On Influences, part 2: Orson Scott Card (Patreon)

Orson Scott Card's 'Ender's Game' is probably the work of science fiction I read and re-read the most often as a young teen. I was reading a lot of fantasy at the time: Lord of the Rings (which remains my first love in reading), but a lot of D&D-themed books; for some reason, the early Dragonlance books by Hickman and Weis made a real impression, and it baffles me that I can still remember the names Raistlin or Caramon, or being sad at what happened to Flint, even if I can't recall the actual plot in any detail.

As much as I enjoyed those, Ender's Game absolutely seized the imagination of my early teenaged self.  I must have loved the idea of a clever, computer game playing child dominating their school and saving humanity, and whilst the geek power fantasy is pretty obvious, the plotting and characterisation made it work.  It felt as though Ender and his siblings, and the other genuis children, had greater psychological depth than many of the books I was reading at the time.  The twist at the end seemed brilliant.  The sequel Speaker for the Dead audaciously (it seemed to me) jumped forward a few millenia and transformed the protagonist into a what was seen as a genocidal villain, and I remember loving the world-building around the aliens, and how it became a story of redemption, present actions restoring the damages of past wrongs.  

I can't remember anything from the third book; I tried reading one of the Ender books that came after and gave up.

Which I think is telling.  I read other Orson Scott Card novels and really enjoyed... some of them.  A Planet Called Treason might have influenced the current chapter of Constant, though if it did it was from some buried unconscious place.  I can't recall any details of it but remember really liking Hart's Hope.  And there had to be more, but it's all faded.  I do remember, however,  a scene from one book, though I can't recall which series or who the characters were--it might've been the Homecoming Saga, but that's entirely a guess as it largely seems to have been wiped from memory.

In this scene, the characters were traveling and talking, and they must've been talking about one character's homosexuality.  And the other said that homosexuality was really a biological short-circuit, that it was evolution's way of weeding out undesirable traits from the gene pool.  

And it was probably around that time that I twigged to the idea that there might be something really unpleasant about Card.  It must've been around this time that I finally began to notice how his Mormonism infused his writing.  Now, that's fine in itself - he believes in stuff, and I believe in stuff, and those beliefs don't have to align.  At the same time, I wasn't particularly keen on the overt proselytising that seemed to be overtaking plot and character.  If a strongly presented political or philosophical or moral point matters in a novel, great, but it should be the politics, philosophy or morals of the character, not the author (or at least, not obviously so).  

And maybe I'm being unfair to Orson Scott Card, because that's when I stopped reading his stuff.  I really should revisit him someday.  Maybe.