977 for a short story "Ender's Game" which was nominated for a Hugo award.
After this, wrote many more sci-fi stories and novels, among them The Worthing Chronicle (1979) and Hart's Hope (1983), to lukewarm response. However, his extensive revision of The Worthing Chronicle in 1983 is highly regarded.
He expanded the Ender story into two novels, Ender's Game (1985) and Speaker for the Dead (1986), both of which won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, science fiction's highest honours—the first time an author won both in successive years. The novels look at human confrontations with two alien species three thousand years apart, the first novel being mainly an action-oriented war story and the latter a psychological, character-driven story.
Demand for more instalments, in what came to be known as the Ender saga or the Enderverse, led to the novels Xenocide (1991), Children of the Mind (1996), Ender's Shadow (1999), Shadow of the Hegemon (2000) and Shadow Puppets (2002), as well as the story collection First Meetings: In the Enderverse (2002). The series seems to be never-ending with the most recent instalment dated 2021 and more planned.
Another novel sequence, starting with Seventh Son in 1987, depicts an alternative history of the United States with the life of Alvin Maker being a parallel to that of Joseph Smith, the real-life founder of the Mormon Church. Every couple of years a new volume in the Alvin Maker series seems to be published, the latest appearing in 2026.
Other notable works include Wyrms (1987) about a woman on an alien world she is meant to save, The Abyss (1989) novelization of the James Cameron movie about aliens discovered in the deep sea, the five-part Homecoming novel series starting with The Memory of Earth (1992), and Lost Boys (1992), a popular ghost story not to be confused with a similarly named vampire flick.
And that's only about half of what he's written. So far. Told you he's prolific.
— Eric
Critique
See also:
Buy the book:
The Ender Saga: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender in Exile
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