Mandolin is on board with laughing at him.
Barry’s BlueSky- Untitled May 16, 2024It's basically impossible to parody the modern right. [contains quote post or other embedded content]
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I asked on Facebook a few months ago, when I’d just read a political screed (“What Really Matters As We Vote “) by Card, whether he merely was a crappy political essayist* or if all of his writing looked like this, and if the latter, why did anyone read him? Didn’t get an answer, alas, but haven’t felt impelled to give Card’s fiction a chance.
* The most appalling part of that essay to have been written by a professional novelist:
Cashill is the fellow who believes that “most memoirs” observe the conventions of changing no names, creating no composite characters, altering no chronologies, and therefore if Dreams shares these traits with Ayers’s memoirs, that’s a meaningful piece of evidence that they were both written by Ayers.
Of course, while I’ve never heard of Jack Cashill, some of the actually-well-known memoirists of our time do this. Pat Conroy does all three in “Water Is Wide.” Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” alters chronology. Scott Turow’s “One L” changes names. (A wise move when you’re writing about lawyers.) David Sedaris goes even further and has been accused of outright fiction. Madeline L’Engle’s children labeled her Crosswicks Journals fiction. Even Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” possibly the most important memoir ever written about the Holocaust, doesn’t live up to what Cashill claims are the norms of memoirs.
If Card finds Cashill convincing about how people write memoirs, I’m really skeptical that Cashill knows a damn thing about writing, much less about politics.
I don’t know whether I’d say that Orson Scott Card is a good writer – the criteria for science fiction to be good are a little different from those for other kinds of fiction to be good anyway – but “Ender’s Game” speaks very clearly to a lot of people who were “gifted” kids. It’s definitely a good book. Which is a shame, since his political views are so loathsome.
Apparently in some of his other books he deals with homosexuality, but I haven’t read those ones, both because the writing in some of his other works (that I have read) is much worse, and because I’m just not that interested in a moral system that thinks homosexuality is wrong.
In any case it shouldn’t be too surprising to find him involved with NOM; he’s a Mormon, which is where he gets his stance on homosexuality, and the Church of Latter-Day Saints was very involved in pushing California’s Prop. 8.
@PG: like Anne, my reading of Card is limited. I’ve read “Ender’s Game” and “Speaker for the Dead”. “Speaker”, especially, was beautifully written, and a young me read it as being about tolerance, and seeing people clearly and loving them for who they are.
It still puzzles me that the writer responsible for that book went on to become such an intolerant essayist, and a board member of NOM …
I’ve read the majority of Card’s work — he’s a fantastically skilled wordsmith and has a tremendous ability to reach into varied subjects from clever angles. Some of his best writing is found in his short stories. In particular I have two copies of his short story collection “Maps in a Mirror” because I want to lend it out but refuse to lend my only copy.
Unfortunately, he also has some down sides…Ender’s Game was a short story and a great one at that but was later expanded to a novel form (albiet a very good one). That novel then expanded to a Trilogy and later had a 4th book tacked on (I think?) and a spinoff trilogy created. Many of his other novels were originally short stories and most did not translate well to the extended form. Of course, Card is hardly the first SF/Fantasy writer to do this, but it gets annoying when you read a novel of his and realize that he’s stolen the ideas from himself from one or more earlier books or short stories and the extended forms and series aren’t nearly as focused as the best of his short stories and singular novels.
He is outspoken and takes some stances that I don’t agree with, but frankly I don’t think he’s any loonier than your average outspoken person. He has said/written against gay marriage, taken some other anti-homosexual positions, & has conservative views on intellegent design, but he also has spoken out against starvation in Africa and corn ethonol’s contribution to it and has spoken out against the stupidity of trying to wall off Mexico — two things where I share his view.
This post is much too long for my original intent which was to say: he’s a good author, but stick to the short stories, the original Ender’s game series (don’t read the short story first though or you’ll get annoyed at the novel), & a few of the 1-off novels (Pastwatch: The redemtion of Christopher Columbus, Enchantment, Lostboys & Songbird (the short stories of the last two are better than the novels).
As far as his viewpoints, if you can read L. Ron Hubbard without turning to Scientology and Adam Smith without turning to Capitalism, Card is worth a go. Personally I just ignore his comments/views on the world and don’t plan on reading his biblical novels (though I have read some of the biblical/Mormon ones and enjoyed them)
It is so weird. The whole arc of his Xenocide books is about how intolerance breeds fear, and that fear leads to unneeded violence. Strange to see how you can so strongly identify a problem, and then completely miss it in your own life.
I see that some people are referencing his gay character in “Songmaster”. I’m gay, and I’ve read it twice, though both a long time ago. I certainly don’t remember thinking at the time that it was a nasty portrayal of gay people. In fact I thought it did an excellent job of exploring the loneliness and heartache of being repeatedly excluded. If I recall correctly the character ended up pretty nasty at the end, but on both readings I took it as a “power corrupts” kind of moral. A “gay people are evil” idea didn’t come through to me at all. In fact I recommended it to my mother to help her understand what I was going through when I was first coming out. (We sometimes communicated best through books). Strangely I don’t remember if she ever read it.
I’m more concerned about whether he’s a good writer. I can enjoy a creative work that has a political message with which I don’t agree, but it has to be well-executed and the politics logical. E.g. I loved the movie “Thank you for Smoking” even though I don’t agree with its libertarian message, because the main character made sense.
Based on his political writing, I’m a bit skeptical of Card’s ability to do the same, and as I said particularly if he thinks Jack Cashill has made a convincing case that Obama didn’t actually write Dreams from My Father. To find Cashill convincing on this point is not merely a political difference, but an indication of literary ignorance. But perhaps Card is just weak in the area of nonfiction and has a better understanding of the mechanics of fiction.
PG — he’s okay. I mean, that’s all. Just okay. There are other writers who can provide what he does (and often better).
I think Orson Scott Card’s writing skills have deteriorated since the year 2000 or so. Ender’s Game is amazing, and nothing else he wrote has matched it.
Regarding gay characters: There’s a gay character in his “Homecoming” series that (reluctantly) marries a woman and sleeps with her because their group is small and Needs Children.
Also, the main character of “Homebody” gives a textbook NiceGuy[tm] rant near the beginning of the novel, complaining about women choosing “alpha baboons” that “treat women as an easier way to jerk off” instead of decent men like him, who build things and contribute to society.
IMO, Card can sometimes use beautiful language. And I have enjoyed some of his books. But all the ones I read: Ender’s Game, the first couple of the Alvin Maker series, Songmaster… all of those books were about the childhood and maturation of an extraordinary boy. Over and over again. It got pretty tired.
The Alvin Maker series — at least the first book — is also extraordinarily racist.
I thought his portrayal of gay men seemed well-done and humanizing when I first read it. It didn’t occur to me that someone might cheer for the death of that one guy (or attribute it to a loving God). The one who gets married just seemed to tell the reader, ‘You never know,’ and ‘We’re all human’. Only when I realized he thinks the character who doesn’t die horribly* is the only good kind of gay man did it seem sinister. Now I picture someone who doesn’t know Fred Clark’s takedown of Left Behind reading that series as a horror story, and not realizing the child-killing God is supposed to be Good. (But I should point out that even today’s crazy Card would write a better series than LB if he tackled the subject.)
The Alvin Maker series still doesn’t seem racist to me. It takes place in an extremely racist time, which serves as a major theme. (Card gives the Magical Negro “Red Man” from Book One most of Book Two to tell us his story and viewpoint.) I feel reasonably certain the author didn’t want us to cheer for the slave-catchers, though I guess he may have some message about divine justice that I didn’t catch again. He did add a bit about law versus activist judges in a later book that seemed out of place, considering all the law-breaking that the speaker did in the slave-related storyline. Maybe the evil owner-representing lawyer who identified laws with justice was really the hero.
*Season 6: We’ve replaced our usual Buffy creator with Orson Scott Card. Let’s see if they notice.
I found PG’s quote in the first comment interesting, because it reminds me of an essay by him I read a long time ago where he used a similar “I’m an author, so I know these things” argument to vouch for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon (which I found funny because I had just read the BoM and concluded it was so transparently made-up that I couldn’t understand how the Mormon church ever got going). It’s been a while since I read any of his fiction, but I recall him being a decent novelist.
hf: the native americans, as he portrays them, are severely romanticized.
True. The Mormon Church-analog seems pretty romanticized as well.
Bad arguments from authorial expertise have a long history. C. S. Lewis argued that the Gospels were not good enough to be meant as myths, a claim we can now refute with two words (Left Behind).
I loved the Ender and Bean series (except for the recently-published “Ender in Exile” — I didn’t make it past the first chapter), but “Songmaster” could’ve been summed up in one sentence, vs 300-something pages: “If you have gay sex, you will be in excruciating pain, and then you will die sad and alone.”
When I read it, I had a vague idea that he believed gays were destroying civilization (which he has said in an essay), but I also thought much of Ender’s Game was homoerotic so I thought perhaps he could go to a place outside his ridiculous religious-based bigotry in order to write his novels.
Yeah, not so much.
julian,
After reading Frank Miller, I realized that being a homophobe is no guarantee against homoeroticism.
Coincidentally I am two-thirds done reading “ender’s game” now, on the strong recommendation of my 12 y.o. who I suspect (but am not certain) saw it quite differently. The homoerotic element is overwhelming, and I found myself increasingly enraged with each page knowing that Card is such a gay-basher. I’ll let Ender speak for himself (p.171):
This is hardly isolated material. Forty pages later Ender is in a pitched nude battle with another boy in the bathroom with a half-dozen boys watching, kicking his attacker repeatedly in the crotch. I don’t care if he later has a message that acting on homosexual urges is bad bad bad (the mortal enemy after all is called the “buggers”); this is a troubled overcompensating Mormon who is letting on more than he intends. I don’t think he is a sophisticated enough writer, especially not 32 years ago, to be in control of what he is letting on. I’d not be surprised to find he is a self-hating closeted gay, and this is a rare case where I think involuntary outing would be just fine. I won’t even speculate what it might mean that all of these Ender characters are prepubescent boys.
This is uncharitable, and over the line.
Writers can engage with adolescents, and and adolescent sexuality, without being pedophiles. We do, after all, have memories.
Over what line pray tell? It is Card who chose to include liberal references to child nudity and interaction. This is a world he created and the pervasive nudity and suppressed emotional intimacy are extra plot elements. It deserves discussion. And if we agree he is possibly alluding to and, further, perhaps personally interested in homosexuality, is it tenable to avoid that his characters are all so young?
Although I am intrigued, I declined to go “over the line” and said I wouldn’t speculate what Card himself is interested in children. I don’t blame him if he wants to discuss pedophilia or sexual impulses among children — these certainly are important, real, and not at all linked to homosexuality — but I am sure he would deny it.
BTW, these characters are not adolescents. Ender was conscripted at about 6 and in the shower scene is maybe 12. Whether sexual exploration at these ages among peers is acceptable is one thing, but I have seen no implication of that with adults.
Yet if Card is a liar about his sexuality in one regard, in fact a crusader against such feelings (or perhaps just acting on them — he says we should love the sinner — is he pleading for his own case?), what else does he lie about, including to himself, while setting himself out as a spokesman for a uniform and coercive national morality (he urges anti-sodomy laws, too). I don’t trust him.
I don’t think there’s a lot of merit in going after Card — who cares what some washed-up science fiction writer and wannabe Mormon thinks? But hypocrites drawing attention to themselves and promoting false agendas to deal with their own turmoil do hurt others for reasons I consider immoral, and that’s not OK.