Pajiba

Love this book; it showed me that sci-fi was not too geeky for me.

I just hope they don't screw up the movie too badly.

I am 38 years old and still recommend this book to people when the conversation turns to books. My eight year old son is tearing through the comics right now. In fact he was showing me the 'bathroom scene' over the weekend.

I kind of hope that you include Ender's Shadow later, but I will admit there are plenty of other great books out there to cover first.

Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead are excellent novels. Speaker is particularly insightful and meaningful in our modern era of fear, uncertainty, doubt and intolerance.

That being said, I agree with the others, here, who dislike Orson Scott Card. I find it mind boggling that someone so close minded was able to walk for so many miles in another's shoes while writing Speaker for the Dead. His was one of only a few panels at Comic Con I have walked out of only partway through.

Thanks for the review!

I'm still not sure how the book's big twist at the end is filmable in a movie. I'll be curious to see how they work that out or if they change it completely. It could potentially remind me of the Atonement twist - good on the page (or so I'm told) but doesn't make much sense in the cinema. It'd be a shame to lose it, as it's a great gut punch in the book.

Look at sfougarisb! he's so much smarter than we little peons.

lubeg, i take your point that there is some merit there, somewhere (that it is material handed out to Marines, does not an argument make it for me though).

Still, i stand by my main notion: most people adore this novel because it tells them: "you were always right, you poor little tyke-genius, they nipped you at the bud and you never blossomed".

Its tripe, pure and simple. That you, and others, have read more worthy books, more power to you. My comments, and sweeping generalizations, were not aimed at you, but to those that worship such a malodorous book, having missed out on what the genre has to offer.

you are welcome,

by all means do continue to enjoy the writings of OSC. Like you say, everyones expectations are different. There are people who consider Avatar a transformative experience. I am happy for them.

Again, my beef with the book, is its premise (its "point" you would say?), and my comments were directed towards those that may consider this to be high-literature when they have not yet sampled what else is there.

If, despite your extensive sampling, you still consider what OSC has penned as valuable, then it is me who is clearly the lesser man in failing to appreciate this rare gem of a book.

And i thought that this is the site where scathing reviews were sweetened by mock and lightened by droll.

Can just hope that you join me in my appreciation of the writings of Ted Chiang, Frederik Pohl, and A. Clark?

I didn't read Ender's Game until I was in my mid-twenties. Consequently I took very little value from the childhood and youth elements of Ender's story. What I recognized in the novel were the aspects of comraderie, training, esprit de corps, tactics, strategy and a commitment to the concept of war (or, from the perspective of the children "winning") as an absolute. Things which, as a trained soldier, shone through, to me, more than the emotional or political dialogues. And to be fair those were elements, themes and context which would mean very little to anyone who doesn't share my background.

I likewise found merit in Ender's endeavor to understand and empathize with his enemy after the fact. To step away from his xenophobia and understand life from the other point of view. Something extremely lacking in America, right now, as we often promote sentiments of sweeping mistrust against any and all persons who superficially satisfy the standard set forth by those who would control us with fear.

As I stated earlier, I have very little use for Orson Scott Card's personal take on the world. I found him to be so personally offensive and narcissistic during a Comic Con panel that, like many others, I chose to leave only a few minutes into the conversation. The man thinks so highly of himself, in fact, that he attempted to lecture those of us who chose to leave early. In spite of this, I am capable of differentiating his heinous opinions from two pieces of his art which I perceive as the only "diamonds in his rough".

Card wrote, in my opinion, two excellent novels worthy of anyone's time and interpretation. I value them for the lessons I found within them. Not the lessons anyone else told me I should find in them. I think he then chose to capitalize on the success and audience of those two novels by creating an income stream writing what can objectively be criticized as dreck. Xenocide and Children of the Mind are two of the worst novels I have ever read. I didn't walk away from either with any lasting memories or appreciation for their content. The Ender's Shadow series contained some novels which were a breezy read, but none contained any great meaning or lessons. To classify them as anything more than a cynical cash grab by the author is disingenuous, in my opinion.

Consequently, aside from Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead I have had no use for his material since I finished Shadow of the Hegemon and objectively critiqued it. Whereupon I decided there were things far more worthy of my time.

sfougarisb - It's hard to know where to begin, however, I find the other authors you recommended pretty interesting; Arthur C. Clarke in particular.

ACC, for me, was the American equivalent of reading classic Russian literature. There are only so many times I can finish a book with a disquieting sense of hopelessness and despair before it feels like "Hey, the plot devices seem different but somehow I feel like I have read this story before."

And speaking of 'feelings', Isaac Asimov - one of the best writers of any generation or section of the Dewey Decimal System - wrote stories almost entirely devoid of emotional connection. Yes, Hari loves Dors and Baley loves Jessie/Bentley/Gladia, but more as a 'quantified and known factor' than a driving (and felt) character trait. In fact, the clearest emotion is ever portrayed through to the reader is that which Baley feels for Daneel.

I could go on. Hyperion, for example, is probably one of the most 'alien' in emotion that I have ever read.

The point, however, is that the reason many readers have connected so wholeheartedly with the writing of OSC is because the worlds created by this writing are so VIVID, so realized. Plot lines are not so groundbreaking and original, though they are far from perfunctory, but the characters are fully realized with dynamic and compelling interior lives. The story, in short, is EMOTIONAL.

Emotion for emotion's sake is trite. There is a reason I do not gravitate to traditional fiction - exploring the inner world of a housewife or whatever the hell Nicholas Sparks does - is not interesting to me in the slightest.

Where OSC stands out is his exploration of the human emotional extreme: the why of monsters and saviors; the question of whether the monster or savior is really so; how people come to do or support the horrific.

In addition to being a fantastic treatise on leadership (which is why it has made the military reading list), I find it to be a compelling companion to "The Lucifer Effect".

Your bull-headed insistence that people only love this book because they feel 'special' and 'misunderstood' is hackneyed and demonstrates your lack of nuanced understanding of the human condition - something which OSC explores at length through his novels. Frankly, it makes me wonder more about you than about the fans of these novels.

While I love much of what science fiction has to offer, OSC explores the fourth dimension: why we are who we are - as people and as a society. That exploration is just as significant and important as the works of Asimov and Clarke.

Behind every bully, every monster, every Hitler, is a man who felt marginalized, unappreciated, and misunderstood.

You, sfougarisb, ignore emotion and humanity at your peril.